The World Without You by Joshua Henkin

perpetual graduate students marooned in college towns, working in bars, bookstores, and cafés long past an age when it’s seemly to do so. Marilyn knows those stories, too. Years ago, David himself was an English PhD, student before he dropped out to teach high school.
    “Come, come,” Marilyn says. “You’re not like that.”
    And she isn’t, Thisbe knows. She’s likely to finish sooner rather than later. She’s never been one to tarry, when it comes to school or anything else.
    “Leo would have loved Berkeley,” Marilyn says, and Thisbe understands that this is a peace offering. Because when Thisbe applied to anthropology programs, when she was deciding among good graduate schools on the east and west coasts, Marilyn implied without ever directly saying so that she thought Thisbe was taking Leo away from them, back to where she’d grown up. Marilyn was right—Thisbe was taking Leo away from them—but Leo had been the one who wanted to move to Berkeley. He had his own fantasies about shorts in November, had fantasies, too, about U.C. Berkeley itself. Born in the 1970s, raised just blocks from Columbia, he’d missed out on the student protests. “I wouldn’t have minded occupying a building,” he told Thisbe once, and Thisbe just laughed. “What you wouldn’t have minded was free love.”
    “Sure,” Leo said. “That would have been good, too.”
    When she decided to go to Berkeley, Leo gave notice at Newsday. He had landed a job at the San Francisco Chronicle , on the foreign desk. They would be moving in August. The day he was killed, they had already booked their flights.
    “I look at you and it just kills me,” Marilyn says. “You’re thirty-three years old, and you’ve already been through so much.”
    “I’ll be all right,” Thisbe says.
    “Will you be?”
    “I hope so.” Thisbe looks down at Calder, who remains asleep, flat as a flounder on the living room couch, his arms flung to the sides. “What about you, Marilyn. How are you doing?”
    “Terrible,” Marilyn says. “Just dreadful.”
    “I’m so sorry.” It’s been the hardest year of Thisbe’s life, yet it’s different for her. Marilyn and David were Leo’s parents. Whereas she … she can barely say the words, even to herself. She has come east for many reasons. For Leo’s sake, of course, and to pay respects to his family, but also because she needs to tell Marilyn and David about Wyeth. I have a new boyfriend. It makes her heart palpitate just to think this. Lily is the only one who knows about Wyeth, and even she doesn’t know how serious it has become.
    Thisbe goes into the kitchen, passing through the swinging door where Leo, when he was three, caught his finger and had to go to the emergency room to have it reattached. It was the first of a series of injuries he suffered (several years later he almost lost a toe, cutting it on a Pringles can during a water fight), victim of his own heedlessness and bad luck. Thisbe was twenty-one when she met him, waitressing at a bar in town, and it was the first thing she noticed about him, that misshapen forefinger, how he held his beer so it looked like he was pointing across the room.
    Now, in the kitchen, she finds food warming on the stove. She has half a mind to try something. If Leo were here, he’d be breaking into the food, serving himself a pre-dinner (an amuse-bouche , he’d have called it, though the way he’d have heaped his plate, it would have been hard to describe it as mere amusement), all too happy to join in the second seating when everyone else arrived. Once, at a Japanese restaurant, he shambled over to another table and returned with a plate of abandoned fish. “It’s all-you-can-eat sushi,” he said. “Why let it go to waste?” He’d done this to shock her, though she was long past being shocked. He’s been gone a year, and she still envies him his impropriety.
    It’s an old wood house with a mansard roof, two stories plus a basement that,