The Mourners

The summer that we lived in Florida accidentally, my husband’s mother’s friend’s son hanged himself in his Montana art studio. I am close with my mother-in-law, but I hardly knew her friend. I’d met her son just once. He’d lived in New York and studied art before moving west. He moved for the cheap housing, the sky and landscape, maybe a girlfriend. I’d met him at a party a couple of years before. He was New York artist, young, successful, charming. He’d worn a cowboy hat.

They sat a sort of Shiva for him, my mother-in-law and three