because

There was a shooting at school, the police officer said, then said, your son didn’t make it, and she tried to slow the room from spinning and her world from crashing, but the best she could do at the moment was to fall forward into the arms of the detective and try to keep her heart from either pounding through her chest or stopping, completely, and she remembered the last thing she said to him when he left for school, that morning. It was: I don’t want to hear any more from your teacher about you not paying attention, and she suddenly wished she hadn’t said that, but instead had said, I love you. His name was Henry and she was a single mom, because she’d made a mistake and had decided not to make everything worse. Henry had a dog, one she’d given him on his eighth birthday. Henry had named the friendly beast Butterfly, because, he said, just because.