“Is it not enough?” Max said. “You want five million?” Silence. “Ten million?” Max knew himself to be worth about sixty million dollars (and of course, Bob Jones knew this, too). “Fifteen?”

“I don’t want any money from you, Max. Just the papers. Please.”

Bess didn’t want his money because she thought it was cursed. It wasn’t good enough; it wasn’t the kind of money that would bring her happiness. She was rejecting him, Max West, alcoholic, drug addict—and she was rejecting his money.

The divorce papers came in the mail; Max tossed his copies in the trash with the Pottery Barn catalog and the circular from Whole Foods. Sayonara, he said. Adiós. Adieu. Arrivederci. Bayartai. He could say good-bye in forty languages—that was something. Max made a pot of coffee and called Bruce. Bruce came over, and together they drank the pot of coffee on the deck, barely exchanging a word (Max loved and valued Bruce for this reason). Then Bruce left and Max pulled out the Tanqueray, but he didn’t pour himself a drink. He felt okay without a drink, and how weird was that? He thought, I should get divorced every day.

When the box came from his mother, however, it was a different story. His mother, Sweet Jane, was moving out of her house in Wildwood Crest after fifty years; she was moving to a posh retirement community in Cape May. Max was paying for the move, and he was paying for the posh retirement community, but Max’s three older sisters and his older brother had volunteered to go to Wildwood Crest to orchestrate the move. Max was expected to pay for everything but not do anything. His mother, with the help of one of his sisters—Dolores, probably—had gone through every closet and drawer in the house. Some stuff went to the dump; some stuff went into boxes. All of Matthew Westfield’s stuff went into boxes because as soon as news got around that Jane Westfield was moving out, a clot of people began loitering across the street, waiting for the garbage. Who knew what Max West’s high school report card might go for on eBay? The handwritten lyrics to “Stormy Eyes”—scribbled on a McDonald’s napkin—could be sold to the Smithsonian or the Hard Rock Cafe. So Sweet Jane and Dolores packed up every last scrap from Matthew’s adolescence and mailed it to him.

He opened the box, and the box smelled like Claire. He went to the kitchen for the Tanqueray, a glass, and ice, and he walked out into the backyard and picked three of the best-looking limes off the tree. He made himself a very tall drink. The box smelled like Claire—or what he remembered as Claire’s smell, but was probably some perfume that teenage girls used to wear in 1986—because it was stuffed with notes from Claire, hundreds of notes, notes that had been handwritten (perfumed!), folded, and passed to him in the hallway, in class, at lunch, in the band room (where he hung out, plucking his guitar), or in the art room (where she hung out, sketching or firing pottery).

He unfolded one such note, carefully, because the paper was twenty years old and as soft as fabric. It said: “How can I tell you that I love you?” The best song! Everything Cat Stevens sings is so beautiful! You can sing like him—learn the song for me, please! I have a track meet against Avalon this P.M. but my dad is in A.C. tonight, so I’ll be over late. Leave the door open!!! I love you xoxoxoxo

Max took the whole drink in at once, not tasting anything except for the tang of fresh lime juice. Somewhere in the house was his . . . he stood up and meandered through the house, the first drink sharpening his need for the next one. Where was his guitar? He had, at last count, 122 guitars, but really only one, his Peal, mahogany and maple with abalone inlay. It had been his first guitar, acquired when he was fifteen from a rich summer woman who had bought it for her son, who didn’t want it; she had sold it to Matthew for a hundred dollars. Max always used the Peal to play any new song he wrote; it was, in some ways, the only instrument he could truly hear. The guitar fit into his arms the way he imagined his own child would.

He poured himself another drink and tried the song. How can I tell you that I love you? He and Claire had been crazy for Cat Stevens; they bought every album and played them again and again, and Matthew figured out the chords and memorized the lyrics. Cat Stevens was outré by then; he had converted to Islam and disappeared from the public eye, but this didn’t matter. Matthew and Claire had discovered him together, unearthed him, dusted him off; the songs were their currency, their gold, their treasure.

How can I tell you that I love you? Claire, in her track shorts, with her long legs, milky white, with freckles behind her knees. He loved to watch her stretching those legs up and over the hurdles, with her arm out, perfectly timed. She sprinted, too. She was on a relay team, second leg; she took the baton, she handed it off. Claire’s mother would attend the track meets but spend the whole time with her hands over her face: I can’t watch! And Bud Danner never showed up at all. Matthew was her cheering section. He was her family.

Another drink. Their senior year, Claire would sneak out of her house in the middle of the night and run all the way over to East Aster and tiptoe brazenly past Sweet Jane’s bedroom, right into Matthew’s room. She would shed her clothes and climb into his bed—he could remember it as if it had happened the night before. He would wake up and find Claire, naked and warm, on top of him. They were seventeen. It was as sublime as love gets.

He read through nearly forty notes—it took him the whole bottle of Tanqueray. And there was other stuff to ogle, too: his diploma; programs from the holiday concert, the spring concert, their senior banquet, their prom; pay stubs from Captain Vern’s, where he bused tables for two dollars an hour; tokens for skeet ball on the boardwalk; a cracked 45 of Billy Squier’s “My Kinda Lover”; an Algebra II quiz on which he’d scored an 84 (if he took the quiz again now, he’d get every question wrong). There were song lyrics, too—stupid, wrong lyrics, and lyrics he’d rethought, rewritten, and turned into Top 40 hits. At the bottom of the box, encased in a large wax-paper envelope, were a mess of snapshots, but he couldn’t look at them. He’d had too much to drink, he was too sad, and the pictures were all of Claire.