“Is everything okay?” I ask before she can give her reason for calling me. Traditionally she has called me every other week with an update. Tuesday evenings after my mother is asleep. This isn’t our regularly scheduled time.
“That’s why I’m calling.” She pauses, and then she plows forward with her reason for the call. “I’m so sorry, Maverick. Your mother passed away in her sleep early this morning from the pneumonia. If it’s any consolation, she went peacefully.”
“Oh.” It’s all I can manage to say.
“She was a lovely woman. It was my honor to work with her for as long as I did,” she says. She rambles on about how my mother had already made all her own arrangements, so there’s not much to do but get to Ohio to say my final goodbyes. “She knew your schedule, so her wishes were to have her funeral on a Tuesday since she knew it was your day off.”
For some reason, the thought pricks a heat behind my eyes.
She arranged her own funeral to happen on a Tuesday so I could attend.
She always put me first, and now in her death, I wish I would’ve put her first more often.
I wish I could’ve been there with her in her final moments. I wish I could’ve had the chance to say goodbye.
“Thanks,” I mumble to Susan, and eventually she runs out of details to share, and we end the call.
By the time I set my phone back on my nightstand, Everleigh is sitting up in bed, her large brown eyes pinning me with concern. “What’s going on?”
“My mother died.” The words sound somehow wrong coming out of my mouth, as if they’re not real. It hasn’t hit me yet. I wonder when it will.
“Oh, Maverick,” she murmurs, and she throws her arms around me to hold me. I let her. I lean into her, my head on her chest as I try to fight off the emotions threatening to swallow me whole. I shouldn’t have opened the door to them, but I did, and now I have to feel the full and treacherous weight of losing the only person in the world I could ever truly count on.
She’s the one who helped me pick up the pieces when I lost my wife.
She’s the one who brushed me off when I found out the baby I thought I lost wasn’t mine to lose.
She’s the one who helped me with my chemistry homework when I just didn’t understand, who made sure my practice uniform was always clean, who held the seat of my bike when I demanded to take off the training wheels.
Who’s going to help me pick up the pieces now that I’ve lost the most important person in my life?
Another shudder runs through me, and I fight off that heat behind my eyes. Except for the last time I visited my mother and called on Everleigh to be with me, I haven’t cried since I saw that black SUV turned over in a ditch. I’m not going to start now.
But as Everleigh holds me in her arms while I tremble and fight away these emotions, I feel like maybe I have an answer to who could help me pick up the pieces.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers. “What can I do?”
“Come with me to Ohio.”
“Of course.” She doesn’t hesitate. She doesn’t ask questions. She doesn’t care about when I need to go. She’ll justbe there.
That’s all I need.
“If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have gotten to say goodbye,” I say quietly into her chest.
She hugs me tighter, and I hear her sniffle.
She’s crying. She’s letting her emotion out. She’s not hiding them from me.
And in doing so, she lets me know that I don’t have to hide from her, either.
CHAPTER 32: Everleigh Bradley
That Complicated Head
I quietly hold him as he finally unleashes his emotions. His mom just died. I don’t expect him to hold himself together. I don’t expect him to be the gruff, unfeeling man he was when I met him.
He feels this—as he should. And I’ll be right here to let him feel it all by his side.
