“I’m sorry it took so long for me to get out here, Mom.” I’m crying now and, after rustling through my pockets, I realize I don’t have a tissue, so I accept the mess I’m about to become. “I think when I was away at college, I let the miles speak for themselves. I couldn’t come visit because I didn’t have a car on campus and when I was home for holidays, we were too busy visiting Nana and Jeff to make the trip. Then, I think when I moved in with Buckley, I became obsessed with making my new life with him work, even if it was hurting me. But I see now that my biggest mistake was thinking a game show could put a spear through my grief.”
Thank God nobody else is around because I’m sobbing now. My body lurches forward as I climb up onto my knees, place my hands on the slightly chilly stone. “WinningMadcap Marketdidn’t make me miss you any less. I think I’ll miss you forever. You’re my mom. One of the greatest loves of my life. And I’m so fucking mad that our time together was so short, but I’m so grateful I got that time at all. I love you.”
I collapse onto the stone, tears falling faster than I can catch them with my hands. A massive burden wisps up and off my shoulders. Instead, I feel the gentle press of a pair of hands there. “It’s okay, Holden. It’s okay. Let it out.”
Finally, I do. I let out the grief I’ve been white-knuckling back all these years. I tucked it inside a relationship that couldn’t last. I buried it inside a false dream of reality TV stardom. I sat on it and kicked at it and did anything I could to keep it caged. Now, out in the open, I can accept it.
“She’s with us always,” Dad says like I’m a teenager again and I’m in the fetal position in my childhood bed. “After everything that happened out in Los Angeles, you have to feel that.”
I blink back a few tears while hugging Dad and my eyes zero in on his figurine—Leo and me on two edges of a shopping cart. The fact that his shopping cart is a million times better than mine aside, I think about Mom, guardian angels, and messages from the universe.
A game show may not have expunged my grief, but in a weird way, it did gift me Leo. I wonder if the happenstance of it all wasn’t so coincidental. Maybe Mom was putting in a word with a higher power for me—assisting with lining up the dominoes so they’d all fall exactly as they were supposed to.
I don’t know if that’s true, but in this moment, I choose to believe it.
Twenty-Seven
TheMadcap Marketwinnings hit my account on a Monday a few months later.
I’m sitting in a coffee shop waiting on someone when the notification from my bank rolls in. I laugh a little to myself.
After a lot of thought, I’ve finally decided what I’m going to do with the fifty thousand dollars. One half of it is going to go toward paying off my student loans. I may have lied to get the money, but the lie turned into real feelings. Besides, Leo’s justification from after the taping still rings true to me. If they were interested in the truth, they would’ve dug deeper. I have to believe that they didn’t care. We made good TV, and I deserve to keep living through this.
The other half is going toward a breast cancer charity—a donation in Mom’s name.
Originally, I thought I’d selfishly use it all. I’d pay off my loans, quit my jobs, and use the extra money to pay rent on a place all my own while I focus on finding a career that satisfies me. My plans changed pretty quickly.
I sip my iced chai with oat milk and think back on how well living with Dad has been these past few months. Since we’re both busy working, we don’t see a ton of each other, but at night, when we sit down to homemade dinner, we get to talk about our days and share stories about Mom and do all the things we didn’t get to do right after she passed because I went away to college and I thought time plus a new environment would fix the unfixable.
It’s been nice.
The bell over the entrance door rings. Buckley enters. I wave him over.
“I ordered you a horchata latte and an everything bagel with scallion cream cheese,” I tell him. “Hope those are still your favorites.”
“They are,” he says, slinging his satchel over the back of the wooden chair. “Thanks. It’s good to see you.”
“You, too. Thanks for meeting me here.” I picked a convenient spot close to his work and chose an hour prior to the start of his workday. Routine is important to him and deviation puts him on edge. I can see now how my chaotic ways when we were together created unwanted tension in his life. We weren’t a match.
“I was pretty surprised when I got your text,” he says, spreading his cream cheese so that it’s evenly distributed. “I figured we said everything we needed to say out in Los Angeles.”
Buckley was a day or two behind me. Part of me worried that morning I left the hotel with Leo still sleeping soundly in bed that Buckley and I would end up on the same flight. Then, I remembered he’d probably have sprung for an Economy Plus seat and I’d be at the back of the plane keeping company with the toilets, so it wouldn’t matter.
“Not everything, not exactly,” I admit before sipping my drink to fortify myself. These days, I choose tea over alcohol when my emotions overwhelm me. It’s one of the many intentional changes I’m making to be more present. “For the past few months, I’ve been attending a grief group. Try saying that three times fast. Grief group. Grief group. Greegoop. See? Not easy. Anyway, we talk a lot about theCs when it comes to losing someone and I won’t bore you with the details, but one of them is communication. I want to apologize for not communicating with you.”
“Apologize?” he asks, midchew.
“Yeah,” I say, nodding. “When we met at college, I was stuck in denial. I was pretending that I wasn’t hurting and I pretended for so long that you believed me. The longer we were together, the more I started to believe me, too. But inside, I was in a lot of pain, which caused me to withdraw and become a ghost.”
“H,” he says. My breath catches at the sound of the disused nickname. “Sorry, Holden. I—I was out of line saying that.”
“I don’t think you were. I think maybe you were a little harsh, but you told the truth and I appreciate that,” I say, thinking about ghosts. Many of us assume that when someone passes, they either float on to a greater afterlife or they remain tethered here to haunt, but much like funerals, ghosts aren’t a form for the dead, they’re a mode of the living. “Because if you hadn’t said it, I think I would’ve tried to continue pretending. I’m much happier now that I’m not.”
I smile to myself. I may not love what I do, but I’ve started finding tiny ways to find joy in the necessary. At the boutique, I turned doing inventory into a game where I hide small prizes in the stockroom, so my coworkers don’t find it to be such a slog. During my Cardio Dance Fit classes, I sneak in one unapproved song per week that I absolutely adore be it old or new, hip or out-of-date. It always gets the class jumping, and the monitors could care less.
“That’s great to hear,” Buckley says, mirroring my smile. “Though I do think flying out to Los Angeles only to get a glittery sweatshirt as a parting gift was a bit much. It’s thrown my sleep schedule and my finances completely out of whack.”
“Sometimes big emotions make us do zany things,” I say with a hearty laugh that’s a bit too loud for this small café. Oh, well. I’m following my positive impulses more these days and trying my best not to judge them.
