“You like that one, huh?” I was smiling huge at him busting a gut.
He just kept huffing out, “Oh my gosh” over and over again, a true testament of my mom’s influence on him.
“His birthday was a month later, and I got him a roll of toilet paper and a bunch of socks.”
“Grandpa showed me a movie of Christmas, and you gave Daddy socks and he threw them at you,” he said between these great big chuffs.
I nodded. “He made me promise never to say anything about it again, so I didn’t. I just kept giving him socks.”
“You’re good,Tia.”
“I know, huh?”
He nodded, his face flushed pink and happy. Even happy, he said, “I miss him.”
“Me too, Lou. Very, very much,” I said softly, feeling a bitter ball in my throat as I smiled. Tears stung the back of my eyes, but by some miracle I kept them in. I wanted this to be a happy thing between us. I could cry later.
The little boy blinked sleepily up at the ceiling with a dreamy sigh. “I wanna be a policeman like him when I’m old like you.”
His comment made my heart ache so bad I couldn’t even focus on how he’d referred to me as being old. “You can be whatever you want to be,” I told him. “Your dad wouldn’t care as long as you always did a good job.”
“Because he loved me?”
He was going to be the death of me, this little kid. “Because he loved you,” I promised. I gulped and hoped and prayed that he couldn’t see the struggle written all over my face. Tucking the covers in around him faster than ever, I leaned over my favorite five-year-old on the planet and kissed his forehead, earning a kiss on my cheek in return. “I love you, poo-poo face. Sleep good.”
“I love you too, poo-poo face,” he said as I made my way toward his door, thinking about his words and grinning even as a tiny piece of my heart broke off.
“Tia,you can buy me socks if you want,” Louie added just as I made it to his door.
Maybe if I’d been expecting it, his offer wouldn’t have felt like a battering ram to my sternum followed by a nuclear bomb being detonated where my heart used to exist.
My legs went weak. Grief and something close to misery boxed in my throat, and with a strength I didn’t think I had in me, I turned to look at him without letting the tears burst like Niagara Falls out of my eyes and nodded. Goose bumps broke out over my arms. “I think your dad would like that. Goodnight, Lulu.”
“Night, dudu,” he called out as I mostly closed the door behind me, biting my lip and swallowing, swallowing, swallowing hard.
I pressed my back against the wall next to his door.
Oh my God.
Oh my God.
My nose started burning. My eyes began watering, and I gasped for air, for strength, for anything that could get me through the pain slicing through everything that made me, me.
How did it never get easier to know that life was unfair?
How did it never hurt any less to know I would never see someone I loved again? Why did it have to be my brother? He hadn’t been perfect, but he’d been mine. He’d loved me even when I got on his nerves.
Why?
I hadn’t moved a single inch when I heard Josh peep up, “Aunt Di.”
Fuck.
“You’re ready for bed?” My voice sounded cracked and splintered even in my own ears as I made my way to his room.
“Yeah,” he replied, the sounds of the bed creaking, confirming his statement.
Wiping at my eyes with the back of my hand and then pulling up my shirt to dab at them, I did the same to my nose and took a deep, calming breath, which probably didn’t do anything because I was three seconds away from bawling. But I couldn’t put off seeing Josh before he fell asleep. It was one of the last few things he still let me get away with every so often.
