I crossed my arms.
“What I was going to say is that Brooke and I want to take Wagner to Disney World for a week this fall, and we were thinking that maybe you could come too. I know you don’t want to miss that.”
I could feel my stomach turning over. I had had more than a year to get used to the Greg and Brooke situation. Things were better. I was feeling stronger. But a joint vacation? He couldn’t be serious.
I didn’t say anything, and Greg continued, “You were the one who was so big on us still doing things together as a family, on not having to have separate birthday parties and trying to keep Wagner’s life as normal as possible. So why don’t you come?”
“You’re bringing Brooke,” Diana chimed in. “Shouldn’t Gray get to bring somebody too?”
“Diana,” I said sharply, under my breath.
Greg looked amused. “What? You mean you?”
“Nope,” Diana said, grinning broadly, “I most certainly do not.” She paused. “Although I have always wanted to go to Disney World.…”
I grabbed her wrist and spun around, calling to Greg, “I’ll think about it, okay?”
He just stood there, looking confused—and kind of pissed. And I have to admit that that made me happy.
“Are you crazy?” I said to Diana, laughing.
“What?” She shrugged. “I’m not going to let him stand there all holier-than-thou like you can’t move on. Hell no. My girl’s already found her the hottest, youngest piece of meat on the beach.”
“I thought you thought he was too young for me. I thought you said it was inappropriate.”
She stopped walking and shrugged again. “What the hell do I know? I’m forty and single.”
That quick wit was one of my favorite things about Diana. What I loved the most about her, though, was how, already, she always, always had my back. No questions, no hesitations. She was Team Gray all the way. I hoped I was showing her that I was Team Diana too.
“I’m coming in to make dinner in a minute.”
“It’s Saturday, Diana. You don’t have to. Get some rest.”
She smiled. “I need to get to know that cute boy of yours. Now seems like as good a time as any. What’s his favorite dinner?”
I could feel a lump in my throat, the burn that meant I was in danger of crying. “Fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, and butter beans.”
Diana nodded slowly, registering the tears in my eyes. “Your momma’s specialty, huh?”
I nodded. She acted like she was going to say something else, like she wanted to ask me something more. But instead, she said, “Okay. I’m going to the store. I’ll throw in some of my best-in-the-world biscuits.” Then she winked at me. “Then I’ll butter ’em both up.”
I smiled even though I still felt like I was going to rip at the seams to keep from crying. That’s the thing people don’t tell you about losing a parent, how many times a day you think about them, how many times you need their advice or wish they were there or want their fried chicken. Not somebody else’s. Hers. Mom’s.
I snapped myself out of it and walked to Wagner’s room. He was mid-unpacking when I squeezed him to me. “Mom, come on,” he said. “You’re going to suffocate me.”
That was okay. I felt the tears coming to my eyes, grateful for him again, thankful that while, yes, I had suffered a loss, it was a loss in the natural order of things. I was always going to lose my mom. It had happened earlier than I thought it would, but no matter what, my son was still here. My beating heart outside my body was standing here sorting his socks and his Nintendo Switch.
Our children are on loan,I could hear my mom saying. She knew all about that. There wasn’t one single day that I didn’t catch her in a moment, know that she was thinking about the brother I would never know.
I heard her talking on the phone one time to a friend of a friend who had lost a child. She said, “You will never, ever be the same. You will never be whole in the way that you oncewere, but you have others to live for. You’re going to keep waking up. When you do, get out of bed. Do something he didn’t get to do. Some days you won’t want to, but while you’re here you have to make the choice to live.”
I used to wonder how my mom found the courage, later in life, when she and Dad weren’t so strapped for cash, to travel with reckless abandon despite malaria warnings and terror threats or to take her morning run through the bad part of town.
Once I became a mother myself, I reasoned that, in losing her child, the worst that could happen to her already had. Her life meant less because a part of it had passed on before her. Or maybe that’s just the pessimist in me, and the optimist in her would say that life is short and fleeting, and living full-throttle is the only way to go.
Either way, I felt like when she found out she was sick, she was relieved. She didn’t have to put on her happy face anymore. She didn’t have to get out of bed. She didn’t have to pretend. She could just go meet my brother where he was. Quinn and I were furious when she refused treatment. Dad too. She said she knew that treatment would only make what could be a dignified death an undignified one.
“But what if it works really well for you?” I remember asking her, nearly hysterical. “What if there’s a miracle?”
