Back in the living room, I found Mia and Kitty hunched before my computer.
“Why didn’t you tell us you had a blog!” Kitty exclaimed.
“Why are you snooping through my stuff?” The blog wasn’t a secret, exactly, but I was self-conscious about it, especially with my family. And while I’d told Beth about the list, I knew she’d find a way to make the blog evidence of why I should go to college.If you can write a blog, you can write a paper!
“I wasn’t snooping,” Kitty said. “I wanted to watch YouTube on abigger screen, but Mia wouldn’t let me use the TV. If you didn’t want anyone to see it, why is it your homepage?”
“XO, Jo?” Mia snickered. “Is that like G.I. Joe for princesses?”
“No,” I said defensively.
“I love it,” Kitty said. She turned to Mia. “Remember when she went bungee jumping and called Mom after, crying? That was one of the things she had to do. The bungee jumping, not the crying.” She squinted at the computer. “You haven’t posted in forever, though.”
True. Mia scanned the most recent post. It was from February, when Nina and I road-tripped across Abaco. Since then, I hadn’t made a single post.
“You have to finish it by your birthday?” Mia asked.
“Yeah,” I said, knowing we were thinking the same thing: by Sam’s birthday. His first birthday without us.
“Samson’s birthday,” Kitty said. And I was reminded of how Beth called her Chatty Kathy for her habit of saying what didn’t need to be said.
Silence fell over the three of us. It was the first time Samson’s name had come up, and his absence seemed to move through the room.
When Samson died, every day felt like forever. Captain Xav and Nina had been kind enough to let me go to North Carolina for the funeral, operating a man down during one of the busiest weeks of the season. I’d booked the first flight I could, returning to the guest room I’d lived in a lifetime ago.
The door to Samson’s room had remained closed until the day of the funeral. That night, as soon as everyone went to bed, I’d slipped down the hall and snuck inside. My heart had been in my throat as I’d looked around at the posters of baseball players and the dried-up Venus flytrap on his windowsill. Textbooks had been piled beside his desk, and I’d pulled the chain on the lamp, finding his agenda open to the week he’d died. The blocks for Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday had homework and baseball practices written and crossed out in his awful handwriting.He’d always pressed down too hard, the paper bending beneath the force of him. I’d passed my hand over the words and imagined him bent over a desk at school, his foot tapping as he scratched away, the ink staining his hand. Sam had been left-handed, which, according to him, explained his extraordinary talent in baseball.
Then there was the other side of the planner. Samson died on a Thursday afternoon. There’d been a Saturday baseball practice followed by three exclamation points. He’d never found out who the culprit was inThe Westing Gameor worked his way through chapter seven in his math textbook.Impossible, I’d thought, that he would never play baseball again or read another book or do another math problem. I’d shut the agenda, not wanting Beth or Mark or the girls to wander in and see it.
“Can we help?” Kitty asked, breaking the silence.
I thought through the remaining items. We could do some, but we’d never finish them all. I took in Mia’s and Kitty’s somber faces. I needed to keep their minds off Samson. Wasn’t that the whole point of sending them to Aunt Jo’s?
Fun, adventure, that was what these girls needed.
And honestly, I needed it too.
“You know what?” I said. “Why not? Let’s do it.”
Kitty leapt up from the chair. “Really? You’ll let us help?”
“Really.” I tried not to think about how this might come back to bite me when we inevitably failed to complete the list, and shooed the girls from the desk. I found the original list (which Mia noticed right away was on a bar napkin) and tacked it to the wall. “We need a plan. What’s first?”
Mia begged me to book us flights to Europe, not knowing I’d already booked one for myself.
“Let’s not worry about that one right now,” I said. “We can do the easy ones first and figure out the rest later.”
“Let’s start with this one,” Mia said, pointing at number nine—go skinny-dipping.
“Counterpoint. Let’s start with this one.” I pointed to number twenty-two—declutter the condo.
Mia rolled her eyes. “Thrilling.”
I nudged her with my elbow. “New plan. Let’s sleep on it and reconvene in the morning.”
Mia flopped dramatically onto the couch, but Kitty wriggled in excitement as I helped them unfold the sofa bed. Once it was made, I wedged myself between them. Mia put on a show calledMy Super Sweet 16, a reality series about rich kids’ birthday parties. I watched, equally intrigued and horrified as a girl in a sapphire ball gown screeched about getting the wrong color Lamborghini for her birthday.
I propped my chin in my hands and turned to Mia. “Why do you like this show anyway?”
