“Do you have a fever?” I ask, taking a closer look at her face.
She shakes her head. “I’m sure I’m fine.”
“She’s not fine,” Lana says from the grassy area. “She was up all night coughing and sneezing. I gave her my cold.” Without thinking, I place my hand over Charlotte’s forehead, instantly realizing how cold my skin must feel against the scorching sensation of hers. I may be cold, but she’s burning up. She recoils at my touch, pulling back with a wide-eyed look as if it were a shock that I touched her. Actually, it’s a shock tomethat I touched her. I’ve done a good job at keeping things very vanilla.
“Oh,” she says, finally coming to terms with having a fever. “Good thing I work from home, then.” With a garbled coughing laugh, she pulls her hands inside the sleeves of my sweatshirt and curls her arms up over her chest. I like the way she looks, all cuddled up in my sweatshirt.
“I have to run a couple of errands this morning, and the store is one of them. What can I get you?” I ask. “Do you have anything you can take to get your fever down?”
“I’m sure I can find something, but if you don’t mind picking me up some ibuprofen, that’d be great,” she says.
Lana runs over to us and wrenches her hand around my shirt, pulling me down to her level. She cups her hands around my ear and whispers, “Mom was tearing the medicine cabinet apart this morning, saying she couldn’t find anything that wasn’t meant for a—a damn kid.” I pull away, trying to maintain a straight face, but she pulls me back again, resuming her secret-telling position. “Then she said…‘Goddammit, why isn’t there ever anyone around to take care of me?’ She said a bad word. Two, actually.” I want to laugh at what Lana took out of that statement, but I know exactly how Charlotte feels. We spend every second of our lives caring for someone else and there is never anyone to take care of us when we need it.
I twist around to the side of her face and cup my hand around Lana’s ear, “I’ll have a talk with your mom about saying bad words.” Lana pulls away and slaps her hands over her mouth, giggling loudly, before running back over to where Olive is playing.
“What was that all about?” Charlotte asks.
I clear my throat and slip my hands into my back pockets. “Evidently, someone needs to wash their mouth out with soap,” I say, in my best mock-scolding tone.
Charlotte scrunches her nose and forehead with curiosity. “What did she say?”
“Don’t worry about it,” I laugh. The other moms arrive in their group and the roaring chatter that grew from halfway down the street stops almost immediately as they come within earshot. They are all very friendly, but I can’t help feeling as though they get quiet because they don’t know what to say to me. I assume meeting a single, widowed father isn’t the norm around here.
“How’s Olive feeling today?” one of them asks.
“She’s much better, thank you,” I respond.
“Chicken soup is always the cure-all,” another one sings with a cynical grin painted across her tinted lips. I know Charlotte doesn’t converse with any of these women, which means someone likely saw her walking across the street with the pot of soup yesterday.
Fortunately, the bus interrupts whatever conversation could have ensued and Olive runs over to take her backpack out of my hand. “Don’t forget to eat your mayonnaise sandwich today, Daddy. You’re going to get sick if you don’t eat.” Rather than argue with my little Ellie, I lift her up and place a kiss on her nose.
“Have a good day at school. I’ll see you when you get home.”
“Bring me home a jasmine today,” Olive whispers in my ear. “My last one died.” She drops out of my arms and runs for the open door of the bus. “Bye, Daddy!”
Once the bus pulls away, the other mothers begin to crowd but I break away just in time to hopefully make the obvious a little less obvious—that being said, I don’t want to answer any soup questions. Charlotte isn’t as lucky, though. She’s in the center of the conversation, and I decide not to look back and catch the look in her eye that would most likely tell me she hates me right this second.
She feels awkward around the other mothers, too, since we’re the outsiders—the single parents who aren’t lucky enough to have a normal family.
I jump right into my truck the second I get home, heading out to the gardens early enough to beat the daily crowd of elderly visitors. I’ve learned if I arrive within five minutes of their opening, I can have thirty minutes alone without the gawking eyes and whispers.
The fifteen miles between Sage and the gardens in Glenn blur by as I catch myself thinking about Charlotte. For the first time since Ellie’s death, my mind feels torn between mourning and healing. Mourning and memories are all I have left of Ellie, so if I let go of the mourning, Ellie is really gone. Moving on feels like betraying her, so healing has never been an option for me before, but lately, I find myself wondering if it’s possible to mourn and heal at the same time. Maybe I finally have room in my life for both.
In another life, a life where Ellie didn’t leave her permanent footprint, Charlotte would be a woman I could see myself wanting to spend more time with, maybe even pursuing something more than a friendship. Not that there is anything wrong with the friendship that has budded nicely between Charlotte and me over the past couple of months, but I’ve made it clear...maybe a little too clear...that whatever we are—will continue as is. She hasn’t exactly asked for more or even insinuated anything, but the reason I keep thinking about it may be because recently, the consideration of something more has crossed my mind more times than I’d like to admit. There is something about her that has me looking forward to the moment she walks out of her house in the morning, and waiting for the first laugh that escapes her lips each day. Being around her has brought me a sense of peace I’ve been missing in my life.
I pull into the gardens, seeing only two vehicles. One belongs to the groundskeeper, which means a visitor is already here.
I step out of my truck and head down the narrow, gravel-covered path. The scent of lilies and jasmines permeates the air, pulling me down the earth-made, moss covered steps toward the tree. Our tree.My tree.
We had these plans. Horrible plans that no twenty something year olds should ever be discussing. But we did for a reason I can’t even recall.“Let’s be buried together by the tree in the gardens. That way we can always be together in the one place we love.”I laughed at her that day and told her never to bring up the thought of dying again. It was the one and only time we ever spoke of it, but at least that terrible conversation made things easier when planning my twenty-five-year-old wife’s funeral. Her parents hated the idea. They were angry that it was my right to make the arrangements and decisions. I understood their desire to bury her in the cemetery that contained the rotting bodies of their relatives, but I had to carry out Ellie’s wish, regardless of how much her parents would hate me.
The one thing I didn’t plan for was the owner of the garden telling me it was against regulations to bury a body on their grounds. They would only grant me permission to bury an urn. I had to burn Ellie’s body into dust. Dust had always been an annoying particle I was used to sweeping into the trash can, but now, my wife’s remains are nothing more than dust and it’s the most beautiful, precious dust in the world.
When the cremation procedure was complete, I was called into the office to pick up the urn. My wife was handed to me in a fucking vase. I placed it in a small box down in the passenger seat and then secured Olive into her car seat. It was the one and only time our entire family was together.Pretty screwed up.
I kneel down by the tree, along with the cliché carving of our names surrounded by a heart with the word “forever”below it. Who knew forever ended at twenty-five? With my hand placed up against the heart, I close my eyes and allow the words to flow. “I miss you, baby. So much.” I pull in the thick air that never seems to find a way through my lungs easily while I’m here. Even if I could breathe freely, the knot in my throat makes it hard to speak the words I save for these moments. But with a slight breeze blowing against my skin, comfort blankets me like a warm hand touching my back. “Olive is learning to read. Can you believe it? She wants to be a writer like her mom. She wants to be just like you, Ell. I’ve done my best to keep you alive in her mind. I want her to know you like I know you. I wish she had years with you like I did, but I’m doing the best I can. I know I say this every time I’m here, but I just need you to know how hard I’m trying.” I open my eyes and remove my hand from our engraved heart. “I hope you don’t mind, but I need to steal a blue jasmine for Olive. She requested it.” I lean down and pull the clippers from my coat pocket. If it weren’t for Ellie’s strict rules on how to remove a flower from the soil, I would yank the thing out, but that would be a sin to her. I clip the flower and replace the clippers in my pocket. “I love you, baby. I’ll see you next Friday.”
I stand up and turn toward the jasmine-lined pond. This was the place that sparked Ellie’s passion for flowers, jasmines in particular. They aren’t naturally grown here, but I guess the groundskeepers maintain them; though the temperature is dropping quickly now, so I’m guessing this will be it for a few months. As I pick a couple more, my focus catches something pink across the pond.
