“She has school tomorrow,” Mom says, keeping her eyes locked on the pair of pants she’s intricately folding into quarters.
“Yeah, I’m aware. I can take care of her, believe it or not.”
“What crawled up your pants, Hunter?” she asks.
Besides the obvious, how can she not know what’s bugging me? “Am I the only one who sees how much you all consume yourself with my private life?” I stand up with Olive still attached to my neck, giggling like a hyena. She makes it hard to have a serious conversation with Mom, but this needs to be understood.
“It’s only because we all worry about you, sweetheart.” Mom finishes folding the last of the clothes and lifts the stack up. “And Ellie’s death has been difficult for your Dad and me, too. Not only was she precious to us, but seeing our son lose his wife has been heartbreaking. We love you very much and have done our best to help you through the past five years, but it’s been a continual learning experience for us too. There’s no manual for how to help your son through something like this. Plus, all mothers pry. If I didn’t pry, it would mean I didn’t care about you. Someday, I won’t be here to make sure you’re happy and you’ll miss this.” She brushes by me to head up the stairs, leaving me with her motherly version of a punch to the gut. This is why I normally keep the peace and let her and everyone else take part in my sad little life.
AJ finally meanders in and pulls Olive off my neck. “Sorry, again.” He sits down on the couch beside Dad, cradling squirmy Olive in his arms. “You should be smiling.”
“You should be looking for your wife,” I retort.
“She’s at home,” he says.
“You should be there, too, then.”
“I want a divorce.”
And there’s the mic drop. Can’t say I didn’t see this coming the day he spent his life savings on a three-carat diamond only because she wouldn’t accept anything less for a proposal, or so AJ said. “Have you thought this through or are you just afraid to fix this problem you caused?”
“Oh!” Olive shrieks. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” AJ turns his attention to her, clearly avoiding my question.
“The mail is here. Mail, mail, mail!” she says, running through the house.
“Where are you going, Olive?” Mom shouts from upstairs.
“Mail!” Olive shouts. She is half way down the driveway before I reach the front door and she is already running back with a stack of mail in her hands. “I knew it!” She runs in past me, dropping the mail on the coffee table, keeping one small envelope against her chest. “It’s her, Daddy!”
“Who?” Mom asks, walking down the stairs into the living room. “Who’s her?”
“Mommy’s heart,” Olive says, as if it would make sense to anyone but Olive and me.
“Excuse me?” Mom says. I never exactly told Olive to keep these recurring letters between this woman and myself a secret, but I never intended to let anyone else know about them either. “Why are you getting mail on a Sunday?”
Uh. We don’t get mail on Sundays. I didn’t grab the mail yesterday, but why would she have thought the mail just arrived. “Olive, did you see the mail carrier?”
“No, I just heard the mailbox.” Bionic hearing? Jeez.Wait a second. Running out the door, letting the wind slam it shut behind me, I make it to the end of the driveway just in time to hear a car engine, but whoever it is has already gone over the peak of the hill. Even if I ran down the street, I wouldn’t have a chance at seeing the car.
Defeated as always, I walk back into the house and take the envelope from Olive. “Did you see the person who put this in the mailbox?” I ask her. Has she been delivering these letters all along? If so, she’s obviously from around here.But, what about the mountains?
Olive shakes her head, her pigtails flopping around. “Nope.”
“Did you see a car drive away?”
“Yup,” she says. Her one little word makes my heart stop beating for a brief second.
“What color was it?” I ask.
Olive places her finger over her lips as her gaze floats to the ceiling. “Ummmm, hmmm. I think—I think it was green—or maybe it was brown. Gray, yeah it could have been gray, like gray and white maybe.”
I kneel down in front of her and take her hands into mine. “Olive, I need you to think real hard. Was it a big car like mine or was it small like Grammy and Grampy’s?”
“It was—kind of in the middle I guess. You know what, it could have been a blue car,” she says with a large smile. “Yeah...I like blue cars.”
This is absolutely not helpful. “Hunter, would you like to explain any of this?” Mom asks me, like I’m a teenager who she just caught hiding weed in his top drawer.
