“I can assure you that will never happen.” Then I opened the door and stepped out.
After shutting the door, I waved him off and walked into the gas station. Only when I saw the creek to the right and the sign for Evergreen Cemetery did I realize exactly where Jason had dropped me.
Are you kidding me?
I looked up at the clouds, wondering if God Himself was testing me. This was quite the coincidence.
I sighed, standing there frozen in the middle of the gas station parking lot. Either I called my ride or I walked the half mile to the cemetery and saw my mother for the first time in years. I used to go on her birthday and her death anniversary, but the guilt ate me alive and I was in a depression for months afterward, so I just stopped going. Now I wondered if her grave was dirty, if she was in some type of afterlife thinking I had abandoned her.
At the gas station, I purchased a Twix bar and then headed to the cemetery. I would probably regret this, but I might have regretted it more if I stayed away.
With each step I took towards the cemetery, I felt a heavy, foreboding weight come over me. I’d asked all the why questions before. Why her and not me? I never got an answer, yet still I asked them again now.
If God was real, why would He take my beautiful mother from this earth and leave my piece-of-crap soul behind here to pollute this place even further?
Why?
Before I knew it, I had stepped inside and down the aisle my mother rested in. One, two, three…She was the fourth headstone in from the left.
The grave was clean. They all were. Which meant whoever ran this place was hosing them off. I would have to find out who it was and give them some money.
I fell to my knees and traced the deep grooves of my mother’s name as a tidal wave of emotions roared up inside of me.
“I’m so sorry.” I whimpered as the grief reared its ugly head, so fresh and hot it felt like I’d lost her just yesterday.
When you’re a young boy raised by a single mother, an unbreakable bond that forms. She was my everything. The guy who’d gotten her pregnant when she was seventeen told her to get an abortion. She told him no and never spoke to him again. She wanted me even though she was only a junior in high school. She wanted me even when her parents kicked her out of the house for making a mistake. She wanted me even when everyone said I would ruin her life.
She wanted me in a world that told her to erase me.
That was my mother. The most loving woman I’d ever known.
It felt like we’d raised each other at times. When I was ten, she was only twenty-seven. That was the age I was now. I couldn’t imagine having a ten-year-old kid! But she had done it. She worked two, and sometimes three jobs, and went to night school. She became a realtor and slowly made more and more money, giving us the life she had always dreamed of. She shunned men I didn’t get along with and did everything to make sure that I was happy.
And here I was, a successful billionaire of one of the world’s biggest game apps, and she had no idea. The Jack she’d last saw had been teaching himself coding while working out of the garage with Jason and hoping to make it big like Steve Jobs. She never saw my dream realized, and I’d give it all back just to have her sing me to sleep one more time.
I broke into sobs as I grabbed my face in an effort to control my breathing. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could live with this guilt.
“God, if You’re real,” I begged between gasps, “just take me too. I don’t want to live like this anymore.”
And then, unbidden, an image of beautiful Hannah rose in my mind. My own little pocket of sunshine. I pulled out my phone and brought up the picture of her at the orphanage in India with the girls pulling on her blonde hair. A smile graced my face as a small sliver of happiness broke through the heavy depression weighing down on me right now.
I glanced back at my mom’s grave and sighed.
“I want to tell you about a girl named Hannah,” I said. “You would like her. Oh, and her name has two N’s in it, which is very important to the story.” Then I laughed.
I set the Twix bar, my mother’s favorite, on top of the grave and then launched into a twenty-minute conversation about Hannah Phillips. It was the craziest thing. Speaking to my mother like she might still be alive somewhere, like she might be able to hear me. For some reason, talking about Hannah made me smile as I recounted so many things we’d been through in our short time of knowing each other.
“When I bought her the restaurant, she asked me if I was a mob boss!” I told my mother.
Even if Hannah wasn’t mine, she was probably the only positive thing I could talk to my mother about right now. So I did. I told my mother all about Hannah with two N’s, and by the time I left the cemetery and called a ride, I somehow felt…lighter.
Maybe there was hope that, in time, I could heal from this travesty.
My phone buzzed with a text, and I swallowed hard when I saw Hannah’s name.
Hannah with two N’s: It was crazy to see you last week. I wish there had been more time. How are you?
I sighed, deleting the message and pushing it from my mind. Hannah was with Luke, and I wasn’t interested in standing in the friendzone while she fell in love with him.
