“I feel like you need to stop being a little bi?—”
“Ok, thank you Meredith. Kevin, would you like to go next?” my mother asks.
He nods. Grants me a small smile.
“Devon, it’s hard for me to say this—we’ve always shared so much and I’ve been in love with you for so long?—”
What in the? Who’s loving who, now?
“Until I saw you and Jeff together and recognized that there was something more. The way you look at him—that’s what I want. I want someone to light up like you do when Jeff walks into a room. And I want to laugh at her dumb jokes.”
“My jokes are not?—”
He lifts a hand. “I still love you—just less pathetic-stalker and more hoe-bro.”
My lips move, repeating the term hoe-bro quietly. Trying it on for size, while Kev races on, “I love you the right amount. And I want you to have all of that stuff I mentioned. I want you to have your Jeff.”
My Jeff. I stop saying hoe-bro to myself and try to take in the whole monologue.
“That’s a lot to process,” I whisper.
“Well said, Kevin,” Mom says.
Kevin smiles like he’s just received a compliment from the chief of surgery.
My mom doesn’t seem to give a shit about processing time because she already has her own spiel waterfalling out of her mouth and into my tired brain. I might run. My amygdala wants me to run. Meredith pulls my chair around the corner of the table, closer to her and my amygdala sends a smoke signal to the ether. Trapped.
I tune into Mom’s voice, realizing I’ve done that Charlie Brown thing where her words sound like the announcements in school.
“Devon, I know you want to run right now. You’ve got that frantic look you had when you ‘overdosed’ on pot and thought the SWAT team had the house surrounded.”
Shittttt. That was intense.
“I need you to take a breath and make sure you aren’t tuning me out. This is important. And I’ve been working on it with my therapist for months.”
“Months?”
She nods at me.
“October 13th,” she tells me, her eyes scanning my face for recognition.
That’s the Monday after Jeff met her. The Monday after the shed. Long before I even thought about allowing him near my box-o’love—well—maybe, I’d thought of it. But, still. It was before. Before us.
Something about this fact has lodged itself in my throat and refused to budge—a little throat-squatter.
“I met your dad at a co-ed wedding shower for one of my college professors. He told me he had no idea who any of the people at the party were—that he was just there for the free brunch and booze. He was arrogant. Third year in med school. Better looking than even Kevin.” She throws Kev a wink and I watch her eyes fill with watery starlight before the next part. The next part is my favorite. “But he sat through that whole showermaking me laugh despite my attempts to ignore him and then before I went to leave, I watched him help clean up with the couple’s mom and pack every gift that they’d received into their car. That was it.”
“He did pack a mean car,” I muse, remembering the way he would make us leave all of our luggage on the curb and then play a mental game of Tetris while we all piled in to fight over the music or the temperature or whatever the hell we thought was important then.
“Your father was a doctor, Devon. He was a surgeon and he cared a lot about his patients. But he cared more about you. About us. Surgery wasn’t everything that he was. And I think we forget that sometimes. That we blame that part of him even though it was just a piece of his puzzle. A part that we loved before—just as much as all the other parts.”
She flattens her palms on the table surface and meets my gaze. A million memories are assaulting me, the sound of his bad jokes and my laughter as we sat here—at this table. The look of pure joy on his face every time I walked into the hospital on the day after a call to bring him leftovers. The feel of his calloused fingers wrapped around my hand—the smell of soap always following him because he’d scrub them raw to keep us from getting sick. I reach across Meredith’s lap and grab my mother’s hand from the table. It’s softer than his was.
“The accident wrecked us, Devon. But, it was an accident. It wasn’t written in stone somewhere. It wasn’t his choice. And it certainly wasn’t something any of us could control. I don’t want to be counted in the wreckage anymore, hun. And he wouldn’t want that, either.”
Fat, salty tears are making their way over my cheeks and into Mer’s lap. To her credit, she doesn’t seem to care. She’s rubbing my back as I’m still sprawled out across her.
“That was one hell of a speech,” I manage.
