She kissed both Jeremy and me on our cheeks with lips cold enough to make me jump, then she took the hand Dad offered her, and we walked through the arched wrought iron gate of Montgomery Cemetery.
Greg’s headstone was indistinguishable from those around it, but all of us picked out the well-worn path to it without hesitation. Mom was first to approach and bend down to remove twigs and leaves that stabbed through the freshly fallen snow. The bouquet of flowers resting against the headstone was barely withered, but Mom knelt and replaced them with the fresh ones she’d brought. After she removed one glove, her fingers drifted over the engraved letters.
Dad moved to kneel next to her, and she leaned into him. As they spoke to Greg, murmurs reached Jeremy and me, but not the words themselves.
Long minutes passed. Mom cried. At one point Dad took her hand in his and said something to her. She shook her head and tried to pull her hand away while Dad spoke again. I could tell he was asking her something, pleading with her by the look on his face, but she went still until he released her hand. When she finally turned back to Dad, she cupped his face with her hand but said nothing.
Eventually, she looked over her shoulder to beckon Jeremy and me to join them.
Dad and I walked ahead as we left the cemetery, Mom, with her arm around Jeremy, following several paces behind. I kept casting looks back at them until Dad stopped me with a hand on my shoulder.
“She’s fine. Jeremy’s with her.”
I wasn’t going to say anything. I’d determined not to for Greg’s sake, but the words came out before I could stop them. “What did you say to her?” Somehow I knew he hadn’t been asking to come back home.
Dad didn’t answer me for several steps. “I love her” was what he finally said. “Despite what you think, I want our family to be together again, but it can’t be like it was before. We have to let go, and your mom isn’t ready to do that yet.”
No, she wasn’t. She clung to Greg more tightly every day.
Letting go didn’t mean forgetting. Angry as I was at Dad, I couldn’t pretend he was saying that. He meant the rest. She had to stop living as though Greg would come home again at any moment. She spoke about him like he was gone, but that wasn’t how she lived, and because of that, none us had been able to fully let go either.
That didn’t mean I agreed with Dad moving out. If anything, I thought that had made her cling even tighter than before. It certainly hadn’t helped her let go.
We needed to be together to do that.
“We should all be with her tonight,” I said. “All of us.”
Instead of tightening his jaw or increasing his pace like I expected, he said, “I know.”
Those words revealed more about his leaving than anything he’d said since the night Mom had helped him pack.
A biting wind stole the breath I needed to respond, and I’d slowed enough by then that Mom and Jeremy were walking abreast with us. None of it made sense to me. Not the way Mom took Dad’s hand again, or the way he tilted his head to rest on hers when more tears spilled onto her cheeks. How could he not see that she needed him so that they could let go together?
When we reached Mom’s car, Dad confounded me yet again when he opened the back door and told Jeremy and me to go home with her, even though it was his weekend.
Jolene
Stupid Adam.
He texted last night to explain that he wasn’t coming back to the apartment that weekend. He felt bad about ditching me, which was sweet and I got why he did it, but Sunday still sucked for me. Instead of hanging out with him and forgetting that anything else existed, I sat in my room hiding from Shelly and stewed about winter formal.
I’d agreed to go but I couldn’t just be excited about seeing Adam in a suit or what it would feel like to have his arms wrapped around me—my toes curled a little as I imagined resting my cheek against his chest and hearing his too-fast heartbeat—no, I had to deal with the problems first.
Of course it wasn’t as easy as the dance not falling on a Dad weekend. For one, I needed a dress. I’d never really gone for pretty around Adam, but I could do it in theory. I had all the parts, and my hair would compensate for the less impressive ones. I’d wear it down. He’d like that.I’dlike that he’d like that.
But I’d need help with the logistics, and that meant a dress. Cherry was out of the question. I’d kept my word and covered for her with her parents so that she could go out with Meneik, but she’d gotten caught trying to sneak back into her house at 3:00 a.m. Then she got caught the next night trying to sneak Meneik into her bedroom. She was massively grounded. Her parents took her phone and wouldn’t even let her hang out in the basement when I was working with Gabe and the band on the music video.
I probably could have asked one of the other girls from the soccer team, but I’d never been awesome at making friends and I wasn’t super close with anyone besides Cherry.
So that meant Mom. When Shelly dropped me off that evening after a blissfully silent car ride and I found Mom getting ready to go out with Tom, I knew I wasn’t going to get a better chance.
She was dragging a black pencil along the inside of her upper eyelid when I stepped into her bathroom. One finger lifting up her eyelid made her eyeball look like it could pop out of the socket at any moment. She glanced at me in the mirror and kept lining.
“I didn’t hear you get home.”
“I was quiet.” I stared, hypnotized and slightly grossed out by her eyeball.
Mom straightened. “Come here.”
