Sometimes, when the days stretched just a little too slowly, she broke down and called him. To his credit, he almost always picked up.
But Dell McCleary, as Mae had learned the first time she’d ever spoken with him, simply wasn’t that good at the phone.
He answered all of her questions, such as,How is Georgia doing? Is she talking better? Does she have a release day yet?And,How are you holding up? Are you sleeping? What was the last meal you ate?
But he answered simply—fine, a little, no, fine, yes, a hamburger—never offering much more.
And Mae never asked the question she wanted to ask most of all.
When are you coming home?
It was selfish. A mother was more important than a bookstore.
Sometimes she also wanted to ask:can I come?
But somehow that felt selfish, too. Dell was more than capable of taking care of his mother on his own, a woman Mae had never even met. It was presumptuous to assume she had that kind of place in Dell’s life, after only knowing him for a few months. After a week of vigorous fucking.
She had committed to Bae Books. Had already told Liv and Olive her planned opening day, mere hours before Dell had received the phone call. Meaning that the majority of Greyfin Bay knew her planned opening day, and while it was possible that half of Greyfin Bay didn’t want a queer running a bookstore in their town in the first place, she’d be damned if she proved herself to be a flighty queer on top of it all.
And so half of her conversations with Dell were filled with awkward pauses. Stretches of only breathing as Mae clutched her phone. Of wishing she could reach out and touch him, so badly it ached.
While Mae was always grateful to hear his voice, almost every time she hung up, she found herself feeling sadder than she had before.
She tried blasting Jesus’s death party playlist around the store to help perk herself up, once she ceased panic-induced sea lion hangs and actually got back to work. But the truth was, she’d listened to these tracks so many times by now that even they started to make her feel sad. Even Judy.
Especially Judy.
Mae didn’t want to keep thinking about the death party anyway. About the ocean outside her door that held Jesus’s ashes.
She wanted to remember Jesus.
She wanted to remember trivia nights and excursions to try new restaurants; she wanted to remember Moonie’s. She wanted to remember that one time they went snow tubing at Mt. Hood Skibowl, how she didn’t think she’d ever heard Jesus laugh that hard, cheeks deep crimson with the cold and his glee, and Jesus was a man who lived to laugh. She wanted to remember the year they tried joining a queer bowling league, how Jesus had been the worst among them, his attempts at flinging the ball down the lane so bad they made Steve laugh until he’d cried, and Steve, in contrast to his husband, wasn’t a man born to laughter. The nearby team of butch lesbians had been so far superior that it eventually made Theo salty enough that the games weren’t really fun anymore, and they’d quit. But Mae wanted to remember how Steve later revealed that Jesus sometimes stopped by the bowling alley on Monday nights anyway, just to say hi to the butches.
She wanted to remember the murmur of his voice, the rumble of his laughter through her office wall. She missed the donuts he always brought to the center on Fridays. She missed hearing his thoughts on the Real Housewives of Atlanta.
She built her inventory, and she posted a countdown on social media, and she cried a little.
And then she went home to the dogs.
Half of her wanted to return to the ADU, to at least temporarily forget the days she’d spent in Dell’s bed beside him, but she had to take care of the dogs.
Young adapted to her presence as the apparent new master of the household the best, happily jumping on her thighs each time Mae returned home. Stills was always stoic or sleeping. But Crosby and Nash, the golden retriever and the pittie, whined almost constantly for Dell, in the beginning.
“I know,” she said, every night, wrapping herself around Nash, the one most willing to be hugged. “I know. I miss them, too.”
twenty-seven
While the hospitalhad let Dell sleep on his mother’s shoulder that very first night, they kicked him out the next day. Which Dell had to admit, with guilt, he was okay with. He needed to sleep, and take a shower, and process the fact that when Georgia had finally woken up, shortly after that first visit from Dr. Collins, she hadn’t been able to say Dell’s name. Only a sleepy, surprised smile, followed by, “I—” and then a frown, and a small confused laugh as she attempted to reach a hand to his face, not fully making it there before her trembling fingers fell back to the bed, and then, “You know.”
And then she’d fallen back asleep.
Without much else to do after visiting hours officially ended hours later, Dell returned to his childhood home.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been here.
Michigan, he only fully understood when he walked into Georgia’s kitchen, which still smelled like the lemon dish soap she had used for decades, existed in the Before.
Before the break-in.
