He was so used to pushing Portland to the background, to the Before. He hadn’t thought he’d done the same to the UP. He thought about it all the time.
But maybe he only really thought about Georgia.
About getting Georgia out of here. To join him, in his After.
The house was so much the same as it had always been, the photographs and the blankets and the paintings on the wall a brazen declaration of Before, that Dell stood in the living room for a good ten minutes, staring at Georgia’s handmade vases on the mantle above the fireplace, unable to move.
Eventually, his skin itched, and he remembered the need to bathe.
He dropped the duffel bag he’d haphazardly packed back in Oregon onto his old bed in his old bedroom upstairs. He’d told Georgia, countless times, that she could make it into something else: another studio for whatever artform she was practicing at the time; an exercise room. She scoffed each time.
“But where would you sleep when you come visit?”
He had to admit, begrudgingly, that he was grateful for her stubbornness at this precise moment. Their old couch would wreck his back, and no way was he sleeping in his mother’s bed while she slept at a hospital.
He flicked on the light in the bathroom. And frowned.
And god, heknew. HeknewGeorgia had spent months remodeling this bathroom, two years ago now, at least. She’d talked about it throughout the whole process. He shouldn’t have been surprised.
But this. This wasn’t part of his Before.
This was Georgia’s After.
And he didn’t like that, either.
He didn’t like that at all.
* * *
After a week, Dell grew tired of eating out. As in Greyfin Bay, there weren’t necessarily a lot of culinary options here to begin with. And so even though he didn’t want…to settle in here—and nothing felt more like settling in than grocery shopping—he found himself at the IGA. An IGA that wasn’t owned by Liv. An IGA where his mother had had a stroke.
He unloaded the bags in Georgia’s kitchen, added his new purchases alongside Georgia’s staples; everything was in the same place, every cabinet as he remembered. He was too tired at the end to make anything but spaghetti.
And as he sat alone at his old kitchen table, the spaghetti tasted so good he almost cried.
And then he let himself stop trying so hard.
He wanted Georgia to be better.
He wanted to see her dip her fully functioning toes into the Pacific.
He didn’t know how to be here anymore.
He ate and he cried and he fell asleep in a bed that had been too small for him for a long time, wishing for the heat of Mae Kellerman at his back, Crosby at his feet.
* * *
By the second week, Georgia still wasn’t able to eat solid food or walk without assistance, but her speech was improving.
“Go,” she said, irritated, flapping a hand at Dell. “See friends.”
Dell stared at her blankly.
“Mom,” he eventually mustered. “I?—”
“Baseball,” Georgia interrupted, even more irritated. And then, light entering her eyes, as it did when she remembered something, when the word traveled correctly from her recovering brain to her lips: “Chris.” And shooing her hand again, back to irritated: “Go.”
So. Feeling more like a child than he had in years, Dell set out to find Chris, and maybe Waylon, some of his best friends from high school, old baseball teammates, whom he hadn’t talked to in well over a decade.
