Nina had loved that about him. Sometimes, she also found it maddening because she was a thinker. She needed to weigh things and turn them over in her mind fifteen times before committing.
David used to make fun of her about it.
“You’re going to think yourself out of your own life, mi amor.”
He had been right about that, too.
She sipped on her coffee and watched the marsh. The tide was coming in, so the water was creeping up over the mud in a slow, inevitable way, turning the flat brown landscape into something alive.
A heron stood on one leg near the dock, patient as a saint. Fiddler crabs scuttled around the waterline.
Edisto was beautiful. Nina knew it was beautiful, but right now she couldn’t feel it. The only thing she ever felt was sadness, like a heavy weight around her shoulders, pulling her down ever so slowly.
That was the thing about grief that nobody explained to you. It did not just take the person. It took the ability to experience the world as you used to.
All the colors of the rainbow were dimmer. Food tasted like nothing. Music was just background noise.
Their beloved marsh was just water, mud, and birds when it had been the most beautiful place she had ever seen.
Now it was just the place where David was not.
“Mom?”
Nina turned, a bit startled out of her memories.
Lucia was standing in the kitchen doorway, wearing an oversized Mickey Mouse T-shirt and shorts, her dark hair in the kind of knot that suggested she had slept on it wet and was not planning to fix it. Young people could get away with things like that. If she’d done it as a fifty-year-old woman, she’d look like a bridge troll.
She had David’s eyes. She had his dark brown, almost black eyes with lashes so thick they looked fake. Sometimes it made Nina feel jealous. Oh, to be young again.
Every time she looked at her daughter, she saw his face, and it was both the greatest comfort and the worst pain of her life.
“Morning, baby. There’s coffee.”
“I don’t drink coffee. I’m sixteen.” Lucia stared at her like she’d lost her mind.
“Oh. Well, I was drinking coffee at fourteen.”
“Grandma says you were drinking milk with a splash of coffee in it at twelve.”
“Yeah, well, Grandma exaggerates.”
“Grandma says that you say that every single time.”
Nina rarely saw her mother these days, since her mother now lived in Washington State with her new husband, Jerry. They liked to travel the country in their motorhome, but they rarely made time to come see Nina and Lucia. Maybe it was because Nina was too much now, with all her grief and sadness. Too much of a downer, she supposed.
Lucia opened the refrigerator and stood in front of it the way all teenagers do, like staring at it long enough might cause something more desirable to materialize. Maybe a pizza or a dozen doughnuts.
She finally shut it, holding a cup of yogurt and a look of resignation, like she was going to eat it as her last meal.
“We need groceries,” she said.
“I know,” Nina said.
“No, like we actually need them. Not, ‘oh, we’re just low on a few things.’ The freezer is literally full of ice and three frozen waffles. That’s it. That’s all we have.”
“Okay, I’ll go today.”
“Well, you said that on Thursday.”
