“Y’all ready?” he said.
They nodded.
He walked back over to me. “This won’t be but a couple hours. Take whatever you need from the kitchen. Zaria likes the?—”
“I know what Zaria likes.” I bounced her on my hip. “Go on. We’ll be here.”
He leaned down and kissed my forehead. “Thank you.” Then they left.
The boys disappeared into video games. Zaria toddled around the living room laying claim to everything she could reach. I kept checking my phone anyway, for nothing, wondering whether driving out to your mother’s grave got easier over eighteen years or just quieter.
When they came back, I knew right away something was off.
Not in an obvious way. Simone was talking low with Zion. Tre wason his phone, ordinary. But Julian was moving too careful. “How are you?” I asked when he sat down beside me.
“Fine.” Clipped. “Good that they got time with her.”
They. Not we.
He pulled Zaria up into his lap, and his free hand kept opening and closing against his thigh.
Later, while he was upstairs changing, I was wiping down the kitchen when Simone lingered.
“How was it?” I asked. “Out there.”
“Hard. It’s always hard.” She paused like she was thinking. “Can I tell you something I probably shouldn’t?”
“Um. Sure.”
“Julian doesn’t come to the grave.” She said it to the sink, not to me. “He drives us out there every year, and he parks in the same spot, and he stands by the car. We walk out to Mama’s headstone, and he stays back. Forty, fifty yards. Hands in his pockets. Watches us like his role is just to be driver.”
I didn’t say anything. I was afraid if I did she’d stop.
“When we were younger we’d beg him.Come up with us, Julian.” She sighed. “He always had a reason. Year after year. He says the same four words,y’all go ahead. And on the walk back you can watch him put his face away, piece by piece, so that by the time we reach him he’s already fine. He’s already asking who wants lunch.”
She finally looked at me.
“He gets us to her. Every birthday. He just never himself. Eighteen years, and I have never seen my brother standing at our mother’s headstone.” She sniffled. “I don’t know why I’m telling you. It just felt like you ought to know what kind of day this really is for him. Since y’all are together now. Because he won’t tell you. He’ll tell you it was fine.”
She wiped her eyes and started putting dishes away, and I stood there holding a dish towel I’d stopped using, putting the whole day back together in a different order.
Thethey, not we.
I’d spent the morning telling myself I wasn’t close enough to him to stand at that grave. I wasn’t a spouse. But there was no standing at that grave. He didn’t go himself. I hadn’t been left at the house because I was too far from his center. I’d been left at the house because the place I thought I wasn’t allowed into was a place he had not allowed himself into.
* **
That evening he seemed back to his normal self. But I kept catching the way he ran every conversation toward somebody else and away from himself, so smooth you’d miss it if you weren’t watching. I was watching now.
We were laid out on the couch doing nothing really. His phone in one hand, the other rubbing my leg, when I realized his screen was blank and he was staring at nothing.
“Julian.”
He blinked back into the room. “Yeah?”
“You okay?”
“Just tired. Long day.”
