Page 66 of After His Eulogy
“Okay?”
“Okay. Griffin. I will let you tell me what you want to tell me, when you want to tell me. I am not going to push. I just want you to know that I am here. If you want to tell me anything. About the seminar or about anything. I am here.”
“I know.”
“Okay.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me.”
I almost laugh. I almost laugh because she has said the thing I have been saying. She has said the thing Reed has been saying. The people I love all say don’t thank me. I close my eyes.
“How are you,” I say.
“I’m fine. The kids are fine. Marcus has a thing with his shoulder, physical therapy. Lila started a chess club at school, did I tell you that?”
“You did not.”
“She is the only girl. She does not care.”
“Of course she doesn’t.”
“She told her teacher that if more girls wanted to play chess they would be here, and the fact that they aren’t here is not my problem. Eight years old.”
“Jesus.”
“I know.”
“Sara, that is…“
“I know. Yeah.”
We talk about Lila for ten minutes. About Marcus’s shoulder. About Sara’s job. She has gotten a new client, a regional bank,the work is boring but the money is good. About whether she’s going to take their mother to the place in Door County in July like they did three summers ago. About whether their mother has gotten worse. A little, Sara says, not a lot. She still knows me. She doesn’t always know what day it is. We don’t talk about me. I let her talk. I let her tell me about her life in the level of detail she would tell me if nothing were happening, which is to say in a lot of detail, because Sara is a detailed person. I let her talk for forty minutes. When she is done she says, “Okay. I have a meeting at three. I should go.”
“Okay.”
“Griffin.”
“Yeah.”
“Call me next week.”
“Okay.”
“I mean it. Next week. I am not going to wait three. Next week.”
“Okay.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, Sara.”
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
She hangs up. I sit on the couch with the phone. I cry. I cry hard, the way you cry when something has gone past the place where the body can hold it. I cry alone in my apartment on a Monday afternoon because I have just had what might be one of the last normal phone calls I will ever have with my sister, and she does not know it. She does not know it and she will never know it. If I go, the next call I have with her, or the one after that, or the one after that, will be the last one. And she will not know. And after the last one I will go, and she will get a phone call from somebody, from a stranger, or from a parent, or from an officer, or from whoever Mendez assigns to make the call, and she willbe told that something has happened to me. She will hang up the phone and she will sit at her kitchen table in Chicago and she will start grieving. She will grieve a person who is alive in a town she has never heard of, doing dishes with the man he loves. She will grieve me the way I grieved Reed.
