Page 32 of From the Embers
I hadn’t done any pushups in the yard; therefore, had no damn clue what she was talking about. But there were more pressing parts of her statement that required my attention.
“Whoa, hold up.” I set Luna on her feet. “I thought you were going to let me take care of that.”
“Yeah, but it’s four o’clock.”
“And?” I drawled, clearly confused.
It had only been a matter of time before this happened. I just wasn’t expecting it that day.
Then again, I’d once read in a book that there is no true timeline for grief. It was always one step forward, two weeks wallowing and cussing the universe back. But, with time, the good days had begun to outweigh the bad.
For over thirteen months after the fire, Rob’s belongings had sat untouched. His coat hung on the rack next to the door, his clothes filled the closet, and his precious convertible collected dust in the garage. Bree and I had talked about her packing up his stuff multiple times, but she’d yet to follow through.
I couldn’t blame her; I still wore my wedding ring because taking it off felt like betrayal.
However, that week, something had been going on with Bree. She’d been quieter than usual, keeping to herself.
At first, I’d thought I’d done something to piss her off because if I entered a room, she made every excuse to leave. She never missed one of our nightly chats by the firepit though, even if those were weird too. Either she avoided eye contact altogether or I’d catch her staring at me from the corner of my eye.
That’s not to mention her reaction when Madison and Asher plotted a sneak tickle attack on her. My job was to pin her arms above her head, just as it had been over a dozen times before. Her face had turned shades of red I didn’t know human flesh was capable of that day. She avoided me like the plague for the rest of the afternoon, only forgiving me when I snuck three red M&M’s into her napkin at dinner.
However, on Friday when she’d gotten home from work, Bree slipped into a pair of purple pajama pants and a matching tank top and then started sorting Rob’s things. Armed with a system of keep, donate, and trash, she refused to let me help other than entertaining the kids and occasionally carrying things down the stairs or up to the attic after they’d been properly boxed for storage.
The helplessness I felt as I paced outside her bedroom door while listening to her broken sobs damn near destroyed me. I’d gotten used to being a team, but that wasn’t a goodbye we needed to say together. After the kids went to sleep, I knocked to let her know I was headed back to the pool house. Much to my surprise and staggering relief, she patted the spot of carpet next to her and asked me to stay for a while.
With two video baby monitors humming in the background, we sat on the rug in her room, laughing over Rob’s and my old yearbooks for hours. The literal and figurative closet cleaning wasn’t limited to just her husband, either. She found pictures of her and Jessica from long before I had known either of them. There were birthday cards in Jessica’s handwriting, a few scarves, and even a small pair of gold stud earrings she’d borrowed from my wife and thankfully never returned. No matter how small or inexpensive, they immediately became family treasures I could pass down to our daughter.
It was well past three in the morning before I headed back to my place, carrying a basket full of not only Jessica’s stuff but also Rob’s favorite T-shirts, the Rolex Bree insisted he would have wanted me to have, and a shoe box of ticket stubs and fliers from my shows that I had no idea he’d collected.
But most of all, by the time we said our goodnights, a weight we had no idea we’d been carrying was suddenly lifted from both of our shoulders. It was almost like we had been too afraid of letting ourselves remember the two people we’d lost out loud sometimes, but that night—after purging memory after memory along with tangible stuff—there was a lot less pain and a lot more peace than I’d ever expected.
As bleak and sad as it probably could have been, after spending that time laughing and basically shooting the shit, carefree into the night, I found myself feeling so lucky I still had Bree. And even luckier that I got to be the one who was there for her.
Saturday was much of the same, though as the house emptied of Rob’s belongings, so did the light in Bree’s eyes. It had been a silent Saturday night around the firepit, and her one glass of wine gradually turned into a bottle. However, first thing Sunday morning, she was back at it—hungover as hell and full steam ahead.
