“No it’s not! Smiles make everyone’s eyes crinkle.”
“Not yours. Your cocky smile is all teeth. Your fake smile is all eyes. Yourrealsmile is your whole face.”
“Wow. How muchhaveyou studied me?” My mouth spreads, and I realize she’s right: my cocky smileisall teeth.
She swats my abs. “Coop. Be real.”
Bruce is busy dumping a box of “Shreddies” into a huge metal mixing bowl, and he doesn’t seem concerned with what we’re doing. I’m not sure if it’s an act or if our chat really did change things for him the way it did for me. Regardless, I don’t need an audience.
I pull Liesel back a few feet into the mudroom and sit on the bench. I tug her down to sit on my lap, and she puts her arms around my neck.
“I’m thinking about my parents. It’s hard imagining my mom cooped up in the house on Christmas without me.”
“Cooped up without the Coop,” she says with a wry smile.
“Yeah,” I breathe. “I don’t know. Part of me wants to call Nate again and see if we can bend heaven and earth to make it to her. But the other part of me is …” I shake my head. “Resigned. But also tired. I would never ask her to push herself into a panic attack, but it’s hard. It’s been hard for a long time.” I rest my head on her shoulder. “I’ve already accepted all of this. Why is it resurfacing now?”
She runs her hand through my hair, and the sensation makes me shiver. “It sounds like you need to let yourself mourn.”
I shift my hands on her lower back. “What’s to mourn? My mom’s alive. I can see her in a few days.”
“Maybe that’s not the right word, because you’re so accepting. The stories you’ve told me make it sound like you went straight from being left in a parking lot to seeing your mom in the car and promising yourself you’d never be the reason she cried again. You jumped straight to acceptance, but you never let yourself process the other steps of grief.” She looks at her hand in my hair rather than my eyes, almost like she’s trying to let me process her words without an audience.
I’ve never processedanythingwithout an audience.
“Mourning the loss of expectations doesn’t mean you don’t love your mom, only that you’re acknowledging that this wasn’tthe way you thought things would go. It’s not a betrayal of her. It’s letting go of what might have been so you can better accept what is.”
I don’t know how I feel about what she’s saying. She kisses my forehead, and I close my eyes and melt into the feeling. Then she hops off of my lap, throws on a coat, and stomps into some boots.
I look at her quizzically.
“Come with me,” she says.
We’re standing outside in her large, winter wonderland of a backyard. Fat snowflakes fall lazily from the sky, and the world has gone quiet in that way only thick blankets of snow can accomplish. We’ve passed the gazebo and have stepped into a small copse of naked oak and willow trees. Liesel and I are holding hands in front of a willow tree. Its skinny tendril-like branches dangle down on us, tickling our faces.
She puts an arm around my waist and leans into me.
“What are we looking at?” I ask.
“Do you see the trunk?”
I look at the gray bark with its deep cracks and peeling strips. And then Liesel points out a part of the trunk that has been gouged out. “Yikes. It looks like someone took an axe to it.”
“Because they did. Lucas got in trouble for something he said to a teacher at school when we were nine or ten. He got really upset about it, took my dad’s axe out of his toolbox, and started wailing on the tree because he knew how much my mom loved it. The tree was a lot smaller then, and when Mom saw him through the kitchen window, she flipped. She ran out, took the axe, and grounded him. She was afraid he’d just killed the tree.”
“It’s a massive gouge. I’m surprised hedidn’t.”
“I know.”
I kiss her forehead through her beanie. “What are you getting at here, Liese?”
“I’m a stats nerd. I have no idea what I’m getting at. But it feels significant, doesn’t it?”
“The tree isn’t mad at your brothers. It accepts what happened, marshaled its little tree resources, and moved on.”
“Yeah. That’s one of way of looking at it.”
“What’s the other?”
