People laughed about it now. Uncle Gabriel always asks me if I need a haircut, and everyone laughs.
Except my mother. She has never laughed about it.
One of the things about death that has always bothered me is that people can die in the most unexpected, terrible ways. People can die while completely minding their own business, while being safe and wearing seat belts and helmets and not doing mind-boggling things like skydiving or bungee jumping. People go swimming in ponds and get brain-eating amoebas that kill them days later. Or people are standing in line to order a cup of coffee in a little coffee shop and an eighty-six-year-old who can’t even see over his steering wheel crashes through the doors and runs over everybody inside. Or you get Listeria from a bowl of ice cream. Or, or, or.
The possibilities were endless, and it didn’t matter if you played it safe or not. Here one minute, gone the next.
I pulled the blankets over my head, blocking out the morning sun, attempting to block out the thoughts that were making my heart speed up, my breathing skip.
“Get it together, Lottie,” I whispered into the darkness of my sheets. “You haven’t even gotten out of bed yet.”
It was nine o’clock. Abe was still sleeping, and Mom and Dad were gardening, with matching sunhats and gloves and two glasses of lemonade. I joined them in the backyard with a glass of iced coffee.
“There’s my girl!” Dad said.
“Do you want some blueberries, honey?” Mom asked.
“We’re up to our eyeballs in blueberries!” Dad said, tossing one into the air and catching it on his tongue. He looked very proud of himself.
“Any raspberries?” I asked.
“We are not as up to the eyeballs in raspberries, so you can have just a couple,” Dad said, pointing toward a cereal bowl almost half full of the berries. I sat cross-legged in the grass and ate one at a time, examining each for spiders first. A very disturbing encounter with a spider in a raspberry had scarred me for life. Raspberries were Dad’s favorite; he watched me out of the corner of his eye as I ate.
“Hey, Dad, what are you doing today?”
“Do you mean besides harvesting food to feed my belovedfamilia?”
“Yes, besides that.”
“I was going to see if anything new had been added to Netflix. I haven’t checked in a while.”
“Do you want to go thrifting with me?”
Dad’s faves: raspberries, Netflix (he had recently figured out how to use it, and he was now an unstoppable force to be reckoned with), and thrift stores.
“I think I could arrange a thrifting break,” he said. “What’s the occasion?”
“I need some more ironic T-shirts.”
“I could use—”
“If you buy another used pocket square, Sal, I swear,” Mom said, interrupting him.
“Vintage,” Dad whispered, winking at me. “Give me an hour?”
“I’ll go get ready.”
We left right on time. I drove; our preferred thrift store was about thirty minutes away, just over the Massachusetts border. It was big, and the housewares section was enormous, rows and rows lined with shelves filled with glasses and plates and pots and pans and knickknacks and things I didn’t need and wouldn’t buy but loved to sift through. Dad was in charge of the radio, and he refused to settle on a station for more than a few minutes at a time. He’d be singing along one minute then changing halfway through a song, suddenly bored, looking for something specific that he never articulated.
“Have you read anything interesting lately?” I asked, fishing, wondering if Abe showed themAngelesyet.
“Fascinating little article about the likelihood of a devastating seismic event on the West Coast.”
So, no. Abe was probably waiting until today to show them.
“How about you, Lottie-da? How are you doing lately?”
Good. Fine. Terrible. Sometimes I woke up in the middle of the night, convinced the normal darkness of my room was a coffin. Sometimes I read the obituaries in the morning paper and googled things like most unusual deaths and weirdest deaths and worst ways to die and accidental deaths. I’d come across a Rilo Kiley song that way, something upbeat and positive but really dark and uncomfortable, and I’d listened to it twelve times in a row one night, falling asleep with the words still crawling across my ceiling.
