“I’ll need your muscles, if that’s okay,” I say.
He follows me back up the stairs to Mel’s real room, the master bedroom she used to sleep in. It’s a hundred times warmer than the guest room. The comforter is white, with splashes of colorful paint. There are pictures all over the room of Rowan, Luke, Sydney, Naomi, and even me. Pictures from Mel’s time in Hungary during college. There are clothes she doesn’t use anymore. A bunch of them are too big now, but I decide we’ll take them anyway. Sometimes the most important thing about certain clothes isn’t physically wearing them; it’s seeing them and remembering who you were in them, where you wore them, who you kissed.
I know I’m shameless now in the white skinny jeans that I love, the ones I was wearing when I kissed Luke that first night. I saw him notice them when he opened the door for me tonight, his eyes roaming the length of me and then trying to act like he hadn’t noticed. I didn’t wear them for his reaction; I wore them because this weekend has been crappy and I felt like putting on jeans that reminded me of something good.
“Okay, so I don’t know if this rug will fit in there,” I tell Luke.
He does some mental math and decides it’s worth a try. So we spend the next half hour shuffling this giant accent rug out from under Mel’s old king-size bed, rolling it up, transporting it down the stairs, and lifting everything off the floor in the guest room to see if it will fit.
“It takes up nearly the whole room,” I say, biting my lip as I try to figure out what to do. “Should we take it back upstairs?”
“Seriously? We could have made a trip to IKEA and been back by now,” Luke complains, but I can tell he doesn’t mind.
“The whole point is that it has to be stuff she owns that we bring in here,” I say. “I just wish it fit.”
He crouches down and starts to roll up the rug, when I change my mind again.
“Hold on, maybe we can make it work.”
He sighs. “I’m guessing we should cross interior decorator off your future careers list?”
“Rude,” I say as I lead the way back up the stairs to Mel’s old room.
I pile her clothes into some plastic storage containers while Luke collects pictures and knickknacks from around her room. We don’t take everything downstairs, but we try to take everything we know she likes or misses.
“Thanks for doing this,” Luke says as he hangs up a picture of the three of them plus Sydney.
I shrug. “She’d do the same for me.”
And it’s true. Shediddo the same for me.
The point of this is to take this sterile room that represents her sickness and make it into home for her. Make it a place she enjoys coming to, where she feels like herself, where she has good memories. Just like she did for me.
It takes a couple of hours, but soon we are standing in a room that doesn’t quite look like Mel’s old room—it’s certainly not as big—but isn’t quite a dying woman’s room either.
I take a moment to pretend to survey my handiwork, but really I’m saying goodbye to my memories of Mel. Her favorite brown sweater. Her purple house shoes. Her matching purple robe that is almost as ratty as the pajamas I was wearing when Luke came to visit me this morning.
After I come back tomorrow night to tell her the truth, Mel will never welcome me into this house again. I won’t have a right to these memories, to her hospitality, to her love.
Luke is watching me look at the room, and he rubs his neck once he’s caught. “We still have some cupcakes from last week,” he says. “If you’re up for it.”
“I should probably get going,” I say. Now that we’re done with the masquerade, he doesn’t have to pretend to be nice to me anymore. He doesn’t have to treat me like someone who matters. Not like his girlfriend or his ex-girlfriend or his sister or his brother’s best friend. I’m “a girl” as far as he is concerned. Or I should be, anyway.
“Mom’s not holding down her end of things, in terms of eating them. I’m only one man,” he says with a crooked smile.
“One,” I concede. “I’ll have one.”
“Coming right up.”
I follow him into the kitchen, my bag still on my shoulder, my keys in hand. I watch as he pulls out a full container of cupcakes.
“You weren’t lying,” I say as he offers me one, then pours us both glasses of lemonade.
He shakes his head and takes a bite. “It’s pretty sad when you have nearly a dozen cupcakes in a house and no one to eat them.”
I know it’s not intentional on his part, but sadness creeps into the space between us. Once, these cupcakes wouldn’t have lasted more than a day. Once, Ro and Mel and even Luke occupied space in this house.Ioccupied space in this house.
“J.J.—” Luke says, drawing me out of my thoughts. I startle, not just at the name, but at the way he says it. Like we are the old Luke and the old Jessi. He says it like it’s the summer he loved me again, the best part of it and not the worst.
