“Yeah. Usually at night when no one’s around.” He stares at the grave. “I talk to her. Tell her stuff I can’t tell anyone else. It’s stupid.”
“It’s not stupid.”
“I mean, I know she can’t hear me. I know she’s just… here in spirit. But it helps. I feel closer to her.” He glances at me. “Does that make me crazy?”
“If it does, we’re both crazy,” I say.
A faraway smile lifts his lips. “I was so young when she died.I hate that I can’t remember everything about her. I feel like visiting keeps me close to her.”
We sit in silence for a while. The sun keeps sinking, the sky deepening to a dark blue.
“She missed a lot,” Gavin says. “Watching us grow up. Cillian opening the bar. Wolfe becoming a genius. You starting your business.” He pauses, a glimmer in his eyes. “And, of course, me being a fuckup.”
“You’re not a fuckup. Not a total fuckup, anyway.”
“But I’m a little bit of a fuckup.”
“Can’t argue that.”
He shoves my shoulder. I shove back. For a second, we’re just brothers again. Not Molloys. Not pawns in Dad’s game. Just two guys sitting at their mother’s grave, missing her.
“Do you still use them?” I ask. “The breathing tricks. The grounding stuff.”
He knows what I’m talking about. The techniques I taught him after Mom died. He was ten years old and falling apart, waking up screaming every night, and I was seventeen and trying to hold everything and everyone together.
“Sometimes.” He stares at the ground. “When it gets bad. The counting thing mostly. Five things I can see, four things I can hear. You know.”
“Good. That’s good.”
“Wolfe uses them, too. I’ve seen him do it when Dad’s being…” He trails off.
“An asshole?”
“I was gonna say ‘particularly psychotic,’ but sure.”
I almost laugh.Almost.
“She taught me that stuff, you know,” I say. “Mom. The breathing techniques. She had anxiety. Never talked about it, but I saw her do it sometimes when things got tense with Dad.”
Gavin looks at me. “I didn’t know that.”
“There’s a lot you didn’t know. You were young.”
“Tell me more. Something new.”
“Mom had a garden behind the house before Dad paved it over for that stupid ass tennis court nobody uses. We used to pick tomatoes together. There were so many, she couldn’t give them away.” My lips curl upward. “I loved her laugh, too. It was real and loud, like a full-on belly laugh. It cracked me up.”
“I remember it but only because of the videos I’ve seen,” he says. “I fucking hate that. I want to remember on my own.”
“Hey, remembering is remembering. If you need a little help from a picture or a video, that’s not a bad thing. Don’t beat yourself up over that.”
He gives a half-shrug. “I guess.”
“And she had such a sweet tooth.”
“Like you,” Gavin says.
“Yeah. And we both loved mint chocolate chip ice cream. Sometimes when I came home after you guys were all in bed, I’d find her in the kitchen eating a bowl of it. She always put one out for me, too.”
