“Night, Dad.”
I pulled the door closed, leaving it ajar so a thin line of light from the hallway shone into his room. Then I stood there for a moment, hand still on the knob, and let myself feel the weight of tomorrow.
Flowers.
The cemetery.
Three children with questions I couldn’t always answer.
And me, trying again.
Always trying again.
2
CONRAD
The next morning was so cold, it made Billie furious.
“This is rude,” she said from the back seat, and a glance in the rearview mirror showed me she had her nose pressed to the window. “Spring is supposed to be warm.”
“It’s early spring,” Bianca said, and she had her nose practically buried in her book. “Early spring is transitional.”
Billie turned her head slowly. “What does transitional mean?”
“It means the weather hasn’t committed one way or the other yet,” Bianca explained.
“That’s cowardly.”
CJ, sitting between them with the flowers in his lap, adjusted the damp paper towel around the stems. “Weather has a lot of pressure on it. Everyone’s always asking it to be something.”
“Rain is bad,” Billie declared.
“No,” Bianca corrected. “Plants need rain.”
“The plants need to wait until it’s warmer.”
I kept both hands on the wheel and let them talk, because the alternative was listening to the quiet in the car. The quiet was worse.
That morning, we’d cut the flowers from the side of the property where the old stone wall leaned toward the woods. The pale blooms clustered on thin green stems, stubborn and pretty and impossible to ignore once CJ reminded me they were there. I’d stood there with the scissors in my hand while the kids crouched beside me, and for a moment, I’d expected Jade to yell from the back porch that I was cutting them wrong.
She’d always had opinions about pruning, and the right way to fold a fitted sheet. She had been very opinionated about whether the good colander should go in the dishwasher.
All those small opinions had seemed mildly inconvenient at the time, then, one day, they became sacred because the person who had them was gone.
The cemetery sat behind a small white church twenty minutes from the house, tucked between old trees and a low, iron fence. Jade hadn’t been especially religious, but she’d liked the cemetery. She’d told me that if people had to be buried anywhere, they might as well be somewhere with decent shade and no highway noise.
At the time, I’d told her that was a morbid thing to say over coffee. She’d smiled over the rim of her mug and said being practical wasn’t morbid.
I pulled into the gravel lot and parked beneath a dogwood that had only just started to bloom. For a moment, none of us moved.CJ held the flowers with both hands. Bianca closed her book and slid it into her backpack.
Billie stared out the window with her brows pinched together. “Is Mommy cold?” she asked.
My fingers tightened briefly on the keys.
Bianca answered before I could. “No. Bodies don’t experience temperature after death.”
“Bianca,” CJ said softly.
