Page 102 of Every Almost

Charlie wanted to argue. She wanted to say she'd find a way, that she'd talk to her boss, that she could handle it from California. But Katie's face held the same thing she'd been seeing for twenty-three years; the quiet, stubborn certainty of a person who had already decided. It was the same face Charlie made. It was the same face Helen had made.

"Okay," Charlie said.

"Okay," Katie said.

Charlie boughta plane ticket that would fly her back to California the next day. She packed the brown box of letters in her carry-on, wrapped up in one of Helen's dish towels. She couldn't leave them in Shelbyville, even if Charlie couldn't bring herself to open them yet.

When Katie dropped her off at the Indianapolis Airport, they held one another for a long time.

"You call me, okay? If anything goes wrong, I'll help or I'll jump on a plane to come out and we can fix it together." Charlie held her sister even while she huffed.

"I promise it'll be okay, Charlie."

"Humor me then, at least." They broke apart and Katie smiled at her.

"Okay. I promise to call you if anything goes wrong and I need my superhero sister to fly in and save the day." Charlie raised an eyebrow. "Does that suffice for you?" Katie smirked.

"It'll do."

Katie laughed and Charlie grinned. But she went in for another hug, and felt her heart constrict in her chest. Katie must have felt Charlie's change because she pulled Charlie tighter. "I'm going to be okay."

"I know," Charlie said, a tilt to her words at her adopting Katie's line. Katie laughed lightly against her.

"Call me when you get home?" Katie asked as they parted for the last time.

"Promise."

"I love you."

"I love you, too, Kit-Kat."

"More than anything?"

"More than the moon and the stars and the planets combined." Katie smiled at that as Charlie grabbed her bags and began to walk away. She blew Katie a kiss and then turned around to finish the walk to her gate, hiding tears before Katie could see them. This time, she didn't want her sister to see how much she was going to miss her.

Katie needed to stay, and Charlie wasn't going to do anything to stand in her way.

? PASADENA, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES?

December was the coldest month of Charlie's life, and California doesn't get cold.

She went to work. She came home. She called Katie every night. She played all the mixtapes, and she playedRumourson the turntable, but "Songbird" sounded different now. Emptier, like the piano was playing in a room where someone had just left. She played it anyway, because the alternative was silence, and silence was worse.

A few days before Christmas, a package arrived from Shelbyville. Inside was a cassette tape in a hand-decorated case. This time there were drawings of rovers, satellites, and the moon's surface, similar to the doodles Katie had been drawing on them since she was twelve years old. Their tradition.

Every year since Charlie left for Caltech, Katie had made her a mixtape for Christmas of their "best of" collection of the songs they'd loved that year. It always had the ones they'd played in the apartment and the car and the kitchen while cooking. Eleven tapes over eleven years, and Katie had never missed one. Not even this year, with Helen gone and an estate to manage and two thousand miles between them. She'd mailed it early so it would arrive before Christmas.

Charlie held the tape gently in her hands, smiling at the drawings and the songs picked for this year's roundup. Then she put it in the Walkman and pressed play.

She spent Christmas Eve alone in the apartment. She made chicken piccata from Helen's recipe and ate it at the table byherself. She opened a bottle of wine and drank one glass before she poured the rest down the sink.

Later on, Katie called her that night, and they talked for two hours about nothing, laughing and goofing off and just enjoying each other's company when they were both feeling lonely across such a vast distance. It was one of the best conversations Charlie ever had with Katie.

That Christmas Eve night, after they hung up, Charlie pulled the brown box of letters out of the closet by the front door. She'd stored it there to keep safe, but also so she could look for it when she was ready. She wasn't sure if she was ready yet, but she sat on the floor of the living room anyway and opened the box.

She ended up not reading them. Not yet. Turns out, she wasn't ready. But she did look through them. She touched Frank's careful handwriting on some envelopes, traced Helen's elegant script on others. All of them were yellowed with age and soft at the edges from decades in the box. She held up one of Frank's to her nose and tried to see if she could still smell pipe tobacco. Instead, all the letters smelled of their home.

After looking through the entire box, Charlie selected five of Frank's letters and five of Helen's, completely at random. She didn't choose them for any reason she could articulate. All she felt was they were just the ones her hands reached for, the ones that felt like they belonged with her. She wrapped a rubber band around the bundle and placed them in her work bag, alongside the Walkman, all twelve of Katie's mixtapes, the eleven Christmas tapes plus the original she'd pressed into Charlie's hand the morning she left for Caltech, and then her copy ofRumoursand other albums she felt were necessary to keep with her at all times. These were the things she carried every day.