Page 23 of Goodbye Days

I peek around him. Clothes are strewn everywhere. Concert posters cover her walls. Modern music, classical music, new posters, vintage posters. Jesmyn sits at a synthesizer connected to a laptop with a cable. I hear the hushed thumping of keys as she plays with her eyes closed, headphones on. Her face has a beatific expression—so different from her mournful look when last I saw her, which was at the funeral. I regret interrupting. She jumps at the sound of her dad’s voice. She glances over at us and then at her laptop. She hits the space bar, pausing what appears to be a recording program. She pulls off her headphones and sets them on top of her synthesizer.

“Hey, Carver. Sorry, lost track of time.”

“No worries,” I say.

Mr. Holder leans against the wall.

“Seriously, Dad?” Jesmyn says.

“Jes.”

She rolls her eyes. “We’re gonna be up here for like two minutes while I put my shoes on.”

I blush. “I can wait downstairs—”

“No, it’s fine. Carver, it’s a pleasure,” Mr. Holder says. He holds up two fingers to Jesmyn with a cautionary lift of the eyebrows. “Two minutes and I’m coming back up.” He goes downstairs.

Jesmyn rolls her eyes at his back. “Sorry.”

“Dads be daddin’.” I nod at the laptop. “What are you working on?”

She waves it off. “Oh…it’s—I write and record songs. Just a thing I’m trying. Come in. The clock is ticking, apparently.”

I step over a pair of jeans and sit on her bed (the bed Eli used to sit on). “I thought you only played piano.”

“It’s all I do well. Eli said you write.”

“Yeah. Not songs or anything. That’s my dad’s thing. I write short stories and poems and stuff. I want to write a novel someday.”

“He said you were good.”

“I don’t know.”

“You got into Nashville Arts.”

“Yeah.”

Jesmyn walks to her closet. She faces away as she sits and pulls on a pair of socks and her battered brown cowboy boots. This is how I’m used to seeing her (if you can be used to seeing someone you’ve seen maybe seven other times). Not in funeral black. A flowy, white sleeveless blouse and cutoffs. Her fingernails and toenails are painted two white, one black, one white, one black. Piano keys.

It casts a shadow on my heart that these are the circumstances under which I’m watching a beautiful girl ready herself to leave the house with me. In an ordinary existence, this moment would hum with endless possibility. It would be the precise second when the supernova of love is born. Something you tell your grandkids about: I remember when I went to pick up your grandma for our first date. She wasn’t ready yet. I got to see her playing her keyboard for a second or two, looking like a leaf slowly falling; drifting on the wind. She stopped and I sat on her bed and watched her find a pair of clean socks. She grabbed the straps on the sides of her cowboy boots and sat on the floor, pulling them on, leather creaking. Her room smelled like her honeysuckle lotion and some sort of heady incense that smelled both new and ancient to me. I watched her making these everyday movements, and even in such an ordinary moment she was extraordinary.

This moment is a cruel parody of that. It doesn’t belong to me. There’s nothing beginning here. We’re bidding something farewell; laying one more thing to rest.

I hope someday it feels right again to pick up a girl and get ice cream and eat it at a park.

I hope there are beginnings in my future.

I’m tired of burying things.

I’m tired of the liturgies of ending.

We sit in my car outside Jesmyn’s house.

“Do you have something in mind?” Jesmyn sits cross-legged in the passenger seat. Girls are light-years ahead of guys in sitting-on-car-seat innovation.

“Kinda, yeah. You down with Bobbie’s Dairy Dip?”

“Never been.”