Page 16 of Kylie

“Me, too,” Avery said, her voice not as loud but equally enthusiastic. “Bigger than a tree.”

“Buildings are bigger than trees,” Kade argued.

“No, they’re not.”

“Uh-huh.”

“What about you, Kate?” Gage asked, politely breaking them up.

My attention shifted to Kate, who was slowly gathering up snow into a little yellow bucket. She didn’t answer, so I walked down the steps to join them.

“Kate?”

She turned her head, clearly not having realized I was there. Her brown eyes glistened with what I knew were tears.

“What’s the matter?”

She looked at me, then looked at Gage. “I wanna make a snowmommy.”

My chest tightened, and I had to swallow the knot that had formed in my throat. I looked at Gage, saw his eyes were glassy, too.

“Then let’s do that. Let’s make a snowmommy,” I told her. “What does she look like?”

There was a hitch in her voice when Kate said, “Like Mommy.”

For a second, I thought I might be having a heart attack; my chest constricted so tight, and it was painful to breathe. But I pushed through, wanting to support Kate. The therapist she was still seeing had told us the best thing we could do right now was to be supportive, to show her we were there for her.

“What should I do?” I offered, hoping to distract her.

“We need more snow,” she decided.

“Here!” Kade hopped over to me, passing off his purple shovel. “You can use mine.”

“You can use mine, too, Daddy-O!” Avery said, giving me her blue shovel.

With one in each hand, I squatted down, scooped snow into a pile. Kade and Avery transferred it over, forming it into a ball.

It took some time, but we managed to scrape enough snow from the grass to build a decent-sized snowmommy. And by decent, it topped out at maybe two feet, not quite the building or the tree they’d been going for. When we were finishing up, Kate took off inside, leaving Gage and me to stare after her.

“You think she’s all right?” he whispered.

“I hope so.” I looked at him. “You want to talk to her? Or me?”

Gage passed Maddox over to me. “I’ll do⁠—”

Just then, Kate came racing back outside carrying a handful of things. She stopped at my feet and stared up at us.

“Can we use these?”

I smiled through the tears that formed as I saw the sunglasses Kate was holding. They were Kylie’s favorite pair, the ones we’d bought her for her birthday a few years ago. She was also holding a rainbow-colored scarf. Or what was supposed to be a scarf. It had been Kylie’s attempt at knitting, one she’d done with Kate and Avery. Aside from being long and slender, it didn’t much resemble a scarf, more like a scraggly, skinny attempt at a blanket, but I knew Kylie had worn it on occasion because it made the girls happy.

“Perfect,” Gage said. “You wanna put ’em on?”

The kids worked together to get the glasses and scarf situated. I focused on breathing as I held Maddox.

“She needs arms,” Kade decided, wading over to the row of bushes along the back porch.

After a couple of minutes of deciding and after snapping off a dozen or so twigs, he returned holding two, one twice as long as the other. He passed one to Avery before stabbing his into one side of the snow.