Page 66 of Keep Me

“Okay,” I said back.

My phone buzzed against the cushion. I looked down.

Finn: Sir Reginald has learned to open the bathroom cabinet. I’m in crisis. Also, he ate my good pen, and I am not okay about this.

Attached was a video of a small white dog sitting surrounded with what appeared to be the entire contents of a medicine cabinet, wearing the expression of an animal who had accomplished something important.

I laughed. Properly. The kind that came from somewhere that hadn’t been active in a while. I typed back three words: send help immediately.

He sent back a single thumb-up, followed by: I’m handling it wrong and I know it.

That was it. The whole exchange. Just a string of words and a video of a dog. Finn, who had never once asked what happened to me. Who had seen me sitting alone on a metal chair, with my sad eyes that I seem to not be able to shed, and had offered me a coffee, sat beside me in the library, talked about his lab schedule and seemed to find that sufficient. Who had called because I sent him four words about my father dying and he had not let the silence just sit there. Who did not know about Jax, or Henry, or the letter, or any of the architecture underneath my life. He just knew I sometimes looked sad and I just knew that he had a dog with a name too large for his body.

I existed to Finn without the bad things. Without my sad, tragic story. I still existed. I realized suddenly that now there was a version of me, in Finn’s reality, who did not have to carry those things everywhere. I set the phone down.

“Who was that?” Zane asked.

“Finn,” I said. “The dog chewed a pen, but he’s okay.”

Zane nodded like this was a reasonable update. “Good.”

I looked out the kitchen window. The hydrangeas needed cutting back. The porch railing had a split in the wood that had been there since I was twelve. The hook hung empty because I had brought the feeder inside to wash it yesterday and had not put it back yet.

“Zane,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Today is my parents’ anniversary.” A small silence. “I’ve never told anyone that before,” I said. “I’ve marked it every year in my mind and never said it out loud to a single person.” I looked at the hook. “I want to bring flowers to the cemetery. I want to go see them. It’s their first anniversary together in eighteen years.”

He did not ask any of the things he could have asked. He didn’t say are you sure, or is that a good idea, or maybe we should wait. He just said, “okay. We will go.”

He had his jacket on twenty minutes later. Austin called while Zane was locking up, and before I’d even finished telling him where we were going, he said, “I’m already at Blair’s, we’ll meet you there.” Cassidy texted five minutes after that, I heard, O and Gavin are coming. No one asked whether they should. They just showed up in the way they always did, which was without waiting to be invited, because at some point along the way I had become someone with a circle rather than a perimeter, and the circle knew how to move.

I put the feeder back on the hook before we left. I did not want it to be empty when we came home.

The cemetery was different in company. The only person I had ever really shared it with was Henry. I did not want to think too much about that in this moment. The gate had always been a thing I passed through by myself, into a place that belonged to me and the dead and no one living. Today there were five cars in the gravel lot and a group of people I loved standing near the gate in the June light, waiting for me to lead them in, and the graveyard did not know how to be both private and shared at once. Neither did I.

I carried the flowers. White hydrangeas from the yard, because they had been my mother’s, a fact I knew the way I knew the feeder recipe, from a father who told me things sideways and never straight.

“We’ll be here,” Zane said at the gate. He understood without being told, which was the thing he had always done best. The others hung back with him. Nobody followed me. They just let me go down the path alone the way I had gone down it ten thousand times and stood at the entrance holding the boundary of my grief so I could step past it by myself.

I walked the route my body knew. Past the old rows, where the ground had gone quiet. To the angel.

She was the same. She was always the same. Stuck in the middle of the gray stone headstones. My mom, the way I had always known her. And beside her now, no longer raw, the dirt settled and seeded and starting to green over, a second stone. His. My dad. I did not know him like this, and he felt like a stranger.

Thomas Garcia. The dates. Loving husband and father. Nothing else, because he had arranged even this in advance, and a man who spoke in logistics does not search for meaning on his own gravestone. I knelt between them.

I hated the dates. Like I said, I knew my mother’s grave by memory, and I had learned her dates before I could read. His dates seemed wrong.

He should have been a sunset in August.

That is what kept arriving in me. An August sky does not rush you. It stretches its gold across the whole evening like it has nowhere better to be, and by the time it finally lets go, you are already at the sink with the dishes, already halfway to bed, already ready. Nobody startles at an August sunset. You wait for it. You expect it.

He went with our hugs only halfway given, and my lease still eleven months from needing renewal and the walk across the stage at graduation that I hadn’t taken yet, before any of it was finished, the way the sky sometimes goes dark at four in the afternoon in the wrong season, and nobody has started dinner, nobody has folded the laundry, the kids are still outside chasing the last of the light because they don’t know yet that the day is already over.

I was not ready. Small and useless, a thing to say about a death. It kept arriving in me anyway. He should have been a sunset in August.

He was a winter dusk instead. The clock rewound against everyone’s will. The sky doing something it was not supposed to do yet, painting itself too soon, too fast, in colors I used to love and could not look at anymore, because now they only meant one thing. He should have been a sunset in August.