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I ignore her, because if we go down this rabbit hole, I get my stubbornness from her and she gets it from my grandma. “I’m not ready.”
“You’re never going to be ready unless I force you to be.”
It’s been no time at all in the grand scheme of things. I’m allowed to grieve, even Holden said so. “Why am I here? I have other things I need to deal with.”
“Go to your room.”
“Excuse me?”
“Just go,” she says, pointing to the stairs.
She follows me up and into “my” room. There’s a sheet on the ground, paint cans and brushes on top.
“Let’s get to work,” she says, offering me a smock stiff with paint splotches—one of my grandma’s. I haven’t seen it in months. There’s a little handprint on the bottom left side from when I “helped” her one day.
“What?”
“We’re painting your wall.”
“I told you earlier, I’m not in the mood for manual labor.” I watch as she throws on her own smock, one I’ve never seen before. “You might have noticed the complete emotional breakdown I’m having? Maybe?”
“And I said we need something mind-numbing. That sounds like cleaning or painting to me.” She starts prying at the lid of the paint can. “I figured you’d prefer painting over cleaning.”
“Painting isnotmind-numbing.” I think about all the lectures my grandma gave about freeing your artistic spirit and leaning into your passions. All that fluffy bullshit seems to have skipped over my mom and landed squarely in me.
“Well, this kind is.”
I step up next to her as she pops the lid off, revealing bright teal paint, the same color as my three un-muraled walls at home. She pours it into the plastic roller tray and offers me a fresh roller brush.
“Nothing better for an emotional breakdown than the ability to just turn everything off for a moment.”
I accept the brush silently.
“Now’s the time to tell me if you want something special on it, or some kind of design that requires painter’s tape.”
I shake my head. Plain walls will have to do; I’m not sure I’d even want the hellscape I’d be stuck with if my mother and I attempted something else. It would definitely never compare to what my grandma could do. Besides, I can’t make any decisions right now. My life has turned into one mistake after the otherand they’re rolling down the hill, picking up each other and speed, until they crash at the bottom and pin me against more of my problems.
“Why are you doing this?” I dip the roller into the paint and start on the opposite side of the wall from her. “And don’t give me a sugary answer, please.”
“It’s a nice, relaxing distraction. It’s productive. It’s—” She shrugs. “It’s really the only thing I could think of to help you right now.” She smiles sadly. “Grandma was the one with the answers.”
“She was.”
“And yet,” she says with the hint of a laugh, “I’m not sure she’d even know where to start with all of this. You really did get yourself into a mess with this one.”
I replenish the paint. “I just want to be able to have them both. They were both mine before they were anything to each other. It doesn’t seem fair that I can’t have either now.”
“It probably doesn’t seem fair to them that they’re losing you now, butyoudid that.” She dips her roller into the paint. “How would you feel if you were in either of their places?”
I stare at the paint growing in front of me. “Blue.” She laughs. “I’d want to punch me. I’d want to punch me right in the ovaries.”
“Something tells me neither of them will be doing that, though.Youhave to be the one to make the first move.”
“So I need to punch myself in the ovaries?”
“You’ll figure it out.”
We fall into silence. I watch her methodically paint thewalls, her strokes even and consistent while mine are erratic and patchy, and admire that she’s doing this for me. She’s packing up my grandma’s stuff for me, so I don’t have to go through the pain she probably is when she goes through it; she’s taking care of picking the place she knows I liked best; she’s painting painting painting and working working working. She’s doing her best to connect herself to me and my grandma, even when it’s a painful connection right now, all to make me feel better when I definitely don’t deserve to. I could learn a thing or two from her. Selflessness.
