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“Exactly,” said Marianne.
“Meaning?” Ruby asked.
“She’s working to avoid having a feeling, but she’s obviously devastated,” Marianne said.
Ruby’s eyes were now large and glassy with unshed tears. “I feel so guilty I didn’t come right back home.”
“Hey,” Dahlia said. “Like I told you at the time, we were all here with her.”
“Jackson and I help with the kids,” Marianne said. “So do Mom and Dad. Chase helps with the farm.”
“But I could have...comforted her.”
Dahlia sighed. “Honey, her husband died. You can’t just...smile and make it better.”
Ruby frowned. “I’m not saying that I can, but I want to be there for her.”
“You know how she is,” Marianne said. “She doesn’t like to share her feelings, and she’s really not sharing them now.”
And Dahlia could see that Ruby was taking none of this on board. Ruby was determined to fix their sister’s very real, deep grief, as if she could do it with her mere presence. To Ruby’s credit, she didn’t like people to be unhappy.
That was also a deeply annoying thing about Ruby.
They all loved Mac like a brother. Lydia had been with Mac since she was thirteen. He was enmeshed in who they were, and it was just... Hard.
His ALS diagnosis had been devastating. His decline gutting. His death still sudden and unexpected in a terrible way.
They’d known it was coming, but when it had, it had still felt like...it had to be a dream. A joke. It hadn’t felt real.
And as to how Lydia was coping? It was impossible to say.
Dahlia had never been the closest to Lydia growing up, but the older she got she thought it was maybe because they were too much the same. Marianne and Ruby showed their emotions easily. Screaming and throwing their hands around and demanding people smell lotion. Waving at people from across the street with broad gestures and loud greetings.
Dahlia and Lydia were just much more reserved. And Dahlia knew that her fashion sense—with her blunt bangs and extreme bob, her hair dyed black and her short skirts and thigh-high socks—horrified Lydia. And that Lydia herself would never admit that they were alike at all. But they both felt things deeply. And while Dahlia was a staunch advocate of the truth...
That didn’t often extend to speaking of the deeper feelings inside her.
“Her whole life is different,” Marianne said. “And you know Mom and Dad try but they’re...they’re terrible at dealing with things like this.”
Ruby frowned. “What?”
“Ruby, come on. They want everyone to just soldier on when things are hard, and that’s what Lydia always tries to do, but it can’t be healthy.”
“I don’t think Mom and Dad are like that,” Ruby said.
Marianne’s mouth went firm for a moment. “Well, maybe they aren’t with you.”
Ruby seemed to shed that comment with ease. “I’m just really worried about her, and I want to help however I can.”
Mac and Lydia had been such a perfect fit. The kind of couple that had made Dahlia believe someday she could find a person that would fit her that way.
They’d both dreamed of a simple, homesteading life. Both of them committed to working their farm and raising their children. And since Mac had died, there had been a hole in the family. Ever since his diagnosis, really. They’d known that he would die. But given that he had an early onset version of the disease, his prognosis had been better than someone who showed signs of the disease in their later years.
But it hadn’t happened that way, and it was the black hole of numbness that Lydia had fallen into that terrified Dahlia the most. Because her sister hadn’t wailed or thrown herself on the ground and screamed at an endless, unfeeling sky. She had gotten up, smoothed her hands down the front of her apron and said:I have to feed the livestock.
And while Dahlia could understand the stoicism, she was also increasingly bothered by all of it.
It was that part of her that was always out for the truth that felt the dishonesty of it and feared it would eat her sister alive. She felt like a coward not charging in and saying it, but she’d learned a long time ago that her brand of honesty was often seen as abrasive and perhaps charging in and asking if Lydia had a moment to talk about her deep, unending grief would not be well received.
