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A text from Jake showed on the lock screen:How you doing?
Petra smiled. She couldn’t imagine how she would have gotten through the past month without him. He’d been a steady presence at her side, always ready to take the weight she couldn’t manage on her own.
I’m okay. About to go in. It’s hard.
I can be there in under 10 mins
Say the word
I love you, but no. I need to be alone today.
That changes, hit me up
I will
Love you. Thinking about you
??
Feeling a little like Jake was at her side, Petra closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and got out of the car. Before she could lose her nerve again, she slammed the car door and stalked straight at the door to the sunporch. She didn’t slow down until she was in the kitchen.
And there she froze, beset by the biological imperative to run, trying to hold it off with everything she had. Trying to be brave and mature and fuckingsane. To do what needed to be done.
She’d expected things to get even harder after the funeral; not only had she been warned as much by several people, she also remembered burying her mom. In the first days after a death, there was so much to do that the grief seemed to hover, for the most part. It crashed down in sudden moments and flattened her, but then it eased. There was always something to turn her mind to, always some question she needed to answer or answer she needed to find, some decision she needed to make. While she was distracted by that need, the grief lifted up and hovered again.
But after the funeral, even though there were still things to do, the flurry and rush of a timely burial was over. The people who’d clustered close went back to their lives. Things returned to normal—for everyone but Petra. She’d have to create a new kind of normal now.
And the grief came down and settled in.
She hadn’t re-opened Gertrude’s yet. She should have, and for more reasons than keeping the business afloat. She’d been covering payroll for these weeks, and it was starting to make a dent in her business accounts, but that wasn’t enough impetus to get her to unlock the doors. Working might have provided a distraction, given her something else to think about, a way to lift the grief off her shoulders for a while, but that wasn’t enough to get her back to work, either.
She couldn’t focus enough to imagine going to work. A certainty had rooted in her mind that everything around her had to stop, could not possibly go forward again, until this one thing, this one, huge thing, was finished.
Until she completed the erasure of her father from the world.
Despite his efforts to arrange things for her, settling his estate was taking some time. Bureaucracy did not rush, even when things should be simple. There was no other heir, no one to contest her father’s will, and no complicated kinds of investments. His entire estate amounted to a healthy but very conservative investment portfolio; his various savings and checking accounts, with balances ranging from moderate to robust; the house, which she meant to sell; its contents, which she also mostly meant to sell; and the Lexus, which ... ditto.
Jake had asked if she was sure she wanted to sell the house; she’d talked a lot in the past few weeks about her childhood, the kind of parents she’d had, how happy and loved and supported she’d always felt, how she’d had no qualms bringing her first girlfriend home because she hadn’t doubted that her parents would accept her as she was. Jake had wondered if she might want to keep the house and those memories.
And it was a beautiful house.
But Petra hadn’t had to think twice about it. No, she would never love this house again. She wanted it out of her life. Her father’s last act inside its walls had obliterated any good feeling she’d had.
She was so fuckingangry. She thought it was the anger more than the grief that weighed her down. Not that she could reliably separate those emotions. Every sad thought came wrapped in fury, every furious thought in sorrow.
None of that was going to get better until she could put the business of ending her father’s material existence behind her. There would be no ‘new normal’ until the echoes of the old one were silent, its shadows brightened, its ghosts exorcised.
So she set her purse and the canvas tote carrying three boxes of yard-size garbage bags on the island and went deeper into the house.
Jake had made her promise to stay away from the basement, and she’d made that promise without hesitation. Somebody else could pack all that up. Somebody who didn’t have the image of her father’s dangling shadow in her head. Petra meant to start in the next hardest room: his study. His favorite room of the house.
She went through the living room to the closed French doors. As she grabbed the handles, she took another deep breath and opened them.
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~oOo~
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