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“Fuck you, bro.” I toss him the middle finger as I walk away, disappearing into the warmth of Thea's house.
With its aged wooden flooring and antique furniture, the house is exactly as I remember it. The walls, as they've always been, are painted magnolia and lined with photographs. Family vacations, candid shots of Jolene and Thea taken in the garden, even one of Bobby holding a largemouth bass that he caught on a fishing trip to the North Canadian River. A picture of Thea as a three-year-old grinning through a face full of strawberry ice cream hangs right beside one of her at our high school graduation.
That's the image that shoots flaming arrows into my heart. At the sight of her proud smile and crimson hair tumbling out from beneath her graduation cap, memories come back to me in blinding color.
It was only two weeks later that she'd left.
Nostalgia settles sad and heavy in my soul as I turn away from the wall of photographs and weave my way through the mourners congregating in the great room to the hallway beyond it. If memory serves me right, Thea's bedroom is the last door on the left.
I don't know what I am expecting to find when I enter, but it isn't the sight that greets me. A duffel bag on the small double bed, closet doors wide open and Thea, red-eyed and puffy, throwing clothes over her shoulder, manic and directionless.
“What are you doing?”
My voice startles her. Turning to me with a delicate hand flattened against her heaving chest, she hits me with a glare lacking in its usual potency.
“Packing.”
“Where are you going?”
Her eyes narrow, not in an angry kind of way, but a thoughtful one. Uncertain. As if she doesn't know the answer to my question, or even that she doesn't have a destination in mind. She just simply wants to leave.
“Home,” she says finally.
“This is your home.”
“No.” She shakes her head and the first tear of the day slips lonely down her cheek, followed by another, then another. “Not anymore.”
The sight of her standing there, wrapped in a dress of black lace, her eyes wet and despondent, she's the saddest fucking thing I've ever seen. I guess all those tears she didn't cry at the service have caught up to her now. And it pierces my heart so painfully I have no power over the urge to go to her, to get down on my knees in front of her and take her freckled little face in my hands.
“You're wrong.”
“Am I?” she whispers. “My daddy's dead, my mom is moving upstate to live with my grandma for a while and you...” She pauses, sucking in a ragged breath. “You can barely even stand to be in the same room as me anymore.”
“I'm in the room with you now, aren't I?”
She scowls and my hand falls from her cheek. “I guess, but I'm just sitting here waiting for you to come out with whatever it is you came in here to yell at me for.”
“You think I came in here to yell at you?”
She really believes that? She really thinks that just hours after she's put her daddy in the ground, I'd seriously come in here and make shit about me?
She shrugs. “Didn't you?”
“No, princess, of course not.” The name I've become accustomed to calling her since she's been back in town slips from my lips as an endearment rather than the insult I usually intend it to be.
“Of course not?”She snorts. “As if you haven't yelled at me at every damn opportunity you've been given.”
“This is different. This is… It's not—“ I scramble for words before finally falling into a silence of contrition. Truth is, this entire exchange is leaving me shamefaced at the way I've behaved until this moment. Guilty, even. Sucking in a steady breath, I tell her, “Your mom is looking for you and I…well, I guess I just wanted to see if you were alright.”
“What do you care?”
“I care,” I say easily.
Maybe too easily.
Thea looks at me then, really looks at me, and despite everything, it makes my breath catch. Because there's so much happening behind her eyes. Her irises are emerald kaleidoscopes of pain and in this moment, I wish I could take it all away for her.
“Why are you leaving, Thea?”
