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He recoils in horror. “Do I look like the kind of guy who’d do a thing like that?”
“No. Sorry.” I reach out and take one of the toffees from his bag.
“Not everyone gets offered aniriskifrom my personal stash, so consider yourself lucky.” He takes one for himself and pops it into his mouth.
“You’ll excuse me if I don’t consider myself lucky today.”
He meets my gaze and gives me a sympathetic smile. “Hey, I get it. You loved your mother. You don’t want to have to say goodbye. But you know that cheesy saying?”
“Which one?”
“Um, something about hard goodbyes and people you love.”
“I’m lucky to have someone who makes saying goodbye so hard.”
He snaps his fingers, pleased. “That’s the ticket. Walt Whitman, I think. Or maybe Gandhi. Can’t recall.”
“It’s fromWinnie the Pooh.”
“Is it? Well, I’ll be damned. That doesn’t sound quite as sophisticated. You sure it wasn’t Gandhi?”
A corner of my mouth wants to twitch up in a smile, but the rest of me is still heavy with grief. “Yeah. Mom used to read usWinnie the Poohtales when Celine and I were little girls. We had a whole collection. It’s still in the attic somewhere. She never threw anything away.”
“You know what my mom used to read me when I was a boy?” he asks. He pauses for dramatic effect before delivering his punchline: “The riot act.”
I roll my eyes as I bite back a snotty laugh. “I’m sure that was the story that never ended.”
He snorts. “You don’t know the half of it. She wouldn’t just read me the riot act, either. She had a cane that she named Horace, and she liked to say that ‘Horace was gonna come visit me’ if I didn’t behave. Mind you, her definition of ‘behaving’ changed daily. Some days, it meant I couldn’t track dirt into the house. Other days, I didn’t tighten the cap on the milk carton to her liking. Horace hurt the same either way.”
“Is this your way of reminding me that I’m lucky to have had my sweet, loving mother who read me storybooks before bed?”
“Phew, glad you got that. I was worried I was too subtle.”
Finally, I can’t help it—I smile. But it’s grudging. “What was your name again?”
“Dima.”
“Dima,” I repeat, finally unwrapping the toffee and popping it into my mouth. The caramel hits my taste buds like a boost of pure adrenaline, and I feel my body rally around the rush of sugar. “Did Mila send you over here?”
“No, why would she?”
“Because she’s tired of babysitting me.”
“Neither one of us are babysitting you,” he says in a tone that’s naturally—and, given his line of work, strangely—compassionate. “We’re just…looking out for you.”
“Why?”
That takes him back. “Because you’re important.” He says it like I’m supposed to already know.
I suck on the caramel and peek around Dima’s shoulder. The service will start soon. I can see people filing through the doors. I’d informed our extended family only this morning in the hopes that most of them might not make it. We’ve got a whole mess of aunts, uncles, and cousins in Denver who won’t make the journey. But I notice Uncle Peter and Aunt Monica waltz into the church in their best mourning attire.
I ought to go out there and greet them. But it’s so much easier standing here, sucking on a toffee behind a wall of sunflowers, talking to a violent yet weirdly thoughtful stranger about storybooks and dead mothers.
It’s like the world I’ve always known has already been left behind.
And I’ll never, ever get it back.
I turn my attention back to Dima. “‘I’m important’? What you really mean to say is that my baby is important. Am I right?”
