After a while Lola winks at me, and I know she’s gotten her wits about her.
“Are you still going down to Elm Village today?” she asks me.
“Yeah,” I say. “I guess I’ll go ahead and get that over with since I ditched work already. I want to get home before Cassie gets out of school. Did she say anything?”
“Sorry,” Lola says and looks like she really is. “I tried to bait her, but she was on to me. She’s just confused. It’s all really bad timing.”
The divorce, the funeral, the conversation about possibly moving in with Grandma. Aren’t all tragedies really bad timing?
“She’ll be ok,” Lola says. “We’ll all be ok.”
Chris puts his hand over Lola’s, and the protective nature of such a small gesture seems to illuminate too many layers of loss.
“Are you ok if I go?” I ask.
“I’ve got her,” Chris says and takes her hand fully.
He thinks we’re talking about Dad, and I’ve got to give him major points for taking such good care of my little sister. I wish I could tell him that she’d figured him out—just to warn him.
“Go,” Lola says. “I’m just being silly. You’re right. See you at Mom’s tomorrow.”
Lola nods her head toward Chris and winks again.
◆ ◆ ◆
There’s so much to do before a funeral that you can get caught up in the tasks and details and forget why you’re doing it. Like going to a movie with so many previews that for a moment you forget what you’re there to see. You can’t even remember if it’s something that will make you laugh or cry. I think it’s a purposeful misdirection, a stalling technique employed by the world at large to help you deal with loss one piece at a time.
It’s too cruel for the widow to have to go to the nursing home to collect the small number of things that once seemed so important and place them into the provided cardboard boxes that will likely never be unpacked. Lola and our brother, Ray, are spared by emotion and absence, in that order. But me, I am the appropriate blend of available, stable, and responsible.
At the nursing home, no one says the word “dead” to me. They all say “We’re so sorry for your loss,” like perhaps Dad has just been misplaced and will turn up underneath a couch cushion. It’s not their fault. There is nothing good to say and saying nothing would be worse.
A young nursing aide named Oliver helps me load Dad’s belongings onto a cart and take them out to my car. We don’t say anything to each other as we walk out into the sunlight and unpack the boxes into my trunk. I suppose he’s done this before, but I haven’t, and it feels like the asphalt is melting under my feet—a quicksand that only I am sinking into.
I thank him for helping me and extend my hand to shake. He takes it and presses my palm between both of his.
“Nate was an awesome guy,” Oliver says, referring to my father in a familiar way that makes me jealous. “I miss him already. I hate this part.”
I forget my own sorrow for a moment in the face of such honest emotion. What a weird job he has, caring for people he can’t possibly make well.
“Thank you,” I say, and I mean to press my other hand around his but instead I step closer to him and we embrace.
After the usual “hug time” expires, I feel Oliver attempt to step away, but I can’t let go. I’m clinging to him in some pathetic effort to stop time. If I move, the funeral will take place. Jack will finish moving out. Cassie might go with him. Someone else will park in Jack’s space, and I’ll be stuck photographing lemonade forever.
Oliver steps back in to the hug. The side of his neck and the shag of his blond hair are a hideaway, and I have no idea what’s come over me. I breathe in deep to get my wits back. I pull away from him enough to be face to face with him, and to my own amazement, I kiss him.
Right on the mouth.
Oh, my! What has come over me?
“I’m so sorry,” I say, gasping at the horror of this thing I have just done. I cover my offending lips with my hands, my face hot with the inappropriateness of my actions.
Guys—I just kissed my dead father’s ex-health care worker, who BTW is completely gorgeous and way too young for me!
This of course will get numerous likes and comments of You go, girl! and Living vicariously, more details please. But inevitably someone will respond with a Your father died? I’m so sorry, bringing it back full circle.
I shake my head and hands as if I can brush away the incident itself.
“Don’t worry about it,” Oliver says. He touches his fingers to his lips and furrows his brow slightly, but then quickly, he offers a comforting smile and says, “You’re sad. We’re sad, too.”
I feel like I should explain myself to Oliver, about my marriage, its demise, how desperately I need companionship, how much I fear losing my job, how awkward I feel around my mother, and how losing Dad feels like I’ve been orphaned. How worried I am that my brother won’t come to the funeral. How embarrassed I am that I just kissed a stranger.
I don’t say any of it.
“Thank you,” I manage, looking away from tranquil, soft green of Oliver’s eyes and then back up again. “Do they train you guys on the right things to say? I’d like to compliment you to your supervisor.”
“No,” he says with a smile on his face. “I just know how you feel. Sort of.”
I sense a story there, but it’s not one that this relative stranger and I have time to share, even if I did just
