“Oh. Okay.”
“Yeah.”
He sits on the steps and I sit beside him. Neither of us says anything for a minute and then he exhales slowly and rubs his hands together.
“Wish you’d stuck around today,” he says. “Missy didn’t stay that long.”
“I was kind of caught off guard.”
“So you’re mad because I didn’t tell you, right? That’s what this is about?”
“How long did you know? Was it really May?” I ask. He doesn’t say anything. I nudge him in the ribs. “Come on, how long did you know she was coming?”
“I knew at the end of May.”
“My dad wasn’t dead then.”
“Yeah, but you got weird with me when I was with Missy—”
“I did not—”
“Yes,” he interrupts, “you did. I never saw you. You just hightailed it every single time she was around and we barely talked, we barely saw each other for—”
“Ten months,” I finish.
“Exactly.”
“Milo, she was your girlfriend,” I say. “You should have been seeing her more than me. I mean, come on—you see it in movies all the time, where the girlfriend gets this hate-on for the best friend and then the guy has to choose—”
“What? Where did you get that fucking ridiculous idea? What makes you think Missy would’ve actually made me choose between the two of you?”
“Her name.”
He snorts. “Nice.”
“Seriously—Missy?”
“Melissa.”
“She tells people to call her Missy.”
“So? You have a boy’s name.”
“And you have a dog’s name.”
It’s humid out. Too humid. I debate telling Milo about Culler, but I don’t. Maybe I’ll just wait, like he waited to tell me about her.
That seems fair.
“So are you two back together while she’s here or what?”
“We’re just going to hang out for the summer,” he says.
I think that means yes.
“You still could’ve told me sooner.”
Silence. I hate this silence. I can’t even stand it enough to appreciate the summer sounds all around us, and those sounds are one of my favorite things about this season. How gentle the breeze is, that soft rush. The way it moves the leaves on the trees. The crickets. The birds that haven’t called it a day, not yet.
“Missy doesn’t have a problem with you,” Milo says. “You don’t need to disappear.”
I don’t say anything. He nudges me until I look at him—three times—and when I look at him he seems so sincere and nice about it, it kind of makes me want to cry.
“Just don’t,” he says. “Okay?”
“My hands are still cold,” I say stupidly. I don’t know why. It’s all I can think of to say and it’s the one thing that never stops being true. I wish I knew how to make them warm again.
“Stop,” Milo says. He shifts away from me a little and asks, “So where did you go? I mean, after you left.”
“Nowhere.”
“Nowhere,” he repeats.
He’s not buying it, but he leaves it at that. He rests his head on my shoulder. I lean into him. His hair is soft and smells like an unlikely combination of coconut and mint and I want to ask him what kind of shampoo he uses, but I know if I did, he’d just accuse me of sniffing his hair.
And then Beth totally ruins the moment by pushing through the door and gracelessly making her way down the steps to face us. Her cheeks are pink.
“Eddie,” she says. “Can I talk to you for a minute? In private?”
“No,” I say. Beth, half-smashed, wanting to talk to me privately. So many possibilities and none of them I am willing to subject myself to. “No way.”
“Please,” she says.
That should be my first real clue that something’s not right because Beth never says please to me and means it, but I realize this too late.
“If you have something to say, say it.”
“Fine. I need help getting your mother to bed. She’s…” She pauses for a long moment, and then forces the next word out of her mouth slowly. “Incapacitated.”
I stare. “How much wine did you give her?”
“Why does that matter?” she asks. “That’s unimportant. It’s moot now. I just need help getting her to bed. So will you help me or not?”
“Do it yourself.”
“I can’t.”
“Then why did you ask?”
Milo gets up. “I can help—”
“No!” I don’t mean it to come out that way—that strangled, that urgent. They both look at me like I have three heads. My face burns. “… I don’t want you to.”
“Look, I’ll do it,” Milo says. “Eddie, it’s not a big deal.”
“Milo—”
He goes into the house before I can stop him. Beth fixes me with a haughty look.
“Maybe next time you’ll listen to me when I ask to talk to you privately.”
“What do you mean next time?”
I step inside the house. Beth follows. When I get to the living room, it’s a nightmare. Two bottles of wine have been decimated. Milo hovers over my mom and she smiles at him, out of it, trying to get her arm around his shoulder.
It takes forever.
I watch them walk unsteadily across the floor, reaching the stairs at a snail’s pace. My stomach shrivels into nothing. I don’t want to see this.
“There’s a step,” Milo tells her in his most gentle voice. I bury my face in my hands. I don’t want to hear it either. “That’s great, Robyn. Okay, there’s another step … great…”
“It didn’t have to be this bad,” Beth says after Milo and Mom finally disappear. I raise my head and glare at her. “You don’t have to turn everything into a big scene. And look on the bright side: wine has lots of health benefits.”
“Thanks so much, Beth. Really.”
“Oh, relax. I haven’t seen your mom that animated in forever.”
“You got her drunk.”
Beth shrugs. “Still. When was the last time you made her laugh?”
Ten minutes pass before Milo comes back down.
I can’t even look at him.
“Thank you, Milo,” Beth says pointedly. She pats him on the shoulder and fumbles past him. She smiles at the wine bottles. “That was fun. Like being back in college.”
“You’re not that young anymore,” I tell her. “Every day you’re farther from it.”
She stops dead in her tracks and faces me very slowly.
I brace myself.
“Maybe you could clean this up, Eddie, if it’s not too beyond you.”
Her voice is cool, but it’s all she says.
“It really wasn’t a big deal,” Milo assures me after she’s gone. He walks over to the table and grabs one of the wine bottles. He holds it out to me.
“Still some left.” He takes a swig and makes a face. “That is the most fucked-up wine I have ever tasted.”
I grab the bottle from him. “It’s not like you’re an expert.”
“I guess not.”
He grabs the glasses and takes them into the kitchen. After a second, the water rushes—he’s washing them—and I’m struck by how adult this all is and how tired that makes me. I should be wrecked. I should be upstairs, sleeping it off while Mom and Beth act like grown-ups down here. Instead, I just stand still, staring down the wine bottle until Milo comes back into the room and touches my shoulder. When I look at him I see that night—the one that changed everything—all over his face.
That night is the reason for this one.
“Did he seem unhappy to you?” I ask, clumsily turning the bottle over. I almost drop it. My stupid hands. “I mean … did he seem like he wanted to die?”
Milo takes the bottle from my hands. I can tell he doesn’t like touching them. He thinks about it for a second and I imagine him searching through memories on memories for some sort of clue. Something he saw—something he saw that I didn’t.
“He seemed like he always did,” he finally says.
Which is a horrible answer the more I think about it.
It’s a beautiful morning. Hangovers abound, so it’s mine and mine alone.
I stay in bed for a long time, staring at the ceiling, my mind blank. Empty. That sounds depressing, but it’s not. Sometimes you can think too much. I actually made myself sick the first three days after because I had thoughts bigger than the space that contained them and too many of them were happening at once. Sometimes the quiet is good. Most times not, but just for now, in this tiny moment where the sun is edging up the sky, it’s okay.
And then I get out of bed.
I get out of bed and I get dressed.
I get out of bed and I get dressed and I go downstairs and I find a piece of blank paper and I fold it into a card. I stare at the empty space inside of it for a long time.
I grab a pen.
I’m sorry for your loss.
Eddie Reeves.
I hate when people say that to me, but this feels different because I’m the one writing it. It’s more important. I want him to know it’s not just me, that I know he must be in pain too.
That I understand.
I find Culler’s address on the envelope he sent us. I tuck my card into a new envelope and address it to him, stamp it, and then leave the house on my bike and mail it.
When I get back, Beth is awake. She’s making some complicated puke-green smoothie and she winces every time she pulses the blender. Every time she takes the lid off to see how it’s coming along, she covers her mouth like she’s going to barf. She does this so many times, I sit at the table and just watch, crossing my fingers that she’ll vomit everywhere, just suffer some gross indignity while I’m there to witness it.