“Did I ever tell you that I lived in New York for a time?” Mrs. Gates says across the table.
I meet her eyes as we work.
“I loved it.” She smiles a little. “Too cold, but it was a lot of fun. That’s where I studied to become a funeral director.”
I think I knew that, but I can’t be sure.
She shuts off the machine. “It’s one of the best schools in the country for mortuary science.”
Mortuary science?
“I can get you in,” she says. “If you want to go.”
I stop, locking eyes with her. My first instinct is to laugh or scoff. I can’t tell people I’m an undertaker. It’s not romantic like an actor or an artist, or heroic like a lawyer or a doctor.
But then, most people haven’t seen what I’ve seen here, either. Mrs. Gates is there during one of the most important times in a person’s life.
“You have a strong stomach,” she tells me. “You empathize. You care. I think the best people to help us say goodbye are the ones who’ve had to do it themselves.”
I keep working, listening.
“You know what these families need.” She drops tools to the tray, picking up another one. “Funerals aren’t for the dead, after all.”
They’re for the survivors.
The idea is ridiculous. Everyone will laugh.
My grandmother would have a cow.
But then, I look down at the kid, Mitchell Higgins from the name on his file, and know that tomorrow I could be him.
If not tomorrow, next week. Next year. Five years from now, because no matter when, it is coming.
“I know your parents want you to go to Wake Forest,” she says, “but if you decide your life should go a different path, I’ll sponsor you.”
Sponsor me?
“You work here on vacations and give me two years after you’ve gotten your degree,” she tells me, “I’ll pay your tuition.”
NEW YORK. WHY does the idea of being that close to Liv make me so happy? I can’t follow her. I gave her up, and being that close will only make it impossible to move on.
And worse. Being that close and knowing she’s moving on will be unbearable.
I can’t go to New York. Wake Forest is perfect, actually. It’s halfway between home and her, not an easy distance to either. I need to let her be. Just like she asked me to weeks ago.
I walk up my driveway, seeing lights glowing from inside my house, and I know I’ll find my mom sitting at the table, waiting for me.
Not so much because she’s worried, which any other parent might be since I left my phone in my room hours ago and she couldn’t get a hold of me, but because it would look bad to go to sleep with an angry, teenage daughter out this late.
I step inside the house, the clock chiming one in the morning as I lock the door behind me.
But as I would normally stomp up the stairs and try to hide in my room to avoid her, I find myself listening for her.
I hear nothing.
I drift from room to room, looking for her, a lot calmer than I was hours ago.
They weren’t always like this. I keep forgetting that. When my brother was alive, we were pretty happy, actually. My parents are disappointing, but when I remember the parents Henry knew, I miss them.
A painting has been ripped off the wall and lays on the marble floor face-down, a vase with roses shattered next to it amidst a puddle of the water that was inside.
I head up the stairs, seeing their wedding pictures broken on the floor of the hallway, as well as the destruction I wreaked before I ran out. I find my mother in her closet, gowns, shoes, and blouses strewn everywhere as she leans back against the dresser in the center of the room, holding a large bottle of Evian between her bent legs.
She meets my eyes, and I’m stricken for a moment.
She looks like me.
Uncertain. Deflated. Too many feelings and no way to put them into words.
Young.
She wears a pair of cream-colored silk boxers with a white cashmere sweater, her hair a mess and black around her eyes from crying.
Not the usual masterpiece she’s been the past few years.
She holds up the nearly empty Evian bottle, and I notice another, drained and laying among the clothes. “I thought champagne would be the answer, but…”
“‘Carbs are never the answer,’” I recite our motto.
I walk over and slide down to sit beside her, my back against the dresser.
“I’m still deciding,” she sighs. “So stand by.” And then she downs the rest of the bottle.
I stare at her, wondering if she ever had any idea this day was possible. When she bought her wedding dress, or when they bought this house, did she know there was no guarantee? That someday she’d end a pregnancy, because she couldn’t stand to raise another child and love something so hard and possibly lose it? That her husband would give up, his heartbreak making him hurt us when hers just made her hurt herself?