It felt wrong for anyone else to try to interject themselves into that and pretend they were feeling anything like what I was going through. I wanted to wallow in that pain and not let anyone come close.
It took a lot of time for me to come around to Gus—far longer than I was proud to admit. But in that time, I came to realize he was going through his own grief. It wasn’t the same thing. He wasn’t their child and didn’t have the same kind of bond with them that I did. But it was there. He’d known them longer than I did and had years of memories from before I was even born. He’d lost his best friend in my father and something close to a sister in my mother. They were pieces of his family, and they were gone.
I started to be willing to share my pain and acknowledge that while I was in many ways now on my own and existing by myself, I didn’t really have to do it alone. Gus and I could be there for each other. He did everything he could for me, and I finally came to realize I wouldn’t have made it through without him to lean on. Even when I wasn’t acknowledging him and was trying to push through by myself, in the back of my mind, I knew he was there. I knew I could fall back on him.
That Sunday found me even more grateful for that than I had been. I hadn’t mentioned my mother’s birthday coming up to anyone and wasn’t planning on talking about it. There didn’t seem to be any point in it. Talking about the milestone would only make me feel the pain more sharply, and that wasn’t something I wanted to do. But it was getting to me, clouding my thoughts and making it harder to focus.
Seeing Deacon in the shop the day before didn’t help. The tattoo shop was kind of a secret oasis for me in a way. I didn’t talk about it with the people in my life, and they had never seen it. The only time I ever mentioned it to Lauren was when she came into the diner to have dinner on a Saturday after I already stopped working those shifts to work the shop and I gave a brief explanation.
Though I dreamed of one day turning my love of drawing and expressing myself through art into being a successful tattoo artist, for right now, I was keeping it to myself. Being in the shop was an escape. It let me separate myself from everything else and be myself in a different way than I was in my daily life.
Then Deacon walked in. It took me a second to even process that it was really him when I first saw him. My daydreaming had gotten to a slightly ridiculous degree after the bonfire, so I thought maybe I had just cracked and was starting to imagine him.
It was honestly a relief when I realized it was actually him. A relief, but also the slight sense that my bubble had been invaded. He was out of context here in the shop rather than out among the rest of my friends, and it was strange to walk the line between them.
It was especially odd to realize he had been there before, and we’d just missed each other.
“You doing okay, Becky?” Gus asked, coming into the back.
I hated when he called me Becky. It was one thing about him that really got to me. But he’d done it since I was a little girl, and no matter how many times I asked him not to, it never really seemed to sink in. I decided years ago not to push it. That’s who I was to him, and he liked the nostalgia of it. In a way, it was a reminder of my father, who called me Becky when I was younger.
“Yeah,” I said, finally getting going again and starting the cup of coffee brewing. “Sorry. I’m just a little tired. I didn’t sleep very well last night.”
That was true. Thinking about Deacon had kept me up well into the night, shifting up to the looming sadness as the sun was starting to come up.
“You shouldn’t be drinking all that coffee,” he said. “It will do that to you.”
I chuckled. “It’s noon, Gus. I don’t think a cup right now is going to send me off the deep end.”
We went back into the front of the shop, and I sat down behind the counter to look through the appointments and handle a couple of other administrative tasks. Gus came up and noticed my sketchbook sitting open beside me. He used one finger to turn it toward himself so he could look at the drawings.