by Devon Ashley
Putting on fresh clothes – a tank and cotton shorts – never felt so good. But now I had the dilemma of the bed itself. I checked my phone for the time but it was completely dead. Didn’t matter though. Judging by the darkness outside, the sun wasn’t coming up anytime soon, and no way was I getting back under those nasty sheets again. I stripped the bed and carried them out, leaving the fan on and the door open, hoping it would air out by the time I came back.
I shoved the sheets in the wash, then headed for the kitchen. What little activity I just did already pained my head. I still needed to eat something more. In the kitchen, I carefully made my way through the darkness to the pantry. A light immediately went off when you opened it, so I knew to prepare myself by squinting and blocking the light with my hand.
“You’re alive.” I turned to see Nana crossing the threshold, right before she flicked on the bright kitchen lights. Blinded, I quickly covered my eyes. I might’ve been up and out of bed for the moment, but I still wasn’t ready for that. Graciously dimming the entire room, Nana added, “I thought for sure I busted a pipe when I heard water flowing through the walls.” She kissed me on the temple. “Welcome back to the living, Tessie.”
I cringed at the word living, because it immediately brought back Brady’s death to the forefront of my mind. The tears were automatic, as was Nana’s grief for causing them. “Sorry. Poor choice of words. But I am glad to see you moving about. Another day and I was going to begin poking you with a stick, just because the smell was beginning to make me wonder.”
Too tired to appreciate her joke, I grabbed the saltines off the shelf and took them to the island to open them up, falling hard onto a barstool. I wiped the tears off my cheeks and inhaled a deep breath to calm my shaken nerves. “I’m sorry, Nana. I didn’t mean to completely check out on you these past few days.”
“Past week, honey.”
“Huh?”
“It’s been a week since...” She trailed off sadly, hurt residing in the gaze that suddenly fell to the floor. She probably didn’t want me to see it, but her effort was in vain. “Well, anyways. Tomorrow’s Thursday.”
I quietly gasped in awe. “Already? Nana! Why didn’t you tell me? Force me up? Take my curtains away?”
She waved me off before leaning over the opposite side of the island. Now that my eyes had adjusted to the light, I caught a quick glance of the soft, ruffled white gown she was wearing. It was pretty. “Everyone deals differently with pain and loss. You needed what you needed and I wasn’t going to tell you that you were doing it wrong.”
I sighed as I forced another dry cracker into my mouth. It wasn’t the most interesting food, but it seemed to be exactly what my stomach needed after failing to nourish it this past week. I was also incredibly thirsty, which Nana picked up on before I could react. She pushed off the counter and grabbed a glass, disappearing behind the fridge door long enough to emerge with fruit flavored vegetable juice.
“This’ll be a little better for you than water right now. Get some vitamins and nutrients back into you.”
“Thank you,” I said softly, forcing myself to take another bite of cracker before sipping the juice. “I promise I’ll be up to help you tomorrow.”
“Don’t you worry about it, Tessie. Just take it day by day. Now that you’re lucid and awake, it’s probably going to hurt all over again.”
“I do hurt,” I admitted. “But I’m also so numb I can hardly feel it. I know I’ll be sad for a while but I’ll do better at coming to terms with it. Promise.”
“No promise needed.”
“I just can’t believe he’s gone,” I said lifelessly.
Nana stood beside me now, and she gently scrunched my wet hair, encouraging the natural waves to curl more tightly. “Me neither. I’ve watched over that boy and his brother all their lives. I can’t believe the Lord has taken three of them home already.”
I responded with a noncommittal grunt, willing myself not to think of that. To not think of Brady while it still stung my heart, made me want to cry.
“Just feel free to talk to me if you need to, okay? Or call Sarah. She’s been calling every day to check up on you.”
“She has?” I asked with surprise.
“Of course she has. She’s worried about you. Thinks you’re ignoring her.”
I shook my head and lightly groaned. “No. My phone probably died days ago. I never heard anything come through.”
“Oh. Well, I’m sure she’d appreciate knowing that. And hearing that you’re doing better. Maybe give her a call before you come down in the morning.”
I nodded my head, agreeing she was right.
“Now, if you don’t mind, it’s late. I’m going to go back to bed.” She kissed me on the temple again. “Good night, honey.”
“Good night, Nana.”
Sleeping was the last thing I wanted to do, but my body was exhausted. Either it was because I’d done nothing but sleep the past week or because none of it was restful, but I knew the moment I put my head on the pillow again, I was going to be out. But unfortunately, I had no bed to fall into at the moment.
“Speaking of sleeping, are there any extra sheets for my bed? I already stripped them off and put them in the wash, but I’m so tired I don’t think I’ll even make it long enough to put them in the dryer later.”
“I’ll get them for you and leave them on your bed. You just make sure you eat and drink enough before you turn back in.”
“Okay,” I answered tiredly. Nana just winked and then disappeared past the door. It took me ten more minutes to fill myself with crackers and get the juice down. And when I finally made my way back to the bedroom, the bed had already been made for me, the sheets turned down so all I had to do was slip inside and fall asleep.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, my feet taking the steps in a double beat as I rushed down the stairs. It exhausted what energy I had and suddenly I felt dead on my feet as I approached the counter. “If I knew I had it in me to sleep that late I would’ve set my alarm.
“I’m so sorry,” I repeated.
Nana lifted her reading glasses and set them on her head, unfazed by my ramblings. “Relax, honey. I’ve been handling what hustle and bustle has come through that door for forty years.” As she looked me up and down, taking in the blonde locks tied up in a messy knot, my reddened eyes, blue saddlebags and my total lack of makeup, she added, “And by the looks of it, you could use a few more hours.”
I squeezed my eyes and sliced my hands through the air. “No. No more sleeping.” I blew a short exhausted sigh and rubbed my eyes. “It’s done nothing to help me come to terms. All I’ve done the past week is feel sorry for what I lost before I had it. I just… I can’t.” My hands fisted at my side. “I need a distraction. I need to work.”
Please don’t leave me to think. I’ll never get Brady out of my head.
Nana watched me forlornly the whole time. After a few seconds of dead air, she replied, “All right. But the day’s almost over so no working until tomorrow.” My mouth immediately flew open, but before a single syllable could fly, she held her hand up in the air. “I’ve got something else I’d like you to do for me.”
Thank God.
“Okay. What?” I asked with relief. Hopefully it was something that would keep me busy.
“I’ve got muffins cooling upstairs. Pack them up and take them on over to Owen. I know that poor boy hasn’t been eating either.”
My insides immediately groaned. This little errand of hers would do the absolute opposite of helping me keep my mind off Brady.
“Nana. Muffins? I’m sure every mom in town has delivered some kind of casserole and I doubt he’s eaten a single one.” I sure as hell hadn’t eaten anything this past week, and hell if my stomach even cared. My shorts were already hanging a little lower on the hips.
“I doubt he has either, but he’s always loved my baking. So if anything can tempt him to eat, it’s one of my cinnamon muffins filled with cream cheese topped with pec
an streusel.”
My eyebrows cocked north. Damn. That did sound good, and for a moment there my stomach gave off the tiniest rumble of approval.
Nana passed me by and made her way up the stairs. Reluctantly, I followed, still not in the mood to leave the barriers of the building.
“I look like shit,” I argued.
“Owen won’t care. But if it bothers you, doll yourself up a bit.”
“Doll myself up a bit? Nana,” I moaned, rolling my eyes.
“Nothing distracts a man better than a beautiful woman.”
“He has a girlfriend. I doubt she’d appreciate me distracting her man. And I doubt he’d appreciate his dead brother’s girlfriend dolling herself up as that distraction.”
“I don’t mean it that way. I’ve known Owen all his life. He’s a good boy who’d never do that kind of thing anyway. I also know he’s more sensitive than Brady was – God rest his soul. He’s hurting and he needs someone like you to help him through this, because that girlfriend of his ain’t the type to care much beyond a day.”
Yeah, I kind of got that impression from her too. And it surprised me that Nana even knew to begin with. Made me wonder how much talking she and Owen did through the years. Maybe Nana had been like a surrogate mother for him in some way.
“Fine. I’ll go. Just don’t expect me to work miracles if he tells me I’m crazy for showing up and yells at me to get the hell out.”
Nana turned her back on me to box up the muffins, letting loose a very sassy, very knowing mmm-hmm. Under normal circumstances, I would’ve made her clarify that. But at the moment, I really didn’t want to know what the cryptic message was behind that response.
The sun was close to disappearing beyond the tree line by the time I parked my car in front of the McCoy house. I hadn’t taken the time to doll myself up, but I did at least throw on a pair of jean shorts and a clean t-shirt. My hair stayed twisted in a messy knot but I did dust some powder on my face so Owen wouldn’t go blind from all the shine.
The house was dark, the exterior around it so quiet it was eerie the way the wood creaked as I made my way up the steps. I didn’t like the way it felt now. This house was on a steady decline. Originally filled with love and warmth and soothing voices, it became darker and colder. Even Brady’s presence couldn’t combat the shadows and eeriness away. And now…with him gone too… I didn’t like the way it felt. Like it wasn’t a home anymore, but a constant reminder of death and bad circumstance.
The night air seemed to come to a standstill within my throat, swelling it, choking it. My heart beat faster as nerves tugged on my insides. My hand shook as I knocked and waited. Why the hell I was so nervous to face Owen one-on-one, I didn’t know.
I was about to push the doorbell when I remembered Brady telling me Owen spent most of his time in the barn these days, even most nights.
Brady…Just the thought seared my heart like a fire-hot poker. Damn it…
I took a deep breath and let it go before taking the wrap-around porch to the back. The barn sat off to the left, its frame perpendicular from the house, and a soft glow illuminated between all the cracks and opened windows. I’d always loved their wooden barn. It was traditionally designed with a raised center aisle and large double doors at both ends that swung outward to offer a nice breezeway. It was the kind of barn you saw a lot in children’s books. Once upon a time it was painted barn red, but the weathered wood had lost most its color through the years.
One of the doors in front was cracked open a foot, so I peeked inside first. Spotlights bolted to the ceiling were on but dimmed, so I knocked gently on the closed door. The thought occurred to me that he could be asleep out here, so I quietly pushed past the door and walked in. I could simply leave the muffins on a table and not have to stay, which still felt a little weird to me anyway. I’d never lost anyone like this before. What was I supposed to say to him? Nothing anyone had said to me had made me feel any better. And actually, the more people talked, the more I just wanted to crawl under my covers and hide for a week.
Which is exactly what I did. Part grief, part hiding, just so I wouldn’t have to witness being the focus of people’s attention. Which is exactly what Owen had apparently been doing as well. Hell, maybe we could just sit in here and be miserable together. I could go for that.
The main floor had multiple work tables with various tools and saws and whatnits and hoosnits scattered about. All his power cords were tight and secured, neatly run in straight lines to the far sides of the barn. The scent of fresh cut wood was all I could smell. Remnants were scattered on the floor, the larger of which seemed kicked to certain spots in an effort to clean. Sawdust covered almost everything, particularly the machines and floor. Off to the right the stable dividers still remained, but instead of housing horses, they were now used to store and segregate the wood he used. In the very center sat the farmer’s table he’d already completed and two of its chairs. I now understood that the various pieces I was seeing scattered about were the makings of a third. I noticed I could no longer see the back doors. A wall had been put up, the room only accessible by a single door now.
I spotted Owen when my head swept to the left. He was sitting on the floor, back to a wall that only rose four feet up. His head was turned my way, waiting to see who’d invaded his sanctuary. Sawdust stuck to clothes and skin, so it didn’t take a genius to realize he’d been pushing through his grief by burying himself in his work.
“Hey,” I said mindlessly, trying to decipher what the hell was going on behind the hazel eyes staring down my own set of blues.
“Hey,” he said back. Least I thought he did. His lips barely moved and the sound of his voice couldn’t compete with the motor of the chrome fan that blew in the far corner.
Since he didn’t seem annoyed by my intrusion, I made my way over. His eyes slowly drifted to the container sandwiched between my hand and my hips. “Nana,” I said by way of explanation. “She said you could freeze them if you weren’t up to eating them.”
Without an invitation, I placed the muffins on the ledge above him and sat down beside him.
A ton of questions ran through my head, each more stupid than the previous. How are you doing? Are you eating? Sleeping? Need to talk about it? Nights are really getting hot around here, huh?
Finally I settled on, “So this is your workshop?” He answered using a noise in his throat. “I like the table. All my mom and I had growing up was one of those cheap metal fold-ups. Something about your kind of table just screams home, ya’ know?”
His head turned forward again. He didn’t verbally acknowledge my remark, but gave me a single nod.
The fan standing at the opposite corner hit us with a constant soft breeze, and even though the air was warm, it was just enough to make the temperature comfortable. So no wonder he was camped out in this very spot. Other than the fan’s hum, I couldn’t hear anything. It was peaceful. Quiet. I leaned back and rested my head against the wood panels like he was doing. “I can see why you like it out here.”
We sat in silence for a long moment, neither one of us even shifting. I’d like to say I used that time to think of something monumentally helpful to offer, words of wisdom and all that, but honestly, my mind was as numb as a frostbitten toe.
“I lied to you.”
My eyes widened when I actually said that out loud. Had I even meant to? Where the hell did that even come from? But for some reason I couldn’t stop my lips from moving, from my throat giving sound to random words that flew outward.
“Well, not completely. I told you I stopped coming here because I spent my summers at volleyball camp. I did, some. Or really I just played all summer long on whatever beach we were living close to at the time. But the truth is, I stopped coming around because when I was thirteen, my mom told me Nana was dead.”
I could feel his eyes staring me down from the side, but I didn’t dare look, didn’t dare lose the courage to say what I obviously needed to say to someone, and have neede
d to say for a very long time. Why I chose Owen was a curiosity I didn’t even understand myself.
“She told me Nana died and that we couldn’t afford to come back here for the funeral. So she bought a few flowers, took me down to the beach when the tide was going out, and together we said goodbye to her.
“My mom wasn’t the best mom, but I had no reason not to believe her. It was the same time our pay-as-you-go phone got lost, but I never put the two together. At least not until I was a sophomore at Los Rios. I was walking back from class one day and lo and behold, Nana was waiting for me outside my apartment building.”
I could still see the image of her in my mind perfectly. Her silvery hair rolling with the wind, her eyes filling with tears when she spotted me and rushed to greet me. My skin could still feel the intensity of her hug, see the redness swelling her tear-soaked eyes, hear the shake in her voice when the emotions got too much for her.
And I was equally as guilty.
“The thing you probably don’t know about my mom is that she’s pretty much a full-time drunk. In the beginning she sent me away every summer just so she wouldn’t have to deal with me. But as I got older, I began to tell Nana things she’d already begun to suspect. That Mom couldn’t hold a job, that we constantly moved from town to town to avoid paying debts, that she let random men stay with us at times for reasons you don’t need me to say. The reason my mom told me Nana was dead and had us do another one of our disappearing acts was because Nana threatened to take me away if she didn’t get some help. My mom said she would, but it was only something she said so we could disappear before Nana could get the courts involved.
“The sad part is…my mom didn’t even want me around because she loved me, she just wanted me around because the government gave her money to help raise me. We were always on some kind of government assistance.”
Not that much of that money ever went to me. But it did keep her swimming with booze. Mostly… When the money ran out she always seemed to find some schmuck for us to crash with who was willing to trade to room and board us.