Mom’s life had fluttered to an end in her tidy hospital room. “She knew we loved her, right?”
He looked at me with weary certainty. “She knew.”
I took a shaky breath and pressed the corners of my eyes with unsteady fingertips. There had been too many tears since Tuesday—too many questions that had seemed to come too late.
“You think Dad will drop in?”
“He might. If someone tells him or he reads the obit.”
“Will you talk to him if he does?” My courageous brother would have to speak for both of us. He always had.
“And say what?”
I didn’t know. None of the lines that came to mind seemed appropriate with Mom lying in her favorite blue dress in a casket across the way.
“He probably won’t come,” Trey said.
“Probably not. That would be too much like admitting he knows us.”
A swollen moment passed. “I hope he doesn’t come,” Trey said softly. “He doesn’t belong here after what he put her through.”
The high heels clicked past the door again, a little faster this time, and I could picture Saccharine Psycho scanning the halls for us, externally smiling, but internally cursing.
“You think she was happy? I mean, for the last few years?”
Trey thought about it for a while. “I don’t think she ever really knew what happy was. And since she didn’t expect anything better . . .”
“Ignorance is bliss.”
“Sometimes.”
“She should have been happy.”
Trey turned his head toward me, alerted by the angry edge to my voice.
“She should have been more than a brutalized wife,” I went on.
“She should have been a lot of things,” he said.
“And she could have been,” I retorted too firmly, my insurrection strengthening. “She could have done things and had things and been things . . .”
“But she got Dad instead.”
“He killed her. And he killed her a long time before last Tuesday.”
“We should send him the funeral bills.”
I swiped at the tears on my face, tired of the grief so horribly distorted by a sense of waste. “Maybe if she’d gotten out while she still could.”
“She wouldn’t have. She didn’t even leave when he started taking his frustrations out on us, and she was supposed to be our loving mom, so . . .”
“She was,” I said. “She really did love us. She just never figured out how to love us and Dad at the same time.”
Trey nodded. “I know.”
“She should have been happy,” I repeated, but the words sounded desolate this time, much less convicted than they’d been before. Maybe there hadn’t really been an option—not after meeting and marrying the man she’d claimed to love until the end.
Trey breathed silently beside me, and I found comfort in his nearness.
“I don’t want to be like her.” I hadn’t intended to say the words, but there they were, suspended in the air above us. I’d thought them frequently enough. Most fervently, perhaps, when I stood by her casket for the first time and looked down at her delicate hands clasped lightly on her stomach. Lightly was the word for it. For her hands and for her life. She’d never given me the impression of feeling anything really intensely or doing anything full-throttle or rushing into anything headlong. Everything had always been predictable and discreet. And I felt like her life had consequently been too delicate and largely unlived.
“Then don’t be like her,” Trey said.
He had a way of making monumental processes sound simple.
“Oh, well, okay then. And how do you suggest I go about that?”
“Figure out where she went wrong.”
I laughed. “Starting where?”
“I don’t know. Just figure it out and do something about it. That alone will make you different from her.”
“Well, I’m not going to marry a jerk, for one.”
“At the rate you’re running off the good guys, there may only be jerks left.”
“That’s not the point.”
“No, but I’m pretty sure it’s a symptom of Davishood.”
I gave the theory a moment of thought before discarding it. My mom’s questionable taste in men had little to do with my singleness. Or so I chose to believe. “I think I need to steer clear of polyester, too, if I’m going to avoid being like her.”
“Wise decision.” Trey rocked his head slowly from side to side, trying to loosen the tension of the last four days. “You think she would have gone on in nursing if she hadn’t met Dad?”
“Probably.”
“Think of how different her life would have been. She’d have gotten a job, tried new things, met new people. . . .”
“I know.”
“We should have taken her bungee jumping or something,”