donut crumbs and anything else there might be. “I need to know that she’s okay.”
“You don’t need to know anything,” Jamie hollers, brushing past me as he walks out of the door.
There’s something he’s keeping from me.
He likes her.
I always suspected.
He stops when he gets to the bottom and glares at me. “Her mother died you asshole. She died and the nursing home couldn’t get in touch with Mari because you,” he stabs a finger in my direction, “you smashed her cell phone, you fucking freak.” He slams the door as he leaves.
Mari’s mom died? They couldn’t get a hold of her? I try to ignore the sharp pain that slices through me, spreading from my chest to my back. Her mom died and the nursing home couldn’t get a hold of her?
Because I smashed her cell phone.
I sit on the stairs in shock, feeling the force of this blow more acutely than when my own mother died. I feel for Mari, and what I did. The guilt climbs up through my stomach and into my throat, until I choke on it.
I want to do something. I want to help her. I know what her mom meant to her. She will be devastated. She’ll be heartbroken. I can’t have her break down.
Chapter 51
MARI
I haven't been able to get out of bed. Jamie gave me his bed again, and has been sleeping on the couch. He's been working and comes back in the evenings, but he calls and checks in on me many times throughout the day.
I like that I'm here alone. Even making conversation is hard. Luckily for me, Jamie understands. I don't have to pretend to be something I'm not, and what I am right now is a mess.
I can't function. I can't eat, or sleep, or think. I can't do anything. I don't want to do anything.
I want to curl up and sleep for years.
My mom's funeral takes place next week. We've got the date, and I've let a few friends and family members know. I wouldn't have been able to do this without Jamie’s help. I wouldn't have been able to function even in the tiny capacity that I am had it not been for him.
I've sent him to get some of my business suits. I'm supposed to be working on a speech but I can't find it in me to write the words I have in my head. I can't express how much love I have for my mom. Had. The love I had. I can't encapsulate it in words, what I feel for my mom, what I felt.
It is an overabundance of feelings, a myriad of emotions. Her smile, her touch, her voice. There are so many precious fragments of things I remember; her picking me up from school, and sending me away to college, her nursing my heart when my first boyfriend dumped me, and then doing it again over the years when all the others did. It was the pride in her eyes when I got my first job, and her elation for every job I got after that.
I feel her through images and emotions, not words. It makes it impossible for me to write it all down.
Ward could have helped with that.
The reminder of him sets me crying again. Not because I feel sad, or miss him. What I feel is hate, so much hate, but crying is the only emotion I have. I seem to only operate in two states: crying or not crying. There is nothing else in between.
I'm staring out of the window when Jamie returns. He'll be home all day today, it being the weekend, so I will have to try extra hard to convince him that I am coping.
“Hey,” he says, walking in with a bag of my clothes. He's carrying the jackets and skirts on hangers, and he disappears into the bedroom presumably to hang them up.
I turn my writing pad upside down so that he can't see.
“How are you doing?” he asks, coming over and sitting down on the far end of the couch. I lift up my feet, hunching up my legs to clear him a space.
“Good.” I smile as if to prove it.
“Get anything down?” He swipes the notepad before I can stop him. He turns it over and stares at the blank page. “Want me to help?”
I shake my head.
He nods. “You've got time. It will come.”
Will it? I don't want to say the last goodbye, that's what makes this so hard.