you out in the yard with Tris in the morning. The way you hold your fork. I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I’m being maudlin.”
I miss him, Colby wanted to tell her. “It’s okay,” he said instead. Then, before he even registered thinking it: “Can I ask you something kind of important?”
His mom’s pale eyes widened. “Of course, Colby,” she said, in this sort of overly confident voice like he should know he could—like they had the kind of relationship where they talked about personal or important things all the time, which they definitely didn’t. It would have made him laugh on a different day. “Anything.”
“When Matt and I got in that fight, he said . . .” He broke off then, losing his nerve, reminding himself once and for all that there was no point in actually knowing. Still, though: “Dad hadn’t tried it before, had he? Like, before he actually did it?”
For a long time, Colby’s mom didn’t say anything, wrapping the strap of her purse around her fingers until the rough skin of her knuckles turned bone white, then unwinding it and repeating the process. “Matt said that?” she asked quietly.
“Uh, yeah,” Colby said, his voice cracking a little bit like he was going through puberty all over again. “I told him he didn’t know what he was talking about, but . . .” He cleared his throat. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about, right?”
Another pause, even longer this time. Finally, she set the purse back down on the bed. “Colby,” she said.
Colby sat down on the edge of the mattress, all the air going out of him at once. “Oh.”
“I didn’t want you to find out,” she said, shrugging almost girlishly. “I wanted to protect you—gosh, your dad wanted to protect you. But now that you know, I don’t want you to think that if somehow . . .” She shook her head. “There was no saving him, Colby.”
“How can you say that?” Colby demanded, standing up so fast he almost tripped on the too-long hem of his dead dad’s suit pants. “You have no idea. I could have talked to him. I could have—”
“Colby . . .” His mom reached out like she was planning on touching him, then thought better of it. Both of them stared silently at the carpet for a moment before she spoke again. “He was the best man I ever knew, your father. But somewhere in there, when I wasn’t paying attention, he stopped being able to see the possibilities in life. Do you know what I mean? He couldn’t see anything but what was in front of his face at that particular moment. And then at the very end, he couldn’t even see that.”
Colby thought he knew what Meg would say right now, about depression being a medical illness the same as diabetes or cancer. But he also thought he understood the point his mom was trying to make. There was a part of him that wanted to keep talking, to tell her about the nightmares—to tell her about Meg, maybe—but in the end he shrugged off the suit coat and draped it carefully over the footboard of the bed. “Thank you for doing this,” he said. “I mean, thank you for doing everything, but—yeah. Thank you for doing this.”
His mom lifted her head and looked at him then, smiling a little. “My pleasure, honey. Leave it on the bed here, and I’ll do the sewing when I’m home on Thursday.” She stood up, slinging her purse over her shoulder. “I’m happy for you.”
“Thanks,” he repeated, reaching out and brushing her arm with the tips of his fingers. “I’m kind of happy for me, too.”
The week passed, the air getting warmer; sweat soaked through his T-shirt twenty minutes into his shifts at work. He took Tris to get her heartworm test. He mowed the backyard for his mom. Friday morning, he hung his freshly hemmed suit on the hook in the back of the car and threw his duffel bag on the floor beside it, then climbed into the driver’s seat and dialed Doug’s number.
It rang three times before it went to voice mail. Colby took a deep breath before he spoke. “Hey, Doug,” he said. “It’s Colby Moran. I just wanted to follow up with you on that job offer. I’m out of town this weekend”—he liked how that sounded: out of town, like he was an actual adult—“but I’ll be back on Sunday, and I’m available to