by Piper Lennox
“You’re not insane, Caroline.”
“But,” she goes on, “what if it’s something really special, or sentimental?”
I turn the present in my hands again. “I could open one side and look for you, if you want. Help you decide.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, this tape right here is almost peeled all the way back—I can look at it, tell you if it’s something normal or something sentimental, and then close it back up. You can either let him open it at the party, or later on. When it’s just you two.”
Caroline nods, turning in her chair and pulling one leg to her chest. “Okay. Do it.”
Inside, the party kicks into gear as Bram starts the music and some other kids arrive. We hear the chatter grow, our aunt’s voice telling people to give us a moment; Caroline will be inside, shortly.
Slowly, I lift the edge of the tape. It peels from the paper, and I open the carefully creased corners. All the while, Caroline holds her breath beside me, neither of us sure of what we should hope to find.
Our father died on a Wednesday.
It was fitting, because for all the signs it was about to happen, it still felt like it fell smack-dab in the middle of everything, like a hurdle on a track.
During his last hospital stay, doctors warned us his kidneys had started to fail too, and his heart was strained. Fluid was building. His mind was slipping. Every day, every minute, could be the last.
For the few minutes he was awake and coherent, Dad ordered me to take him home. He didn’t want to die in a hospital.
“But it’s safer here.”
His brow furrowed. “Safer from what?”
He had a point. There was no controlling what would happen next, or when. Just where.
It took six days for him to go. Caroline and I moved our mattresses into the living room, along with Bentley’s crib, and we waited together.
Dad and I never got that big Hollywood resolution. I never got to tell him what a piece of shit he used to be, for treating Mom and me like he did; he never said he was sorry for any of it, except the drinking in a broad sense, apologizing for all he was going to miss.
But we did get something. It was Halloween, and Caroline was taking Bentley to a trunk-or-treat at church with April and her mother. Dad and I spent the evening watching movies; he slept most of the time, while I assured Caroline via text that everything was still as uneventful and safe as when she’d left.
“Ford?”
I muted the television and rushed over the mess of mattresses and pillows on the floor to his bed, a hospital rental that filled the room in the worst way. “What is it?”
He waved his hand, the signal to calm down and sit, so I did.
“How are things—you...Easton?”
This was normal, by now: the fragmented speech he’d adopted when breathing became too difficult, and energy was rare. He slept more than Bentley.
“Good,” I told him. “Great, actually. Guess I’m just older and wiser enough to not mess it up again.”
His laugh was a quick push of air, showing itself more in his eyes than in sound.
“Cigar box.”
“Go get the cigar box? The one in your dresser?”
He wet his lips and nodded.
His and Mom’s bedroom was off-limits to me as a kid. In my teens, I’d learn why: every drawer and panel hid liquor bottles and cigarettes and dip, all of which I stole in incremental amounts throughout high school.
All that was gone, now. Caroline and I came in here frequently to get Dad’s clothes, but the room still carried that shouldn’t-be-in-here feeling, and I found myself rushing to find the cigar box in the top drawer of his dresser, heart rate climbing like I was about to get caught.
When I brought it to him, he opened the lid and shut his eyes. His fingers felt through the contents as though he’d memorized them in darkness, and sight would only be a hindrance.
To me, which objects were junk and which were special was a mystery: the box held a couple broken watches of my grandfather’s, a horseshoe that used to hang over our doorway in Filigree, old truck keys, matchbooks, and a rodeo belt buckle he won as a kid.
He handed me something. His skin felt like tissue paper when I took it.
It was a ring box.
“This was Mom’s.” I recognized the set as soon as I opened it: plain gold band, oval diamond in the middle, and two flanking stones on the wedding band, wrapped to fit the engagement ring.
“She wanted...you to have—have it.” It was the first complete sentence he’d said in weeks, but it left me more confused than the fragments.
“Me? Why not Caroline?”
“Caroline...locket,” he reminded me. Caroline was given our mother’s gold locket, passed down from our great-great-grandmother, when she turned twelve. Truthfully, the locket was far more sentimental than this ring set, and I knew Caroline would choose the necklace over it in a heartbeat. It still felt strange, though, to think Mom wanted me to have this.
“She said,” Dad went on, “ ‘Reese, only...give this to Ford...if I’d like—’”
He coughed, the sentence cut short, but I finished: “...if Mom would have liked the girl I wanted to marry?”
Dad nodded. He was exhausted from even that little activity, but said, “She loved Easton.”
“Yeah.” I took a breath, surprised at how choppy it felt. Like suddenly, I was the sick one. “She did, didn’t she?”
“New bands,” he advised. “And ask Jason.”
“It’s only been, like, five months,” I reminded him, but he waved his hand again as if to say, You know what I mean.
The weird part was, I did: whenever I was ready, this was the plan I was to follow.
The day of his funeral was unseasonably warm, with only a fleeting kind of chill in the air that made you simultaneously regret wearing your coat and wonder if you needed another.
Hillford funerals were like family reunions for the town, the one event that only locals attended, out-of-town relatives aside. No tourists. No strangers. The church was filled to capacity. Every seat and inch of standing room was claimed.
“All these people are here for Dad?” I whispered to Easton, when the pastor was still giving his opening spiel. “Most people didn’t even know him.”
“But a lot of them know you,” she whispered back, “and Caroline. That’s who they’re here for.”
My eulogy was originally so short that, when I let the guys read it for feedback, Bram joked, “I didn’t know you wrote haikus.” Truth was, I wasn’t sure what to say about my dad: he loved his family, but had a hard time showing it. A really hard time. He died with a lot of regrets. The end.
But that morning, while Caroline and I sat at the Lawrences’ kitchen table and drank coffee in our church clothes, my little speech suddenly seemed incomplete. I’d asked April for a pen and moved to the porch, scrawling line after line while Easton read over my shoulder.
When I was done, I handed it to her and said, “Edit it for me,” but she pushed it back.
“It’s already perfect.”
So here I was, finishing the original portion of my eulogy, tongue sticking to my mouth when I reached the rest. I took a sip of the tiny bottled water the funeral director had given me. It was warm, but it helped.
“When he moved our family here to Hillford,” I said, voice gathering a slight echo in the microphone, “Dad told me we were starting over. Turns out, things aren’t like that. You can’t really ‘start over,’ acting like what happened to you before...just disappeared. You have to face it, because the truth is—it can’t be undone.”
I paused. The pews creaked as people shifted their weight, nodding. Someone in the back coughed.
“What you can do, though,” I went on, “is start again.”
My notes fluttered under my exhale. It was the closest I would come to crying that day, until I was alone in his garage, running my hand over the workbenches and tools he’d left me.
“I u
sed to think Hillford was this...this weird snapshot. The same thing, the same people, day after day. But it isn’t. It changes constantly, even if we can’t see it—even if a change happens so slowly, no one notices it. The only thing that stays exactly the same, here, is that the town keeps going. Every single day is another start.
“I think my father spent a lot of time trying to start over, and that was his biggest mistake. He buried his regrets and tried to run from them, instead of facing them. It was only near the end, ironically, that he seemed to realize he could start again, instead. He couldn’t go back in time and undo his drinking, but he could stop and try to lengthen the days he had left. He couldn’t raise us any better or differently, because that time had passed, too—but he could face those mistakes, those regrets, and use them to be a great grandpa. Which he was.
“So that’s what moving here really gave us: the chance to start again. And that’s what my sister and I are going to do tomorrow. It’s what all of us do, every single day, after we lose someone we love.”
I paused and looked at the faces around me. All of them familiar, a handful far more so than the rest. Beside me, Caroline took my hand and squeezed. Easton put her hand on my shoulder, steadying me, a rush of cool blue in this final red, burning moment.
“We take a breath,” I finished. “We get up. And we keep going.”
The day after Reese McLean’s funeral, I delivered twins in Filigree, just a mile from one of Ford’s family’s old properties.
“Oh, sure, we remember them,” the wife nodded, as breezy as could be. She was, by far, my most baffling client to date: six kids already, including another set of twins, completely unfazed that their household now included ten people and five dogs. Of course, living on a farm helped: plenty of space for canines—and children—to run around, which was exactly what her kids did, the entire time she was in labor. Her husband made everyone grilled cheese for lunch, his Bluetooth speaker blasting Garth Brooks for most of the day.
She didn’t want yoga or meditation, or mindful breathing, or a birthing pool. All she wanted, she insisted, was to clean.
“Cleaning calms me down,” she’d told me, when I first drove out to their farm for a consultation. “I think anything that keeps you calm during labor—well, that’s worth putting in your birth plan. Don’t you?”
I was doubtful. But lo and behold, the morning she went into labor, I arrived at their home to find her scrubbing gray fingerprints from the stairway wall.
“The kids drag their little hands along this wall, instead of using the banister. Drives me insane. Do me a favor, get that baseboard by the door?”
So, for the first time ever, I spent a lot of a client’s birth...cleaning her house.
It must have worked on the calming front, though, because she delivered both of her baby girls with ease that afternoon, in her spotless bedroom. I caught the first baby. She caught the second.
While she fed the girls in tandem (another feat she made look deceptively effortless), I packed up the last of my supplies and asked how long she’d lived in Filigree. When she said she was born and raised here, I brought up the McLeans.
“They had a boy, right? He was a few grades behind me.”
“Ford.” I nodded. “He’s my boyfriend.”
It still felt strange to say it, even though we’d been together—officially, labels and all—for almost half a year by that point. But it also felt right.
On the drive from Filigree, I played Dolly Parton’s “Nine to Five.” The second line, in particular, suited the mood well: the mother of that family had her work cut out for her now, with eight kids underfoot—but plenty of ambition to get her through.
When I was little, the song played in bright, cherry red, with Dolly’s twang weaving flashes of gold right through the center. Happy colors, bold and brave. It was how I imagined the mother’s voice would have looked, too.
When I got back to my parents’ house, I showered and changed before crossing through the gate to the McLeans’. It occurred to me, as the gate thunked shut, that I wouldn’t be able to call it that much longer. Caroline and Ford were discussing the sale of the house with their aunt at the funerary reception, in fact. Tying up loose ends, cleaning messes: there was something calming in those actions. Even if they were hard to do.
“Dad was underwater the day he bought this place,” Ford said, when I came through their kitchen door and asked how the realtor meeting went. He kissed me hello quickly, then slid me some notes and legal papers I couldn’t decipher. “His rent-to-own agreement was a crock of shit.”
“Crock of poop,” Caroline and I corrected at the same time, pointing to Bentley in his high chair. Ford gave a hard sigh.
“Well, the extra poopy part here,” he spat, “is that Dad still owed more on this place than it’s worth. We can’t afford the difference.”
I looked over his notes. “Wait, where are you getting this number from? Your house is worth way more than that.”
“Not according to the appraiser.”
“But it’s virtually identical to my parents’ house.”
“Your parents’ house,” Ford said patiently, “has a renovated kitchen and semi-open floor plan, not to mention a new roof. It’s not exactly comparable.”
I sat back, out of advice.
Until I noticed the tool set on the countertop, left there from when Ford fixed the garbage disposal last week.
“What if we renovate it ourselves?”
Ford laughed. Caroline’s eyebrows rose, though, and I knew I had an ally.
It took many months, a little capital, and a lot of help from Tanner and the good Samaritans of Hillford who knew how to handle power tools—but the McLean house sold, for a profit, on the first day of spring the following year. Ford and Caroline cheered right there in the yard as the realtor added the “Sold” magnet to the sign, until all of us rushed outside to see what was going on.
“It sold!” Caroline called, and flung open the gate so we could join them for a toast. All we had was some sugar-free sparkling cider Mom bought my father for New Year’s; he’d left it untouched out of spite. Good enough.
“All the painting,” I sighed with relief, after we’d cheered some more and run barefoot through their grass, celebrating the warm weather as much as the sale. We were now sitting on the lawn, cupping ladybugs in our hands and setting them on Bentley’s baby swing. He tried, unsuccessfully, to grab each one before they took flight again.
“All the cleaning,” Caroline added.
“You’re both wrong.” Ford waved to my parents over the fence as they took my grandmother back home for the evening. “The worst part was that stupid granite island you made me install.”
“Got the house sold, didn’t it?”
We lay back and talked until the sun went down and the stars came out. Caroline took Bentley inside, wishing us goodnight from the porch. We called back through the soft purple dusk.
Ford pushed up on his elbow and looked at me. “Thank you. For all your help with the house. It’s such a relief to have this place gone.”
“You’re not sad at all?”
He shrugged and stuck a piece of grass between his teeth. “A little, maybe. There’s some good memories here.” He paused. “The bad ones are some of the strongest, though. But besides that, it’s really that the house doesn’t feel like ours. I mean, Caroline only visited Dad a couple times a month once she lived with Aunt Tessa, and didn’t move back until a month or so before I did. So neither of us feels like...like we have ownership of it.”
“It has seemed different, since your mom passed.”
“Exactly. And with Dad gone, it doesn’t feel like the same house at all. Plus, objectively speaking—it’s way more space than the two of us need.” He glanced back at the darkened house, the only light coming from Bentley’s nursery. “Some other family could use it a lot more.”
“It’s going to be so weird. Looking next door and...it not being you guys there.” My hand, skim
ming through the grass, felt something in the dirt. I dug it up with my thumbnail: a bottle cap, the color polished away with time. “We won’t be neighbors.”
“Yep,” he said. Just as easily as could be.
“That doesn’t make you a little upset? A little...I don’t know, nostalgic?”
“No.” Ford leaned back and reached into his pocket. He fished something out and palmed it to me, smirking in the rising moon. “I don’t care that we won’t be neighbors, anymore.”
I opened my hand. Inside, he’d placed a house key.
“We’ll be roommates,” he said, winking. He sat up and touched my face, the way he always did before another time-slowing, Technicolor kiss. “Will you move in with me?”
Somewhere, in the distance ahead, I thought I could suddenly hear cicadas, the soundtrack of our summers, even though it was far too early. Maybe it was just stuck in my head, like a song.
“Yes,” I whispered, a laugh suddenly ringing out of my chest as he drew me closer in the broken silence and kissed me.
“She doesn’t want him to open it now?”
Ford shakes his head and pours me another cup of soda. “I don’t know what the gift is, exactly, but the box looked old. So it’s probably something sentimental. She doesn’t want to cry in front of the guests.”
“I get that,” I say slowly, as Bentley abandons one of his presents to play with the box it came in, “but I just wouldn’t have that kind of patience.”
“Says the woman who gets paid to wait with clients through hours of labor.”
“Key words: gets paid. You can have plenty of patience, for the right price.”
Ford laughs and loops his arm around my waist, a motion so smooth I almost don’t notice his fingertips pressed into my hipbone until my heart kicks up.
“God, get a room,” Bram mutters as he passes. Ford taps his cup before he can drink, almost making him spill.
When he’s gone, I nudge Ford. “Not a bad idea, though.”
“I thought so, too. But I can’t let him know that.”
