Page 5 of Every Beautiful Mile

I close my eyes. I don’t need to look at him to know what I’ll see. The conversation with Doug proves every point he’s trying to make.

He doesn’t miss a beat as he sits back down and picks up right where he left off.

“When’s the last time you went to that market you love in Homestead to get ingredients for a new cocktail?” he demands.

I drop my head forward and huff out a breath. He knows how long it’s been, and I refuse to answer.

“What about the kids? When was the last time you, Finn, and Marin did something together? Had fun?”

I push my chair back from the table and jerk to a stand. I am not talking about the kids.

I hold up my clipboard. “I have to finish taking inventory.”

Much to my dismay, he follows me. “I know Gabe invites you out on the boat with him, Jenny, and the boys. You never go, Nelly.”

I shake my head and round to the back of the bar, where I immediately start counting liquor bottles. He sticks to me like flypaper—annoying and relentless.

His voice lowers and there’s a hint of sadness in it. “I’m worried. We’re all worried.”

My eyes flick to his, and he somehow looks older than he did minutes before. Concern fills every line of his sixty-seven-year-old face.

I soften just slightly. “I’m alive and well, Dad.”

I hold my arms up as evidence.

He frowns at the oversized gray sweatshirt that hangs sadly from my arms, baggy from a year of my grief-induced withering away.

“You don’t have fun.” He says it like it’s a fact, and it makes my entire body tense.

I wish I was that damn pelican.

“Travis was the fun one,” I argue.

“Travis wasn’t the only fun one.”

I don’t budge—he’s wrong.

Travis was the better half of every good time. The kids used to turn to him when they wanted to do something adventurous, not me. I’m just Mom—drinking wine and laughing nervously from the sidelines as they make bottle rockets and snorkel with sharks.

Three hundred and eighty-three days after he left, and the only thing I know how to be is empty. Fun is a pipe dream.

“Your ideas are what made the bar what it is, but the last year…” he pauses, clears his throat, and adds, “I don’t know what I’d do if I lost your mother. I’m just saying maybe it’s time to take some steps. Go through his things. Let yourself have fun. Let your kids have fun with you. Let him go a little. He wouldn’t want this.”

Let him go?

The words hit like an anvil to the sternum, making all my emotions bleed together.

The weird thing about grief is that one minute, I feel fine, and the next it’s as though my heart is being scraped across a cheese grater.

Peace. Pain. Peace. Pain.

It’s a sick cycle that doesn’t make sense. Time hasn’t made it stop, just created longer intervals between the two extremes. The moments of peace will always be followed by devastating blows of pain. Even knowing that doesn’t prepare me for how abruptly horrible it feels. How easily my heart can be shredded, over and over again.

“Your kids need you, Nelly,” he says, softer this time.

I close my eyes and try to rein in whatever feeling is thrashing wildly beneath my ribs.

“I don’t know how to give them that.” It’s the most honest thing I can say.

---