Page 27 of Ladybirds

Sara knows the words are meant to bring comfort, but they only sharpen the pain. All those months they could have had together, gone. So what if it would have pushed her graduation back? What’s a half a year in the face of just a few more months making memories in Oma’s kitchen, laughing when the flour smudged their cheeks?

Janice’s aged fingers slip away from her own to rifle through the remaining papers. “The house is to be sold, the profits to go to you on your twenty-third birthday.”

A little less than a year; just after she’s due to graduate. She’s not entirely sure how she feels about that—Oma’s house has always felt like home. “Does it have to be?”

“Sold?” When Sara nods, Janice sighs. “Yes, dear. Gertie was very clear. She had big dreams for you, honey, and she knew you wouldn’t find them in the likes of this place.”

There is no funeral, not in the traditional sense, but Janice does organize a Celebration of Life.

They set up tables in the garden, drape fairy lights between the house and the gnarled oak. It’s smaller than Oma deserves, but the people who come are the people she cherished, and Sara thinks that’s just how she’d want it. A handful of people, laughing and toasting a life well-lived under a late summer sky.

Jen hugs her when they arrive, the embrace so tight it’s borderline painful. It feels good—grounding. “I’m so sorry.” Her voice hitches, cracks. She grew up having play days and sleepovers under Oma’s roof—shares many of the same fond memories that Sara holds dear. The grief she wears is as real as her own. “Oma was an amazing lady.”

Sara tries very, very hard to resist the instinct to flinch at her use of past tense. She nods, throat tight. Over Jen’s shoulder, Miles greets her with a sad, empathetic smile, and Sara is reminded that it was just last year that she joined him on the grass for his brother’s funeral—the ritualistic rifle fire loud and the folded flag heavy in his mother’s arms. She remembers the bitterness Miles spat later, fueled by whiskey and grief, that the army had some nerve to take his brother after taking his leg.

Then, Sara couldn't find the right words to help him. Now, she understands that there are none. The truth is that none of it is fair.

It’s not fair that Miles lost his leg in a war he had only agreed to serve in as a medic, only to lose his only brother six years later to the front lines.

It isn’t fair that she lost the love of her life to a freak accident and a miracle turned sour, only to lose her grandmother to death just when the tear in her heart was beginning to heal.

That night, Sara sleeps in the spare bedroom Oma always called hers. Her dollhouse, built by her grandfather’s careful hands when she was born, sits in the corner. Tomorrow she’ll have to sort through Oma’s life, treasure by treasure, and decide what she can keep and what she’ll have to let go.

The digital clock on the nightstand illuminates the room, the numbers changing faster than she can find sleep. She stares at the dollhouse, admiring the tiny shingles and hand painted shutters, and knows there’s no space for it in her tiny apartment.

(It doesn’t stop her from wanting it anyway.)

She takes as much as she can, unwilling to part with all of it. The bed frame from her old room, the mustard velvet couch from the living room—but it’s not the large items she finds herself in danger of taking too much of, but the seemingly infinite amount of odds and ends she has a memory attached to. She combs through the house with a diligence that borders on frenzy, her pile of treasures growing faster than she can box.

Here is Oma’s favorite pie plate she would use almost exclusively despite having three others; there is the embroidered artwork that hung in the bathroom for as long as Sara’s been alive. She takes the bundt cake pan, the faded coffee tin full of tea bags. Sara’s never crocheted in her life and has no use for her grandmother’s hooks, but she takes those too—the wooden handles shiny from use. It takes her at least five minutes to talk herself out of taking the yarn as well.

She packs up every single one of the photos; strips them from the frames and presses them neatly between the pages of Oma’s albums for safekeeping. All in all, the pictures take up two moving boxes. Sara knows they will likely take up a cringeworthy amount of space under her bed, but she can’t bring herself to regret it. Photos and yarn were the only things Oma hoarded. Sara can’t rationalize the second, but she can justify the first.

Miles’ hand rests on her shoulder, startling her. She’s not sure when she stopped moving or how long she’s been staring through Oma’s decorative set of wedding china, but the worry lining his forehead gives her a pretty good idea.

“You good?”

A question with ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. Miles has always been good about offering an easy way out of difficult conversations. If he were anyone else, Sara might have lied as easily as breathing, but she knows Miles. Trusts him to know when to push and when to let the conversation die. “No,” she says, her smile as weak as her heart, “but I’ll live.”

Miles nods. Behind the frames of his thick-rimmed glasses, his eyes soften with sympathy. He gives her shoulder a soft, reassuring squeeze before dropping his hand. “Yeah, you will.” Miles nods toward the china she had been staring at. “This coming, too?”

Biting her lip, Sara stares longingly at the displayed plates—eyes tracing over the sweeping floral pattern and wondering if she even likes it (or if it’s just her love for Oma bleeding into everything she owned). “I have nowhere to put it,” she murmurs, regret tightening her chest. She tries to tell herself she won’t miss it, will probably never think of it again. It’s just that the pressure of knowing what to take and what to leave feels like a game of dodgeball she’ll never win. No matter what, she’s sure to return home with bruises.

She still hasn’t been able to make a decision on the dollhouse.

Wordlessly, Miles opens up the display case, pulling out a plate and wrapping it in newspaper.

Sara watches in painful silence until she realizes he’s putting it in one of the boxes labeled as ‘keep’. “Miles—“

“Keep it,” he says, eyes warm and expression soft. “Keep all of it, if you want. If you don’t have space at your place, there’ll be space in ours.”

Sara shakes her head. “It’s not fair to ask you to store all this just because I can’t make up my mind.”

“So go through it in a month, or a few months. Or a year. Life’s too short for regrets, and if you force yourself to leave this behind now, you’re going to regret it.” He gestures towards the plates, eyebrows raised. “Take it. We already have a spare room full of stuff. What’s a few more boxes?”

Her throat tightens and her eyes burn; gratitude as poignant as the loss. Stiffly, she nods. Miles ruffles her hair, the way he knows she equally hates and loves, before reaching for another plate.

The house is bare, nothing but skin for walls and windows for eyes. A corpse.

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