Page 3 of Four Weekends and a Funeral

Rachel pulls me closer by my forearm, gripping so desperately pain shoots to my fingertips. “Sam didn’t want my mom to know he broke up with you. She’d been on him about ‘getting serious’ and ‘settling down,’ and she likes you. You’re stable.” She means dull. “Despite all his achievements, the only thing that matters to my parents right now is that he was finally settling down with a nice girl.” Her voice puts nice girl in scare quotes. Whether she’s objecting to nice girls in general or attributing the term to me, no one’s asking follow-up questions.

I tilt my head to the side, trying to process this bizarre turn of events. “You want me to…pretend?”

She nods her head as if still convincing herself. “It’s one day. You guys only dated for a minute, and when the grief fog lifts, they’ll forget all about you. I—we just need you to be ‘the girlfriend’ today. Please.” She swallows the last word, but I hear it all the same. Tears pool at the corners of her eyes, and she blinks them away. The sight of her tortured expression pulls at a painful rock in my chest, and I bite on the insides of my cheeks to keep from crying too.

The thought of Sam worrying that his bold, undaunted life wasn’t enough cuts me in a way I can’t explain. I want to tell him I admired his unsettled life, but I can’t. I can’t tell him anything ever again, and neither can this despairing woman in front of me.

But pretending is something I can do.

I peel Rachel’s hand from my arm and offer her a smile I hope is encouraging. “Of course. Whoever you need me to be.”

•••

As far as funerals go, this one’s vibrating with energy. The church is packed in the way it only is for Easter Sunday, Christmas Eve, and the funerals of young people. Mara and I are directed to a pew near the front, and I realize too late the usher has provided us prime mourner real estate.

We’re in the second row, directly behind the immediate family, mixed in with cousins and lifelong family friends. As a discarded summer fling, I brought reinforcement and dressed for the back pew to hide beside former coworkers and high school acquaintances. Instead, I’m up front on full display as Sam Lewis’s Current Girlfriend (capital C, capital G).

Rachel delivers the eulogy. She starts with childhood stories of tree climbing and broken arms. Sam’s early wanderlust and his adrenaline-junkie thirst for adventure. His penchant for taking spur-of-the-moment vacations and wilderness hikes without a word to anyone. A frustrating attribute in life sounds so charming in death. I recognize the man she describes as Sam, but he’s flattened—a flawless sum total of sweet stories and wacky anecdotes.

I always thought Sam was living precisely the right life. He was effervescent and spontaneous, always wanting to try a new spot, always leaving for an exciting trip. He was zero to one hundred in every facet of life. He was impulsive and did things that scared him “for the story.” If anyone was really living, it was Sam.

He introduced me to his parents and invited me on a two-week backpacking trip through the Patagonian Andes after only a few dates, as if that were a completely ordinary way to approach a new relationship.

I thought being with him would make me adventurous in a hurry, but it just made me tired. I hoped I’d eventually acclimate to his lifestyle, like a climber adjusting to changing altitude, but it only got more exhausting and difficult to breathe. Finally, he cut me loose.

Sometimes I don’t think you even like hiking or parasailing or rock climbing, he said when he ended it. I want to know you, but it’s like you’re pretending to be someone else.

I feel the weight of everyone’s eyes on my back as the grief swims beneath my breastbone, but my sorrow isn’t what it looks like. I miss Sam as my friend, as the guy who burned hot and bright like the sun, everyone helpless against his gravitational pull.

After “On Eagle’s Wings,” I perk up at the introduction of the next reader, biting back an inappropriate smirk when the priest directs “Adam Berg, Sam’s best friend” to the pulpit. Sam’s oldest friend and college roommate, the mythical Adam Berg, is known to me—and now only me—as the North Shore Grump.

A character in many of Sam’s stories, Adam lives two hours away in Duluth, and though I’ve been on countless group chats with the man for last-minute invitations to events and spontaneous weekend trips, we’ve never met. Adam was always quick to respond with a curt “Can’t” or “Nope.” (My responses were often rejections as well, but far more regretful and long-winded.) As with Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster, it seemed doubtful I’d ever catch a glimpse of Sam’s supposed “closest friend.”

When he finally approaches the lectern, I’m surprised. He looks nothing like the aspiring wilderness influencers Sam surrounded himself with. It’s not that Adam’s not good-looking—he is—but he’s a different brand of “unkempt handsome white guy.” Where Sam had the easy, windswept attractiveness of a man dismounting a Jet Ski, Adam manages to look like he hasn’t slept in days but also just woke up. His rumpled dark brown hair and beard are a bit overgrown, like he’s missed a haircut or three. Partway through Philippians 4:8, he fights with the starchy shirt collar under his charcoal suit, which I’m certain is either borrowed or has been sitting at the bottom of his closet since a wedding years ago.

At the final sentence, he peers into the packed church, and his eyes pierce mine like a tranquilizer dart, sending pins and needles down my spine. Before it can render me boneless, his look transforms into a puzzling combination of recognition and embarrassment, like the expression of someone who stole a stranger’s parking spot only to share an elevator with them five minutes later.

My insides clench, but before I can make sense of his expression, the phone I’m certain I silenced chirps in my coat pocket. In the millisecond it takes to lift my eyes back to the front, his gaze has drifted away. He steps down from the pulpit without a second glance.

I turn toward Mara to exchange telepathic looks of Did you see that? and Seriously, what is his deal? But she’s flipping through her hymnal, unaffected by the stare of the elusive Adam Berg.

I take advantage of the uncomfortable lull in the proceedings and wake up my phone. The alert that broke through the quiet settings stares back at me:

Message from the Future: Get in a hike this weekend with Sam!! Chile is everything you imagined, but only because you put in the training back in October!

A guttural sound wrenches itself from my throat, reverberating throughout the church. I feel the weight of every set of eyes on me.

“That’s the girlfriend,” someone explains among the echoey chorus of sympathetic murmurs.

Because now I am “the girlfriend.” Sam Lewis is stuck with me—even in death.

2

The Luncheon

Sam used to leave reminders in my calendar when we were dating. He called them “Messages from the Future.” It was part of the life philosophy he promoted on his motivational Instagram platform—the inspirational messages captioning photos of his sharp jawline admiring sunsets on Kilimanjaro.

If I casually mentioned wanting something, it became a message. They were written from the point of view of my future self, saying things like, “You started training for the marathon today, and now you’re killing it!” or “I’m so grateful you bought a ticket to Croatia today, because you’re there right now and it’s breathtaking.”

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