Page 4 of The Cost of Forgetting You

Silence grows taut between us. It takes three stoplights before she replies with simply, “Oh.”

“He’s really sick.” I turn on the blinker for our street. It’s more of a gravel path than anything, with only my grandparents’ house at the end of it. “It sounds like he has what Nana did.” I can’t bring myself to say the word dementia. It feels too raw. Too real.

I expect her to ask anyway. To want that clarification. Part of me even thinks she’ll burst into tears the way I did. After all, they were married for seventeen years. How it ended doesn’t change the fact that for a time he was the center of our world.

“You know you don’t have to go, right?”

My head snaps toward her. I blink twice, not quite comprehending.

“Don’t look at me like that. After everything he did to us?—"

“To you,” I interject without thinking. My fingertips land on my lips, not quite believing they actually formed those words.

“What did you say?”

She’s giving me a chance to course correct. I could lie right now, and we’d both go on pretending the words never slipped out of me in the first place. But I’m so tired all of a sudden. Tired of being angry for both of us.

“After what he did to you. He cheated on you, Mom.” Not me, I want to add. But this much I can hold back.

We’re parked in front of the house. My headlights illuminate the colonial-style home that’s older than both of us combined. It looks more like a museum than a place where two women live. It feels like one, too.

“How could you say something like that to me?” Her voice pitches up, then warbles at the end. She’s going to start crying. And I’m going to end up cleaning up the mess.

A heavy sigh passes over my lips. It’s not worth it to argue with her. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

Her lips thin. She’s studying my face, searching for something. I smile, weary as I am, and she returns it. Content to believe the fragile facade I’ve presented.

She reaches out and strokes my cheek with the back of her hand. Her knuckles are cold. The ornate gold ring she inherited when her mother passed scrapes my skin lightly.

I wince, but she’s already turning to open her door.

“Glad that’s settled.” She retrieves her purse from the floorboard and steps out into the night. She doesn’t wait for a response before closing the door. She’s never had to wonder if I’ll do as she asks.

But as I watch her foot land on the first step of the wide staircase leading up to the porch, I feel something shift within myself. For the first time in so long, I imagine my dad sitting on a different front porch. His Converse scuff against the wooden floorboards, kicking him into motion on the swing he put in for my mom the year his mother moved into the nursing home. I hear cows in the distance. Sweat beads on my forehead. When I step in front of him, he turns, but his gaze shows no sign of recognition.

“I’m going,” I whisper, surprising myself. Because deep down, I know I mean it, even if it’s the one thing my mother could never understand. The one thing she could never forgive.

Because if I stay, I may never forgive myself. And shouldn’t that matter more?

Chapter Two

Delilah

Fly Hollow has a population of 3,112 according to the newly minted sign at the edge of town, but even that number seems a bit of a stretch. With not much more than a small grocery store, a school that you attend from kindergarten all the way to graduation, a church, and copious amounts of farmland, I’m not sure where all those people are hiding. I’d be willing to bet they included cattle in the tally, just to beef up the numbers.

A half-hearted giggle bubbles over my lips. The cluster of cows near the fence line to my right moo as I drive past, as though disapproving of my joke, but I ignore them with a tired smile.

Leaves rustle overhead. A familiar canopy of live oaks blots out the pale blue sky. Birds perched in the sprawling branches call to one another. In the distance a tractor starts up. I turn down the volume on my road-trip playlist and unfurl my arm out the open car window, capturing the hot breeze in my clammy palm.

Homesickness stirs in my chest, adding to the already long list of complicated emotions I have to sort through. It’s all the same. It’s all so hard.

The scent of azaleas blooming along the road filters in, light and sweet, while the words dancing in my mind are anything but.

“He doesn’t deserve your pity.”

A middle-aged man wearing a faded ball cap stands on the weather-beaten deck behind the post office, loading mail into a beat-to-shit Jeep for delivery.

“You’re all that I have; you can’t go.”

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