Page 38 of Elevating Eve

How could he possibly find the words and the strength to express how much Eve meant to him when his heart was breaking?

Lucy looked up at him for several seconds, a searching look in her eyes. He stared back impassively, not sure what else to do.

Sighing, she stepped into the closet and turned on the light. “I need to take Orson’s suit to the funeral home this afternoon. You know more about suits than the rest of us combined, so I thought you should probably choose.”

Jonathan froze on the threshold of the closet, staring at the row of suits behind his mother. She couldn’t be serious. No way could she really be asking him to choose the suit his dad would be buried in.

No, no, no, no, no.

She began examining the suits one at a time, sliding each one down the rack when she finished with it. “I talked to the girls last night, and we all think you should give the eulogy,” she went on, completely oblivious to what was going on behind her.

Panic exploded through him again, making his chest so tight and painful that he couldn’t breathe.

“The Episcopal funeral service usually doesn’t have one, but Uncle Warren is Catholic, and he got really upset when I told him. He’s already furious we’re doing it at our church instead of his.” She rolled her eyes. “So I talked to the priest, and she said it was okay. You’re the best public speaker by far, and you’re the only one who will really do it justice.”

What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck...

Those words spiraled through his mind again and again, pushing out his ability to think.

“Jonathan.”

He jerked back as if he’d been slapped. His mom had half-shouted his name, and he got the impression this wasn’t the first time she said it. Blinking several times until his vision came back into proper focus, he drew in a shaky breath. “I’m sorry.” He wasn’t sure what else to say.

Lucy placed a soft hand on his shoulder. “Sweetheart, you have nothing to be sorry for. This isn’t easy for any of us.”

And yet, he was the only one completely losing his shit. How could he not? Why was everyone else so much calmer about this?

“I talked to him that afternoon, only hours before...” Jonathan pushed out a jagged sigh. He couldn’t bring himself to finish the sentence. “I don’t understand what happened. He was perfectly fine. He’s always been perfectly fine.”

Orson Hale had one of those magical immune systems where he hardly ever got sick, even so much as a cold. He played squash twice a week and had been obsessed with his Peloton bike ever since the shutdown in 2020. Nothing about this made any fucking sense.

Tears glistened in his mom’s eyes, making him feel like a complete asshole. Dealing with his bullshit was the last thing she needed right now.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, inching around her in the packed closet and moving toward the row of suits. “Let me take a look at these.” He reached for the first one, ready to do this for her no matter how much it tore him up inside, but her hand on his arm stopped him.

“Sweetheart. Look at me.”

Swallowing down the lump once again threatening to choke him, he turned.

“Sometimes these things just don’t make sense. You hear about vegans who run marathons getting cancer in their forties. Then there are people like your great-grandfather, who smoked two packs a day and basically stayed drunk for the last forty years of his life, and he died peacefully in his bed at ninety-three. There’s only so much we can control.”

“But I’m not ready for this,” Jonathan admitted, finally making himself say the words out loud. For the first time, hot tears splashed against his cheeks. “I’m not remotely fucking ready.”

Lucy’s face crumpled for only a moment or two, but she wiped the new tears away, standing tall and strong before him. “I’m not either,” she whispered. “But we have to figure out how to get ready pretty damn quick, sweetheart, because God didn’t give us a choice on this one.”

This time, his body knew what to do all on its own. He wrapped his arms around his mother, holding her close as they both gave in to their tears.

Jonathan still had no idea how to handle any of it by the time people began arriving at the church four days later. But with Eve’s help, he at least figured out how to pretend enough to get through it.

“No one expects you to act like everything’s okay,” she told him earlier that morning, as he donned one of the suits Zach overnighted from Vermont. “So you need to stop trying, or you’re going to completely break.”

“Don’t they, though?” Jonathan said, flipping up the collar of his stiff, white shirt, looping a somber grey tie behind his neck. “I’m supposed to give the eulogy. The fuckingeulogy. If I screw this up, they’ll never forgive me.”

When his hands couldn’t muster the fine motor skills to knot his tie for the fifth day in a row, she stepped in and did it for him. “I gave the eulogy at my dad’s funeral, too,” she said, voice haunted by the long-ago memory. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

“How did you get through it?” Desperation clung to the question—a plea to save him from what he was sure would end up being the biggest failure of his life.

She thought about it as she finished adjusting his tie and popped his collar down into place. When at last she answered, she sounded almost wistful. “I realized I wasn’t giving the eulogy for other people. I was giving it for me.”

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