Page 2 of Ask Your Mom If I'm Real

But even those eventually dried up.

“Papaw,” Bayou said in annoyance. “Are you even listening to me right now?”

I grinned.

Bayou was a lot like my Mary.

So fuckin’ short tempered. All. The. Time.

“What?” I asked, not bothering to pretend I’d been listening.

I hadn’t been.

Out of all my grandchildren, Bayou was by far the one that would’ve noticed. He noticed everything.

Just like my Mary.

“Why are you ignoring this?” he asked.

I touched the last of the ornaments.

“He’s not ignoring it,” Hoax grumbled. “He’s purposefully doing it because he’d rather act like this than think about the fact that he’s dying.”

I was dying.

Thank God.

I was so ready to be home.

With her.

Mary.

I ran the tip of one shaky finger over the edge of the photo-inlaid ornament on the tree beside my chair, my gaze staring longingly at the two healthy people we once had been.

“Tell us about that one.”

I glanced at Phoebe, Bayou’s wife, and grinned.

The girl, just like her father, was a little hellion.

She’d heard the story before.

They all had.

I loved talking about my Mary, though.

“Oh, that grin looks bad.” Pru, Phoebe’s sister as well as Hoax’s wife, laughed.

“Not bad.” I sighed, pulled the ornament off the tree, then took the chair next to the fire.

This place, the exact placement of the furniture and the décor, was frozen in time. The last time it was touched was the day before my Mary died.

It had a layer of dust that likely couldn’t be scraped off with anything but a damn scraper, but it’d stay exactly like it was until the day that it died. Because that table, it was all my Mary. Everything that I loved about her.

I stared at the ornament and smiled.

Then launched into my story.

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