Page 85 of Nothing Like the Movies

Then I decided to take summer classes.

Then, last year, I found a Vrbo in Colorado where my parents and I spent Christmas break.

And then I begged them to let me go on spring break with Leo and Campbell.

Rinse and repeat with summer classes.

My goal had never been to stay gone forever, but the anxiety I’d felt at the thought of returning home led me to desperately grab on to any method of avoidance, every single time.

I’d been surprisingly okay with not being able to visit my mom’s grave. I’d grown up, it seemed, because I was now able to talk to my mom (pretty much every day) without being in close proximity to her headstone.

So it didn’t make sense that the moment I touched the letters of her name tonight, engraved in the cold marble, I fell apart.

I was a mess.

I’d been sitting on the ground, on top of a pile of leaves, sobbing my eyes out as I told my mother every tiny thing that’d happened to me since I’d left for college two years ago.

It was mostly good stuff, the happy accounting of the nice things in my life, but telling her about it was making me miss her so much that it was painful.

What is wrong with me?

On top of that, the thought of leaving her again felt just as awful as it had the first time.

Perhaps I was never going to get over it. Never be past it.

I climbed to my feet and dusted off my leggings. It was really dark now, and I needed to get home. I walked up the road, the road I’d sprinted so many times over the years, and it seemed like a lifetime ago. Who was that girl who’d jogged to the cemetery on a daily basis? I couldn’t remember.

Ironically, the last time I’d been here, I hadn’t even visited my mother’s grave.

It’d been for Mr. Bennett’s funeral.

What a terrible day.

It hadn’t been cold, for Nebraska, but it’d rained hard the entire day.

I’d been with Wes in the big funeral car, holding his hand, while his mother sobbed uncontrollably and his sister looked like a lost little bird, staring into space the entire day. He’d been stoic,very un-Wes-like, while he behaved as the head of the family, ushering his mom to her seat under the makeshift awning, answering the pastor’s questions, watching his father’s casket be lowered into the ground.

“No,” I muttered under my breath, walking faster as the autumn breeze picked up and blew my hair in front of my face. The last thing I needed to be doing was thinking about Wes or how awful that day had been, so it didn’t make any sense that I was walking toward Mr. Bennett’s grave.

But I just had to see it.

It was illogical, but I felt the need to visit him while I was there, to at the very least say hello. I knew I was nuts when it came to cemeteries, but I didn’t like the thought of no one visiting him, even if he had been a bit of a jerk 75 percent of the time.

I went straight to the cottonwood tree it was under, the biggest tree in the cemetery and my absolute favorite. Its leaves were probably bright yellow by now, but it was impossible to tell in thedarkness. I ducked underneath its lowest branch and knelt at the grave marker I could barely see.

STUART HAROLD BENNETT

I burrowed my chin into the collar of the jacket as the nameWesley Harold Bennettwhispered through my ears, and before I could process that, I saw the baseballs.

I got out my phone again and turned on the flashlight, because maybe I was seeing things.

Only…nope; they were baseballs.

At the base of the headstone, there were no fewer than fifteen baseballs, each one burrowed into the mud and dirt just enough so they stayed put. I set a finger on one of them, wondering if Wes had left them while knowing it had to have been him.

I leaned down to dust a few leaves off the top of the marble when I saw a key ring on the ground, the metal glinting in the light of the flashlight. I picked it up, and it was a Bruins Baseball key chain with a few keys on it.

They had to be Wes’s keys, right?

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