Page 44 of The Cadence
“I remember.” He had to clear his throat after he spoke, because it was clogged up from disuse and maybe emotion, too. “I can’t believe I let that happen, even if I was an idiot back then.”
“You weren’t, and I was glad that I could help when…anyway, I don’t mean when I was with you. I drove by a few times when you were gone.”
“Oh.” He stopped the car and put it in park.
“I’m sorry. That probably brings up bad memories of other people doing the same thing,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter now. Let’s go in together,” he told me, and got out.
The Bodines had lost their ancestral home, which one of them had built after the Civil War and they had occupied until their money problems drove them out. I believed that his grandfather finally sold it or gave it up to the bank and afterwards, the family had downsized. This place was about half the square footage of their original mansion, which still made it very, very large, especially since only Will’s mother and father had lived in it for so many years. From the front, it looked just like the others on this beautiful street: freshly painted and with a large, neat lawn and flowering plants that my grandmother would have admired a lot.
Will walked up to the front and opened the door with a key from his ring. “Mama?” he called, and she came to the top of the stairs and slowly walked down, just like in a movie.
“William,” she said, and they hugged. She looked like him in a way, with the same dark hair and beautiful grey eyes. But she was small and delicate, like a little bird, and he loomed over her. So did I, when she turned to me.
“Who is this?” she asked her son.
“I let you know that Calla was coming with me,” he answered. “You must remember her.”
“Hello. I’m very sorry,” I said, and I sounded just like all the people who had spoken those words to me, not too long before.I swallowed hard because the memory, as well as the stress of all this, started to make me get tearful…and this wasn’t my pity party, because I was here for Will just like he had been there when I needed him, too.
“Oh. Thank you.” Ophelia Bodine turned and walked down the hall, her steps dragging a little, and we both followed her.
The rest of the night was terrible. Will planned out the funeral, asking his mother questions while she sat on the couch and cried. He held her hand while she looked at his father’s bed, where she’d found him, and cried. Then I fixed something to eat and she sat at the kitchen table that I remembered, and cried more. By the time we left for the hotel where he liked to stay when he was at home, I was exhausted. It was probably how Miss Mozella and the rest of my grandma’s friends had felt about dealing with me, too. At the time, I’d thought that I was handling everything so well and that I had been comforting them, but now I recognized how they had also held me up.
“We probably should have stayed in the house with her.”
Will hadn’t spoken in a while and I jumped in surprise. “What?” I asked.
“I wasn’t thinking when I made the hotel reservation,” he explained. “I never spent time at the house when my father was there, but we could have now.” He paused. “I don’t know if there are even beds in the guest rooms anymore. My old room is empty because I took everything out when I left for college.”
“Do you want to turn around? You can cancel the hotel and I can bunk with Miss Mozella,” I suggested.
“Did you tell them all that you’re here?”
“I did.” They were thrilled, of course, but I also related to him how sorry they were for his loss.
“Right, my loss. No, I think it’s better that we go to the hotel.”
By this point, it was very, very late. I watched him check behind the car several times and I watched his hands grip the wheel just like mine did when I was worried. That was why, as we rode the elevator I’d liked so much before, I suggested that he might want to get right into bed. Tomorrow promised to be a very long day.
“Grief makes you really tired,” I noted.
“Is that what happened to you?” He opened the door to his room, which was right next to a separate one he had rented for me.
“At first, it was like I had weights hanging on my body,” I said. “My muscles ached like I’d been working out really hard, but I hadn’t done anything except sit in her rocking chair and cry.”
Will looked at me and then opened his bag. He retrieved a box of tissues, because he’d thought to bring his own. He silently handed them to me.
“I apologize for doing this. You don’t need to take care of me,” I told him as I wiped my eyes. “That was smart thinking to pack these. You and your mom will both need them.”
“No, I won’t. I brought them because I thought that all this would make you sad, because of the parallel to what just happened with your grandmother. I won’t need any for myself because I wrote the guy off a long time ago.”
“The guy?”
“My father,” he answered. He sat down on his bed. “You said you were sorry, but I’m not. I won’t cry over the loss, because I didn’t experience one. He was an asshole for my entire life. I learned very young not to depend on him, not to trust him, and not to give one single shit about his behavior.”
I nodded. “I can understand that.”
