Page 121 of Divorced from Number Thirty-Eight
“Y-yeah?”
“After curtains.”
“What’s that?” he asks a little while later, his eyes on the charred remains that I think are made up of my bedroom and the room that had been immediately below it?—
My office.
“What do you mean?”
He releases my hand then moves toward the collapsed wall, stepping over the edge.
“Wait,” I tell him. “The engineer?—”
“I’m not going far,” he murmurs. “I’m just—” He stops maybe two feet into the wreckage then crouches, shifting pieces of wood to the side as he searches for something.
Something that has my breath catching when he rises a moment later, his hands covered with soot, his expression unreadable.
Then I’m processing what’s in his hands.
And it all bursts forward again.
Over the last couple of weeks, the raw pain has faded, the tears burning constantly at the backs of my eyes lessening, and somehow as I met with the insurance agent and the engineer, talked through the next steps with the contractors, this hasn’t really felt like my house.
It was a project, a task list full of items to tick off, one after another.
Yes, there were moments it all welled up. Where I remembered.
But not like this.
My mother’s soft hands braiding my hair for a dance recital.
Kicking a soccer ball around the back yard, cheering in victory when I “scored” by slipping the ball past my dad and between the two pillars of the porch we’d designated as the goal.
So many rounds of UNO that the cards were tatty, the colors rubbed off on the edges, their corners dog-eared, their middles rounded from being shuffled time and again.
Gray settles the metal box in my hands, and though it’s not even remotely heavy, the weight of the memories inside have my knees buckling, my body collapsing to the charred ground.
He curses and drops down next to me, but I’m already wrestling with the partially burned and misshaped lid, nails scrabbling as I tear at it, seeking purchase. It’s so swollen, it doesn’t move, or maybe it’s that my moments are so jerky that I can’t make it move.
Either way, after a few more seconds of scrabbling, Gray slips the box from my now soot-covered hands and carefully removes the lid.
“Here,” he murmurs, settling it back into my lap.
My gaze is on his face, on his gentle eyes, the concern in the emerald-green depths intense.
It’s not until he nods slightly that I find the courage to look down.
The red cardboard of the UNO box is the first thing I see and a sob hitches up in my chest as I carefully trace my fingers around the worn edges. I feel a tear slip free, slide partially down my cheek before dropping down, settling on something metal and shiny below it.
I lift the cards out then feel more tears come as I unearth the photo of my parents and me in a silver frame, the three of us smiling like loons, though I’m doing it upside down, my hair spread out below my head as my dad holds me by my ankles.
“You look like your mom,” Gray says softly, shifting so he’s sitting behind me, his legs on either side of mine, his arms wrapping around me.
Steadying me.
Because I’m trembling.
“I know,” I whisper back. “Nana used to say that and I’d lie and say I didn’t believe it.”
