Page 3 of Three Reasons

Normally when off the clock at a decent hour, I would walk to the nearest bar and enjoy a few cold beers, but I could use a good night’s sleep. It had been ten years since I’d last stepped foot into a classroom, but Monday morning would find me sitting at a desk attentive and ready to take notes.

It was time to prove I could stand apart. Be just as accomplished outside the bedroom as I was in. I dreamed of congratulations. Pop’s eyes shining with a sense of pride like he did whenever he looked at Micah, his firstborn son.

Goal firmly fixed in my brain, I hopped in my car and headed home to my apartment. My future was so goddamned bright I was going to need another pair of Ray-Bans.

Chapter 2

Matteo

Sweat soaked my shirt and shorts. Hell, even my socks squished inside my running sneakers with every slap of rubber on pavement, but I pushed through the muggy air. Only one more mile lay ahead of me until I reached my destination.

Katie’s grave.

I no longer choked up at the thought of my wife’s name or how her strawberry blonde hair used to spread over our pillows while she lay lax beneath me. The memory of her gorgeous and sated green eyes peering up at me while we’d fought to catch our breath didn’t knife my chest anymore.

Reminiscing of past happiness didn’t make me ache.

It was the sense of emptiness and deep longing for what I would never have again that got the best of me.

My feet pounded the road, my breaths harsh and lungs oxygen-starved. Running had become the way I punished my body until I was too tired to function. It also blessedly numbed my brain into quietness. A better choice than alcohol or drugs, but at forty-two, my knees sometimes complained about all the action. The only kind I’d gotten since losing Katie.

The sun had begun to sink, but more than enough daylight hours remained for my weekly visit.

I turned into the cemetery’s entrance, the black wrought iron fence open and as inviting as the meticulously groomed landscape. Towering oaks and maples lined the main road, the smaller branches curving off along either side dotted with shrubs.

The scent of nature bursting with life, a cloying, sweet perfume of flowers, lay heavy in the humid air. My sharp inhales attempting to fill my lungs broke the stillness around me. No chirping birds, chittering critters, or sounds of the main road behind me reached the cemetery’s depths where my wife’s body rested.

I slowed while rounding a bend, hoping for privacy. While I’d come into contact with her family a few times since her funeral, I preferred to keep my distance. Seeing my mother-in-law, a spitting image of my beautiful wife, and being reminded I hadn’t done enough for her precious girl intensified my guilt tenfold.

Even though I panted for oxygen, my breath left in a thankful rush at finding no one near Katie’s corner of the cemetery. A white granite headstone marked where she lay. The bouquet of wildflowers I’d left the week before had wilted, no longer vibrant as she had once been.

A vase of peach-colored roses sat atop the rectangular stone left by her parents. Fresh, so there was no chance they would show up while I visited, thank God.

I sprawled atop Katie’s grave and attempted to catch my breath while staring into the cloudless sky overhead. Lush grass cradled my backside but would make my bare skin itch eventually. I didn’t care. Hands atop my chest, I rested as my inhales and heartbeat slowed until I felt sure my body could melt into the ground and join my wife wherever she’d gone.

While I didn’t believe her spirit was there in the cemetery with me, I hadn’t yet been able to let go of the physical. Knowing her bones rested deep in the earth beneath me gave me a bit of comfort I hadn’t been able to find anywhere else. But I hadn’t been looking, much to my parents’ and sister’s disappointment.

Heaving a sigh, I rolled onto all fours then sat back onto my heels. Crouching in such a position would be a regrettable offense to my legs if I sat for too long, which I usually did.

Katherine Evelyn D’Angelo.

The sight of her etched name didn’t move me as much as the truth of her too-short life in the dates below. Only thirty-six years of age. Taken from my side by bone cancer that had been diagnosed too late to save her. I’d had no choice but to hold her hand as she faded away, her final months nothing but pain and heartache for both of us.

But she’d left me for either peaceful darkness or light, and I was alone to grieve the loss of my sunshine.

I picked a blade of grass and tore it into tiny pieces, each bit of green fluttering quietly to the ground in front of me as I considered the afterlife she’d believed in and the comfort it had given her while she’d lain on her deathbed. No such assurances made my existence without her easier.

Grief counseling had gotten me through the worst, but I still couldn’t find my footing.

Swallowing hard, I glanced around the cemetery, my aloneness intensified by the lack of others visiting the final resting places of their loved ones. How had they moved on? Drawing breath came easily—instinctively. Choosing to get out of bed, to face another day did not.

Some mornings proved a hard struggle.

“Summer is finally over, and classes begin again tomorrow,” I murmured to Katie even though she wouldn’t hear me. “A new semester to fill the hours with the job I still enjoy and my mind with thoughts outside missing you.”

Guilt rose inside me as it always did whenever I took comfort in knowing something would distract me from lingering sadness.

A part of me wanted to live again, but I didn’t have the right to.

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