Chapter 27
CHAPTER 27
Theo
D eath was the only life guarantee that humans had. We weren’t promised riches and fortune, or fame, love, or success, yet we were all promised a final chapter. A novel’s ending would find all of us one day, and that was the only promise made to us when we took our first breath on this planet.
With life came death. Still, that didn’t make it any easier.
The celebration of PaPa’s life took place at my grandparents’ home. It was nothing like a regular funeral. There weren’t sad stories being shared around or sad songs being sung. It was more so a grand celebration of life. Bright, vibrant colors. A tie-dye T-shirt-making station out back by the water. Whiskey shots. A lot of whiskey shots. Irish music and dancing throughout the place. PaPa always said when his time came, he wanted people to celebrate, to sing and shout, and that was exactly what everyone did. Even with heavy hearts, we still gave PaPa the send-off he requested.
His final request was to be cremated and then spread around within all the elements. “ That way, you all can see me and feel me within everything ,” he told Grandma and me once at our nightly dinners.
Grandma moved around the whole night as if she were on autopilot. She talked to everyone, she smiled, and she danced. She acted as if she were okay even though I knew she was far from all right. How could she have been? She was missing the biggest part of her soul. Nothing would ever fill the space in her heart the way her husband had.
I couldn’t imagine the amount of emptiness she was feeling.
It wasn’t until I crossed her path in the kitchen that I saw her reality. She was alone in there when I walked through her French doors. She stood in front of an open cabinet with a coffee tin in her hands. Inside the tin were all of PaPa’s homemade recipes that he’d written down.
I walked over to her and placed a hand on her shoulder. She jumped slightly and wiped at her eyes. “Oh, sweetheart. Hi. I didn’t hear you come in.”
“Quiet on my feet.”
“You always did move around like a mouse. I swear, when all the other kids ran around wild, you were so quiet.” She turned to face me and placed a hand against my cheek. “PaPa always said you were the quietest with the loudest thoughts.”
“Why do I get the idea that your thoughts are pretty loud as of late?”
She smiled and sniffled a bit. She glanced around the kitchen, then back to the recipe cards. “It’s loud in the house, but it feels…quieter. Doesn’t it?”
“It does.”
“I miss him.”
“Me too.”
She smiled, but it fell quickly to a frown. I was glad she didn’t find the need to pretend to be okay around me like she did with everyone else. “Theo, I—”
Before she could finish her sentence, the French doors were pushed open, and a woman wearing all black entered. Who in the hell would wear all black to my grandfather’s funeral? Color. The theme was fucking color.
It wasn’t until I locked eyes with the woman that I realized who exactly I was staring at.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” I barked out, my whole body heating instantly.
She blinked a few times before she parted her lips and said, “Hi, son.”
My mother.
My fucking mother.
She stood there in the kitchen as if she weren’t a ghost who’d just barged into my grandparents’ home. I hadn’t seen or heard from the woman since she walked out of my life when I was twelve years old. Yet now there she was, on the day of PaPa’s funeral, saying, “hi, son.”
Did hell just freeze over?
Was I hallucinating?
“What the fuck are you doing here?” I repeated because those were the only words that could shoot out of my mouth.
I stood in front of Grandma slightly as if to protect her from the daughter who broke her heart all those years before when she walked out and left us all behind.
To my surprise, Grandma didn’t seem nearly as shocked by my mother’s presence. “I told you not to come today,” Grandma scolded my mother. “You swore you wouldn’t.”
Mom tugged at the sleeves of her black dress and bit her bottom lip. “I know, I know. I just couldn’t miss this. He was my father.”
My eyes darted back and forth between Mom and Grandma. My mind buzzed with confusion as I stared at the two of them. I looked at Grandma, feeling hurt, betrayed, livid. “You’ve been in contact with her?” I asked, pain soaking through my words. “You’ve been talking to her? For how long?”
Grandma parted her lips to answer me, but instead, she shook her head and turned toward Mom. “You swore you wouldn’t come.”
“He was my father,” she repeated, this time the words irritating me more than the first time she’d said them.
“ He was my father !” I shouted, gesturing toward her as if she had lost her damn mind. How dare she claim PaPa as hers after she broke his heart? She didn’t know it, but I sometimes heard him crying over his daughter. Worrying about her safety. Mourning the loss of a daughter who was still living. How dare she show up to his funeral to mourn his death as if she had been there when he was living? My chest burned with anger the longer I looked at my mother because she looked like the best parts of him. In her eyes, I saw PaPa. In her frown, I saw him, too. But he wasn’t hers. He was mine. “He was my father, he was my mother when he had to be, and he was my friend when I had none,” I choked out. “How fucking dare you show up today and act sad for a man you abandoned? For a family you left behind.” And for the little boy who begged for you to come back night after night after night.
Mom parted her mouth to speak, but no words were produced.
Tears kept streaming down her face, but I didn’t care.
She had no right to be fucking sad. She could’ve spent the past decade loving PaPa, but instead, she left. What did that say about her?
“I-I’m sorry. You’re right. I shouldn’t have come here,” she said, hurrying out of the room.
Grandma raced her hands over her face as her overwhelming emotions grew stronger. But I still wasn’t up to par with how she didn’t seem beyond surprised by the first-time arrival of her daughter, who had been in no contact with the family for over eighteen fucking years.
That was when reality set in for me.
It wasn’t the first time they’d seen one another over the past eighteen years.
“What’s go-g-going on, Grandma?” I asked, feeling sick to my stomach.
“I’m so, so sorry, Theo. She wasn’t supposed to be here. I told her not to come today.”
“Today,” I cut in. I narrowed my brows. “You’ve seen her recently?”
She frowned and nodded, no longer able to hold eye contact with me. “Yes. We have.”
“We?” I questioned. “Who’s we?”
“PaPa and me. We’ve been seeing your mother—”
“She’s not my mother,” I corrected.
“Yes, well… Christina has been visiting us both for a while now,” Grandma said as she leaned against the kitchen island.
“What?”
“She’s been seeing him ever since he got sick. Twice a week.”
“Bullshit,” I said through gritted teeth. “There’s no way… He’s been sick for two damn years!”
“Yes. I know.” She nodded. “She’s been coming up ever since. We made sure she’d visit when you were out fishing. PaPa didn’t want your wires to cross, just in case…”
“In case what?”
“In case after PaPa passed, she’d disappear again. I didn’t want to open that door for you, Theo. I didn’t want you to go through losing your mother again.”
“How dare you,” I growled. I began to pace with my anger growing at a concerning speed. Anger or sadness. It was hard to tell what I was feeling, but it had to be one or the other of those two. Or maybe it was both.
Definitely both.
“Son,” Grandma started.
“You lied to me.”
“No,” she disagreed. “I just thought it best not to share Christina coming back to town.”
“You withholding this from me was a lie, Grandma.”
“No, I—”
“ You fucking lied !” I shouted, bringing my pacing to a halt. My chest burned as I stared at my heartbroken grandmother. My chest filled with a million marbles of instant regret. Grief filled the rest of the space. “I-I-I’m s-s-sorry, Grandma. I di-di-didn’t mean to yell like that. I just…” I lowered my head and shook it. “You didn’t think that today, on PaPa’s s-s-send-off, might have be-e-e-n the worst day for me to cross h-her path?”
I was holding on by a thread.
The space between heaven and hell was earth, and at that moment, earth was the last place I wanted to be. I was pissed off at Grandma for holding on to this secret, but I was even more pissed off at PaPa that I wasn’t able to rage at him about how angry it made me. How hurt I felt. How my heart shattered into a million pieces. Because why would she want to see them and not me?
I was her son.
Her heartbeats lived within my chest.
Why did she not want me? Why was I never good enough for her? I would’ve been better if she needed me to be. I would’ve been the perfect son. I would’ve behaved how she told me to. I would’ve never stepped out of line. I would’ve loved her forever.
Still…she left. She walked away and didn’t look back for years. Then when she did make her way back to Westin Lake, she never tried to reach out to me for two years straight. She never tried to check in to make sure I was okay. She never came back.
Fuck her for leaving.
I only wished she had stayed gone instead of fucking up my already fucked-up thoughts that afternoon.
“I wanted to tell you, Theo. Trust me, I did. But PaPa thought it would be too much to put on you, and I wanted to respect his final wishes, and I… I told her not to come,” Grandma stated, her voice cracking. Then the tears fell from her eyes as she shook her head. “I begged her not to come today. I didn’t. I didn’t… I… I…” She stumbled over her words, and I knew exactly what that felt like. To try to speak but nothing coherent came out. I knew that panic. I knew that level of struggle and hurt.
What I didn’t know was losing my soulmate.
What I didn’t know was coming to terms with the fact that I’d never see my other half again.
What I didn’t know was having a daughter who walked away many years ago.
What I didn’t know was the heaviness of Grandma’s grief.
I could only experience my own as a grandson, as a son…but as a partner? As a mother?
Grandma’s heart had cracks in it that I would never begin to understand.
And the last thing she needed was for me to hammer into her about my mother arriving for PaPa’s funeral.
I moved closer to her and wrapped my arms around her. “I’m sorry, Grandma. I didn’t mean to react like that. It’s just a lot to process.”
She patted her hands against my back as she hugged me. “I don’t take words personally during the storms, baby. Don’t you worry. We’re gonna be all right.”
She said those words, but I couldn’t imagine how they could be true. Nothing was all right.
Grandma sniffled. “I’m going to go check on things. Make sure everyone has enough booze to forget we’re sad.” She pulled back slightly, brushed away her tears, then placed her hands against my cheeks. “Grandma loves you.”
I bent down and kissed the top of her head. “I love you, too.”
She walked out of the kitchen to the rowdy living room space that was playing all of PaPa’s favorite music on the jukebox. As she pushed open the swinging door, “A Horse with No Name” by America blasted through the air.
I wished more funerals had highly inappropriate music for the occasion. It made it all feel a little less traumatic.
I wasn’t ready for the music, though.
I stayed in the kitchen, standing still in my fucked-up emotions. I picked up PaPa’s tin of recipes and began to flip through them. They were covered in flour and oils from being used so often. For decades, his fingers paged through those cards. His fingerprints were imprinted on the cards. His love was within his cursive writing on those pages. But still…he was gone.
I felt sick.
I felt confused.
I felt lonely.
The kitchen door pushed open, and in walked Willow. She stood there with her hair in two French braids, dressed in orange, and a small smile on her face. Her eyebrows knitted together the moment she saw me.
“Hi, Mr. Grump,” she whispered, walking toward me.
“Hi, Weeping Willow.”
“I heard rumors of your mother maybe being here.”
“Yes.”
“Did you see her?”
“Yes.”
“Are you okay?”
“No.”
“Sad?”
“Yes.”
“Confused?”
“Very.”
“Angry?”
“Beyond.”
“Okay.” She took my hands in hers, laced our fingers together, then pulled me into a hug. I shut my eyes. There it was. Comfort. Willow Kingsley and her goddamn comfort.
I tried to stay as stable as I could as I leaned into her.
“It’s okay, Theo,” she softly said. “Go ahead and break. I’ll keep you from falling.”
That permission was all I needed before I burst into grown-man sobs. I never cried in front of anyone, except for my grandparents, when I was a kid and got fed up with the bullying. I never fell apart in public where another could witness my cracks. I’d never shattered with an audience. Yet for some reason, Willow didn’t feel like just another person. She felt like another piece of me. A stable post that kept me from drowning.
I still felt sick.
I still felt confused.
But I didn’t feel alone.
“Willow?” I whispered.
“Yes?”
“Can you p-please do me a fa-favor?”
“Anything.”
“Stay with me? Please. Just…s-s- stay .”
She held me tighter, a simple sign that she wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. I was thankful for that.
All I ever wanted was for someone to stay.