Chapter 12 #2
She didn't ask if I was okay.
She knew I wasn't.
She put her hand on my thigh and let it sit there.
I let my head go back against the cushion.
The leather chair was across the room from me. Her reading glasses were still tucked into the spine of the book she'd been halfway through. The brass lamp she'd read by for forty years. I hadn't moved any of it in eighteen months.
"She kept the porch light on for me when I worked nights," I said.
"The whole year she was sick. She'd be in bed by nine.
She couldn't have known if it was on or off.
But every time I came up the walk at six in the morning, that porch light was on.
I checked every shift. She left it on the whole time. "
Astrid's hand on my thigh didn't move.
"She'd come out in her robe sometimes. I'd tell her, Go back to bed, Grandma.
She'd say, I want to see you eat something.
I'd say, I ate at the station. She'd say, Sit down.
I'd sit down. She'd make me a piece of toast with butter and put it in front of me on a plate, and I'd eat it because she'd made it.
She'd sit across from me at the table at six in the morning in her robe and watch me eat that piece of toast like it was the meal of her life. "
Her thumb moved once at the seam of my jeans.
"The last week she was here, she stopped eating.
They said it was the body doing what the body does.
I sat next to her bed in the chair we'd moved into the bedroom and read out loud to her from the Reader's Digest she got in the mail, because that was what she'd asked me to do.
And at some point on the Thursday, she opened her eyes, looked at me, and said, You take care of Penny, Easton.
You take care of that dog. And I said, I will, Grandma.
And she closed her eyes. And she didn't open them again. "
I scrubbed a hand down my face.
"I told her I would."
"You did."
"I told her I would, and I did. And tonight, she went out in my lap on the kitchen rug."
"You took care of Pen every single day she was yours. She was on the rug in your kitchen tonight, with you holding her. That's the whole thing. That's the entire job."
She took my hand. She turned it over in her lap, palm up, and ran her thumb along the meat of it.
"Astrid."
"Yeah."
"I don't know how to stop missing her."
The words came out of my chest like smoke from a building that'd been holding it, slow at first, then all at once.
Astrid didn't move.
She let me have it.
She didn't say, I'm sorry. She didn't say it would get easier.
She kept my hand turned up in her lap and ran her thumb along it.
She let her shoulder stay against mine. She let me feel something I hadn't let myself feel since the Thursday afternoon I sat in a chair next to a hospital bed and read out loud from a Reader's Digest until a woman I loved closed her eyes for the last time.
I cried.
I hadn't cried for her. Not really. I'd cried at the funeral the way a man cries at a funeral, one hand on the back of a pew, one hand at his side.
I'd stepped around the boxes in the hallway for a year and a half and not cried, and tonight on the floor with a woman I'd kissed for the first time two hours ago, I cried for an old golden retriever I'd buried under a rose, and I cried for a woman who'd left the porch light on for me at six in the morning, and I cried because the two of them were the last things in this house that had been mine.
Astrid held my hand.
She didn't say a word.
After a while, she lifted my hand to her mouth and kissed the inside of my wrist, once, the place where her thumb had been on the drive home, then set it back down on her thigh and kept her hand on top of mine.
I let my head go down on her shoulder.
She let it stay there.
At some point, the kitchen got the gray it gets right before the sky starts going. Penny's water bowl was still by the back door. I'd have to put it away in the morning. I'd have to do a hundred things I didn't have to do yet.
I sat on the floor with Astrid Matthews and didn't do any of them.
She turned her head against my hair, after a long time, and said, very quietly, "Do you want me to stay?"
I lifted my head off her shoulder.
I looked at her.
Honey-brown hair coming out of the knot she'd put it in for our date. The lipstick was gone. The small gold hoops she'd put on at the door were still at her ears. She'd cried at some point, and I hadn't seen her do it. The tracks were dry on her cheeks already.
"Yes."
"Okay."
"Astrid."
"Yes?"
"I don't mean—"
"I know what you mean. I'm staying."
"Moose?”
"I already messaged Audrey. She's with him tonight.”
"Okay.”
She got up off the floor and held her hand out to me. I took it. She pulled me up the rest of the way and didn't let go.
She walked me to the bedroom at the end of the hall, the one that had been my grandmother's and had been mine for eighteen months. She turned the bed down on one side. She took her own shoes off, set them at the foot of the bed, and got under the quilt fully dressed, on the side closer to the door.
I lay down next to her.
She put her hand on my chest.
I put my hand over hers.
The breath went all the way down for the first time in eighteen months. Not the breath of a man let off a hook. The breath of a man who'd finally started to grieve.
I didn't mean Penny.
I didn't have to mean Penny.
Astrid's thumb moved once at the hollow of my collarbone, and I closed my eyes and went under.