Chapter 9
NINE
“Gram? Mason?” I called out as I entered Gram’s house. Her car was in the driveway, so I knew she was home.
I’d already been living on campus when my mom passed away in the car accident, but my brother was still a minor, so Gram became his legal guardian and we sold my childhood home when he moved in with her.
Gram put the funds from the sale in a trust for Mase and me to be disbursed in increments.
I started getting small amounts monthly and used the money to help pay some of my rent.
As much as I loved Gram, it was hard to come home sometimes. It was weird for a house to be both a sanctuary and a hard memory to face.
This wasn’t the house I was raised in, and it was difficult to see memories of my mom and her childhood when I missed her so desperately.
My mom had been my first best friend. She’d been my cheerleader, always on the sidelines rooting for me.
When I felt awkward and clumsy, she made me feel strong and brave.
She made me believe that it didn’t matter how mean kids were at school because I was the nerdy girl who preferred math and science over doing girly things.
She always taught me to embrace what made me unique.
She used to tell me that the most important thing we could do as human beings was to embrace our brand of special—the thing that made us different from everyone else—and that society focused so much on “sameness” because people were afraid of standing out.
I’d felt lost without her.
Gram did her best, but it wasn’t the same.
Nothing felt the same without Mom here.
But as hard as it was to come here and see memories of Mom, I couldn’t avoid it because I loved Gram and my brother needed me.
Mason had become a shell of himself since our mom died.
I hadn’t seen him smile since before her accident, which was crushing because he had one of the best smiles of anyone I’d ever met.
We were a close-knit family, and we felt her loss with every aching breath, no matter how much time passed.
I’d thrown myself into my studies and work and trying to leave a legacy at CFU that I knew my mom would be proud of, whereas my brother had stopped all of his activities, except for one. Football.
I was pretty sure he still played because the coach refused to accept him quitting.
When Mason had tried to turn his pads back in, Coach Clyde told him that he could turn them in at the end of the season with everyone else, but he expected him to show up to practice.
For nearly two years, he’d kept Mason engaged with football.
He’d even gone so far as to pick him up for practice until he was sure Mason would show up on his own.
I owed Coach a huge thank you.
Mason was still quieter and more withdrawn than he’d ever been.
He still refused to get his license—something I suspected was in part because our mom was killed in a car accident—and had only started hanging out with his friends more often in the last few months.
But at least I knew he had some kind of outlet, especially since Coach Clyde did summer football sessions to keep the players engaged.
It gave me a bit of comfort to know he had a community around him and wasn’t here drowning in his grief.
Mason had left a voicemail for me that he was worried about Gram, and so instead of coming home for a visit tomorrow like I had originally planned, I decided to come a day early.
Gram didn’t live far from the university—only about a thirty-minute drive if traffic was good. Campus was quieter in the summer, which sometimes made it easier to slip away for a visit. But with my work schedule and internship, it still felt like there were never enough hours in the day.
“Mase,” I called again.
Instead of calling back, he walked around the corner.
He’d grown taller since the last time I was home.
He’d already been taller than my five feet six before our mom passed away, but he’d shot up in the last year and a half and was apparently still growing.
His dark brown hair that was the same shade as our dad’s was shaggy, and I had to fight back the revulsion at the mullet cut.
How the hell had that trend made a comeback? I didn’t understand it. His dark brown eyes met mine, and my heart ached at the way they didn’t light up like they used to. He’d been such a happy, carefree little kid. Part of me felt like I’d lost the brother I’d known my whole life when our mom died.
“Hey, what’s going on?” I asked.
“Something is up with Gram, but she won’t tell me.” His voice was deep and scratchier than I remembered.
I placed the back of my hand on his forehead to check if he was getting sick, and he instantly pushed it away.
I furrowed my brow but let it slide. I knew from experience that pestering him with questions about his well-being would get me nowhere.
“What do you mean something’s up with her?” I asked.
He shrugged, and God did I hate that teenage boy shrug he’d adopted.
It never told me a damn thing even though he always acted like it should explain everything.
I arched a brow, and he rolled his eyes before continuing.
“She’s been weird lately—quiet—and she started going through her stuff in the attic. ”
That was concerning.
For one thing, Gram had the biggest personality of anyone I’d ever met. She could walk into a room with complete strangers and walk out with dozens of new friends.
But even more concerning was that she was hanging out in the attic.
Gram had once told me she stored all the memories that were too hard to see up there so that she still had them, but didn’t have to look at them every day.
I knew all of Grandpa’s stuff was stored up there, and most of the things from my mom that we’d kept. I hadn’t seen her go up there in years.
“Is she up there now?”
It was the only logical reason why she hadn’t greeted me at the door like she always did.
He nodded, and then started to turn around like that was the end of our conversation.
“Hey, how are you doing?” I asked before he could escape to his room.
He shrugged his shoulders again in that way that seventeen-year-old boys do. “Fine.”
I knew that wasn’t true. I wasn’t sure anyone in this house had been fine since my mom’s accident, least of all my brother.
I grabbed his hand before he could walk away. “Hey, I love you,” I told him.
My mom had said “I love you” to us every day.
She had said it was important that we always felt her words and knew how proud of us she was.
I knew she would never want a day to go by where her baby boy didn’t know that he was loved.
And so I tried to carry on the tradition, even if it was via text message.
It wasn’t lost on me that the little boy who had once giggled “I love you” every time she said it hadn’t uttered those three words since the day of her accident.
He didn’t utter them now, either. He simply gave me another nod and then disappeared down the hall to his room.
With a heavy sigh, I went up to the attic.
Gram lived in an old farmhouse on twenty acres of land that had been passed down from her mother and her parents before them.
“Gram, you up here?”
There was a narrow staircase that led up to the attic, and I climbed it until I could peek up into the large open space.
The attic wasn’t cramped like most attics I was aware of and instead could have been its own room.
It had six-foot ceilings and spanned the entire top of the nearly two-thousand-square-foot house.
It was mostly cluttered with boxes that had black scrawl on them to give an idea of what was stored in each box.
Along the right wall was an old wooden rocking chair that I knew from stories and pictures had been used when my mom was a baby and Gram would rock her to sleep.
That was where I found Gram rocking gently as she looked at a photo album on her lap.
I quietly made my way up the rest of the stairs until I was in the room with her and approached her slowly.
“Gram, are you okay?” My breath caught when I looked down at the photo album on her lap. It was the last photo that had ever been taken of us as a full family before we’d lost my grandpa, then my dad, and then my mom.
Dad had a heart attack in his sleep and was gone before any of us could have ever done anything.
I’d been seven and Mason had been only three years old.
It was the first horrible memory I had, and sometimes I wondered if I only remembered it so vividly because Mom had been devastated.
She’d tried her best to hold it together for us, but he’d been her soulmate, and his loss carved a hole in her heart that left a permanent mark.
Gram looked up, tears glistening in her eyes. She reached for me, and without hesitation, I slipped my hand into hers. Her frail hands were cold, and I held them just a little tighter as anxious worry knotted in my stomach.
“What’s going on?”
“Just missing everyone today,” she said.
“Are you sure that’s all?”
Her smile was soft and sad, and the burn of tears threatened behind my eyes.
“Gram,” I repeated, my voice choked. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
She squeezed my hand and stood up. “I’m just fine.”
Her voice was steady, but I was sure it was a lie because there was something in her eyes, a sadness that I hadn’t seen there before that made me think fine was the opposite of what she was feeling right now.
But my grandmother was a stubborn woman, and if she didn’t want to tell me what was going on, I knew she wouldn’t.
She set the album down on the rocking chair and said, “Are you staying for dinner?” Her voice was light again as if she didn’t have a care in the world.
“Yeah, I can,” I said. Staying for dinner sounded like a good idea given how out of character she was acting.
She smiled fondly at me. “I think Mason would appreciate that.”
“Is something else going on with him?” He was the hardest to read of my family members.
Her brows furrowed. “It’s hard to tell these days if it’s new or old pain that he’s carrying. I can’t seem to break through to him, and I only hope his coach is having better luck than I am.”
“I’ll stay and hang out, see if he’ll talk to me.”
We’d been close our whole life. Mason was the baby brother I’d always wanted, and I looked out for him with the fierceness of a lioness protecting her cub.
But even I struggled to get through the walls he’d put up since Mom died.
I was scared what would happen to him if he held all his pain inside without letting it out.
I couldn’t lose another family member.
As we sat around the dining room table later that evening, I couldn’t help but notice that each of us seemed somewhat lost in our own heads. Gram didn’t ask as many questions as she usually did. Mason was as silent and stoic as a guard at Buckingham Palace.
And while I had plenty to worry about between the two of them, my thoughts kept veering to a too-handsome-for-his-own-good hockey player with a charismatic smile that reminded me why I’d had such a crush on him freshman year.
The same hockey player that I suspected had a learning disorder he didn’t seem to be fully aware of.