47. Ellie
Ellie
We hold the funeral on a Saturday.
I picked Saturday on purpose, even though the funeral home tried to steer me toward a Thursday because it was cheaper and the chapel was open. But I told them it was Saturday or nothing. I didn't want to give my father any excuse to miss it, and he works weekdays.
He doesn't come to the funeral.
I knew he wouldn't.
I think I knew it the second I addressed the envelope to a name I haven't thought about in years.
Cyrus dug up the address. I didn't have it.
My father has always moved through the world as if he was terrified of being found, and I've always known I'm one of the two things he's terrified will find him.
I still reserved a seat in the front row for him, right on the aisle, with a little folded program and everything.
Just in case.
It's an invitation he did not deserve and one he was always going to decline, but I didn't send it for him or me.
It was for her.
I feel it standing here at the edge of a deep rectangular hole cut into the ground, the wind cutting through Jinx's jacket I still haven't given back even though it doesn't match my black dress at all.
Mom would have known, deep down, that Dad wasn't coming. Just like I knew on most of my birthdays. She would have wanted me to invite him anyway because she always held the door open for him, and it feels right to do it the way she would have. Especially since it's for the last time.
My mother loved a man who never once chose her. She loved him in the dark, through the leaving and the silence and the nights spent sobbing, and through all those returned letters.
And if there's one thing I know I inherited from her that isn't our blonde hair and the hungry thing in our blood that wanted those pills like oxygen, it's that.
The loving past all reason. The loving and the waiting.
But everyone, if they're lucky, gets to do a little better than the people who made them. My better is not that I fell in love with four men instead of one.
My better is the fact that the men I fell in love with chose me back.
In a hospital corridor, in an underground club, in a burning field, and in the middle of the night on a bathroom floor with my body gnawing itself apart.
They chose me when I screamed every ugly word I could find at them and begged them for the one thing that would have killed me, and they held the line anyway.
They chose me when I was lovable, and they chose me when I was the worst version of myself a person can be.
Again and again, the way my mother kept waiting for a love that never wrote back, except mine never stopped writing.
And she chose me too, in the end.
I get to decide which version of her I carry with me, and I'm picking the one who looked at me through a windshield and chose me.
I kneel down in the cold, damp grass. Kade makes a sound that makes it clear he doesn't appreciate me not giving him the chance to put his jacket down for me first, already hovering.
I shake my head once to let him know I'm okay.
They close around me anyway, all four of them forming a wall against the wind, and I let them.
I pull the letters out of Jinx's jacket lining.
All of them.
The love letters my father wrote to my mother in the early days before I was born, sloppy and full of promises he never kept.
The ones she sent back to him, the ones that came returned and unopened.
The forged drafts in my own careful, stolen handwriting.
And the others, too. The ones I wrote to four boys in a trailer park, and the ones they wrote to me, even if none of us knew it then.
Words reaching out across time and so much silence, somehow finding each other.
These letters belong to the past, but the future belongs to the five of us.
So I untie the twine binding them all together and let them drift down onto the lid, twenty-some years of love and ruin scrawled on dead trees.
"Bye, Mom," I whisper, reaching down to take a handful of the dirt piled by the graveside.
I let it fall.
It hits the wood and the paper with a sound softer than I expected.
It sounds like rain.
I stand up and my knees don't want to hold me but they do, because Tank's hand finds my elbow before I've even decided I'm unsteady. He always knows. He catches me before I know I'm falling, every single time.
They all do.
None of them say anything because there's nothing to say. They just order themselves around me and walk me back across the wet grass to the car, matching my pace. Kade opens the door even though I can tell it still hurts him to reach.
Tank and Kade take the front. Jinx and Cyrus pour into the back with me, one on each side.
I sit there in the middle, pressed between them while the heater blows and the cemetery shrinks away in the side mirrors.
Jinx has my hand in his and Cyrus has his arm around my shoulders, stiff at first the way he always is, then settling.
"You did good today," Cyrus says quietly next to my ear.
I don't feel like I did anything. I feel raw and hollow and so fucking tired. More than anything, I feel like I'm waiting for something because if the last four years have finally come to an end, then what comes after?
"I want to do something," I hear myself say.
"What?" Jinx asks.
"I don't know." And I don't. It's not a plan, or even a feeling. All I have is a restlessness buried under the grief. "I don't know. I just… I need to do something."
Jinx turns and presses his lips to my forehead. "Then whatever it is," he murmurs against my hairline, "we'll do it." He pulls back, and there's that slightly crooked smile I love so much, even if it's muted for the occasion, just like the black suit he wears in place of his usual bright colors.
"You don't even know what it is yet," I warn him.
Neither do I.
"Ride or die, bitches."
A laugh comes out of me before I can stop it, and Kade scoffs from the front seat.
I lean my head on Jinx's shoulder and watch the world slide by through the windshield, the gray sky finally breaking up in patches.
I believe him.
Whatever I ask of them, however far, however stupid, they'll do it. They always have. That's just what we do.
I close my eyes against Jinx's shoulder, and somewhere between the cemetery and home, for the first time in longer than I remember, I forget to count a single damn thing.