Henry
My car heats up fast, so I tick the temperature down.
Grace’s front door opens. She’s in Tim’s coat again and holding a beer and a glass of rosé. When she climbs in there’s a chill, and I hope the mice Ian and I freed earlier are okay.
She hands me my drink. “Your lady wine, sir.”
“For someone who makes fun of rosé so much, you certainly have a lot of it.”
She takes a sip of her beer. “I may have bought you a few bottles. It’s important to be a good hostess.”
“Aw,” I say. I’m touched by the thoughtfulness of this simple thing.
Grace can tell, I think, because her eyes soften. “Well, I get wine at cost, so, you know, I’ll send you a Venmo request.”
The car stereo is linked to my phone, so a Wilco song plays at a low volume over our brief silence.
A couple of hours ago, as I came around the house with the recycling bin, I felt something strange.
I looked through the window at Grace and Bella drinking their hot chocolate.
Grace was in her sweats and Bella was sitting on the counter poking at marshmallows floating in her mug, and I wanted to be in there with them.
And not just as some guy who’d shown up for a Bill Murray movie. I wanted to be…with them.
Then Ian said what he said about ghosts.
“My brother tried to set me up with someone the other day,” I say, because I guess I’m not quite ready yet to talk about talking to Brynn.
“Yeah?” she says. “Was it ambush style, like our moms did to us?”
“Yeah. Didn’t see it coming.”
“Was she pretty?” Grace asks. “Nice?”
“Both,” I say, “But…”
Grace lets me trail off because she gets it. “Yeah,” she says.
Along with the reindeer, Grace’s neighbors have added three elves to their yard since the last time I was here. Two blink, one doesn’t. The non-blinker leans precariously, like it could tip any second.
“Do you see him, too?” I ask. “Tim? Is that part of it when you, you know, talk to him?”
“I do,” she says. “And yeah, it is, most of the time.”
“It’s funny,” I say. “I remember exactly what Brynn was wearing the last time I saw her. Her flight to L.A. was insanely early, so she was going for comfort. A purplish sweater-hoodie thing, and a black North Face vest because she was always cold on planes. White Adidas sneakers that she liked. And she had on these jeans that weren’t really jeans.
They were sweatpants, actually, that were made to look like denim. ”
Grace smiles. “Sounds like my kinda jeans.”
“Her outfit is crystal clear in my head,” I say. “The rest of her though…it’s like the specifics are fading, like her face is going blurry. I worry that it’s just gonna get worse. It’s one of the reasons I want to talk to her again, so I can see her, you know?”
“Makes sense,” Grace says. “This’ll help with that.”
“So, how do you…?”
“Breathing is a big part of it,” she says. “Like yoga. I breathe until I’m relaxed, then I just start talking, and there he is.”
“You just talk?”
“Yeah. There’s no big trick to it. I don’t hypnotize myself or do shrooms or anything.”
“What do you tell him?”
“Little things.”
“Little things?”
She sips her beer and turns to face me. “You and I, Henry, our Great and Terrible Sadnesses have a lot in common. One difference, though, is mine happened slowly, so I got to tell him all the big things before he was gone. Goodbye, for example. That was a big one. And it sucked, by the way. I know you probably hate that you didn’t get to say goodbye to Brynn, and I get that. But, Jesus, Henry…”
I can only imagine, so I tell her I’m sorry.
“Anyway,” she says. “Since I got the big things out of the way, I focus on the day-to-day stuff now. Those things are better anyway.”
“How so?”
“You used to tell each other about your days, right?” she asks. “What happened at work, who annoyed you, how shitty traffic was.”
“Sure.”
“That’s what I miss talking to him about the most. It seems so trivial, right? Just this nonstop marital blah blah blah. But you’d kill to hear her tell you about her day just one more time, wouldn’t you?”
She’s right, I would.
“The little things make it feel less like he’s gone,” she says.
Above us an airplane cruises over Baltimore.
But for the grace of good fortune and sheer randomness, it’ll sink slowly to the ground on a runway over at BWI, and I curse myself for the times I let my mind wander while Brynn talked about an article she’d read or the mathematical complexities of an ad buy. I should’ve hung on every word.
“The other reason I want to talk to her,” I say. We dip again into silence. Wilco turns to Hall and Oates. Grace waits.
“That last time I saw her,” I say. “It wasn’t…well, it wasn’t great.” I clear my throat. “I really want to tell her I’m sorry.”
“Are you gonna keep being like this?” Brynn asked me on that last morning.
I was making coffee, not saying anything. “It’s too early, Brynn.”
She sighed, leaned on the counter. A few years before, she’d pointed out that I only say her name at the end of sentences when I’m mad at her. “I know you don’t want me to go, Henry,” she said. “But Craig specifically asked me to. He said he needs me.”
I didn’t reply with actual words, just a dismissive half laugh that still haunts me.
“Nice,” she said. “Appreciate that. Really supportive.”
A big crew from Art of the Brand was set to go to L.A. Then Craig Henson, our founder, figured out that they were too heavy on males—the optics weren’t good—so Brynn got a late invite.
“Yes, I get why I’m invited,” she said. “It’s a good opportunity, regardless. And Cal will have another party next year. That’s how birthdays work.”
It was one of those rare business trips that would extend over a weekend, Thursday to Tuesday.
A mix of legit things like looking at potential office space and less legit things like a Lakers game with our biggest West Coast client on Saturday night, which was the night my sister-in-law was throwing a party for my brother at an axe-throwing bar in Baltimore.
He was turning thirty-six, which was a totally random age, but Cal and Sally were hyping it up because it’d be his last birthday as a non-dad.
I can barely remember it now. My mom had her first Long Island Iced Tea and nearly fell off her barstool.
Cal hit the bull’s-eye and tried to moonwalk in hiking boots.
“The least they could’ve done was give you a spot on the jet,” I said.
“Oh, so that’s it then?” Brynn replied. “If the private plane sat more people, you wouldn’t be acting like this?”
One of my worst qualities is that I get mad at people for not being able to read my mind.
I was annoyed about her missing Cal’s party.
But really, I didn’t want Brynn to go to L.A.
because I didn’t want anyone to go to L.A.
I’d seen the writing on the wall. I knew Win and I would be asked to run the office out there.
Win would want us to go. Brynn would want us to go.
She’d call it something fun, like our West Coast Era.
All I wanted, though, was to stay here with her because I was happy the way things were. My default setting: no.
“All right, well, I’ll send you a picture of LeBron James, I guess,” she said, which I can only assume are among the dumbest final in-person words ever spoken by a wife to her husband.
Grace finished her beer about halfway through me telling her all that. Now she looks at her house through my windshield and doesn’t say anything. Harry Styles has settled at the front window to watch us.
“I just let her walk out the door,” I say, quietly.
She sets her empty can in my cup holder. “Marriage is hard, Henry. And it’s not just hard. It’s every…single…day.”
“I know, but—”
Grace touches my arm. “So you were a dickhead once,” she says. “The timing sucked, granted. But, maybe give yourself a break and think about all the times you weren’t a dickhead. That’s marriage.”
Based on the most general, vaguely told recounting of my last moments with Brynn, Grace is right.
Husbands, wives, partners, even the best of us have bad moments.
What I don’t tell her, though—what I’ve never articulated aloud—is that if I wasn’t being a dickhead on that very specific morning, Brynn would still be alive.
I’m the reason she was on the plane that crashed coming home. I’m the reason she’s gone.