CHAPTER 31 Maverick Jennings
Incoming Call
The sun is already up when I wake, and Everleigh is asleep in my arms.
The last time I felt this content, it was all ripped away, and that’s why I wake with a feeling of dread rather than of contentment like I should feel.
I didn’t find out about Christina’s accident from some phone call. I always thought it would’ve been easier if I had.
No…I found out when I drove by. She drove a black SUV, and when I saw a black SUV upside down in the ditch, my first thought wasn’t that it was hers.
In retrospect, I often wondered if I should’ve felt it when she passed.
It was immediate. On impact, they said. I should’ve known. Should’ve felt the light shutting off.
I didn’t.
She was coming home from the grocery store. They always say the worst accidents happen close to home. You have that level of comfort that you’re almost there. We were in Ohio, and it was summer. Someone who witnessed the accident said a deer ran in front of her, and she swerved to miss it.
The last thing she saw was a deer in headlights.
The image haunted me every day until the funeral. And then I found out what she’d been doing behind my back, and the image of the deer was replaced with images of her underneath another man.
Those images have haunted me for a decade, and they didn’t really start to fade until my brain started to fixate on red lips and red heels.
I rustle a little as a feeling of uneasiness pulses through me. This woman has thrown me all out of sorts, but the truth is probably that I’ve been out of sorts most of my life. Maybe for the first time, I’m…in sorts. Or whatever the opposite of out of sorts is.
My phone buzzes on my nightstand with a call, and when I see Montgomery Memory Care flash on the screen, a shudder runs through me.
That sickening feeling of dread rises up in my throat.
I suddenly feel it. I feel the thing I didn’t feel when Christina died.
I know what the words are going to be before I even answer the call.
If it were my mother calling me when she was awake, as I asked Susan to have her do, the incoming call wouldn’t say Montgomery Memory Care. It would say Mom.
“Hello?” I murmur so as not to wake Everleigh, but she starts to stir anyway.
“Hi Maverick. This is Susan from Montgomery Memory Care.”
“Is everything okay?” I ask before she can give her reason for calling me. Traditionally she has called me every other week with an update. Tuesday evenings after my mother is asleep. This isn’t our regularly scheduled time.
“That’s why I’m calling.” She pauses, and then she plows forward with her reason for the call. “I’m so sorry, Maverick. Your mother passed away in her sleep early this morning from the pneumonia. If it’s any consolation, she went peacefully.”
“Oh.” It’s all I can manage to say.
“She was a lovely woman. It was my honor to work with her for as long as I did,” she says.
She rambles on about how my mother had already made all her own arrangements, so there’s not much to do but get to Ohio to say my final goodbyes.
“She knew your schedule, so her wishes were to have her funeral on a Tuesday since she knew it was your day off.”
For some reason, the thought pricks a heat behind my eyes.
She arranged her own funeral to happen on a Tuesday so I could attend.
She always put me first, and now in her death, I wish I would’ve put her first more often.
I wish I could’ve been there with her in her final moments. I wish I could’ve had the chance to say goodbye.
“Thanks,” I mumble to Susan, and eventually she runs out of details to share, and we end the call.
By the time I set my phone back on my nightstand, Everleigh is sitting up in bed, her large brown eyes pinning me with concern. “What’s going on?”
“My mother died.” The words sound somehow wrong coming out of my mouth, as if they’re not real. It hasn’t hit me yet. I wonder when it will.
“Oh, Maverick,” she murmurs, and she throws her arms around me to hold me.
I let her. I lean into her, my head on her chest as I try to fight off the emotions threatening to swallow me whole.
I shouldn’t have opened the door to them, but I did, and now I have to feel the full and treacherous weight of losing the only person in the world I could ever truly count on.
She’s the one who helped me pick up the pieces when I lost my wife.
She’s the one who brushed me off when I found out the baby I thought I lost wasn’t mine to lose.
She’s the one who helped me with my chemistry homework when I just didn’t understand, who made sure my practice uniform was always clean, who held the seat of my bike when I demanded to take off the training wheels.
Who’s going to help me pick up the pieces now that I’ve lost the most important person in my life?
Another shudder runs through me, and I fight off that heat behind my eyes. Except for the last time I visited my mother and called on Everleigh to be with me, I haven’t cried since I saw that black SUV turned over in a ditch. I’m not going to start now.
But as Everleigh holds me in her arms while I tremble and fight away these emotions, I feel like maybe I have an answer to who could help me pick up the pieces.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers. “What can I do?”
“Come with me to Ohio.”
“Of course.” She doesn’t hesitate. She doesn’t ask questions. She doesn’t care about when I need to go. She’ll just be there.
That’s all I need.
“If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have gotten to say goodbye,” I say quietly into her chest.
She hugs me tighter, and I hear her sniffle.
She’s crying. She’s letting her emotion out. She’s not hiding them from me.
And in doing so, she lets me know that I don’t have to hide from her, either.