You can’t, I told myself. Distract yourself.
I looked at the fridge once more then grabbed my keys. My truck started easily for some reason and the roads never seemed so clear to me. I headed straight for Sykes Market because that’s where Mom always did her shopping.
When I walked into Sykes, I barely recognized it. It’d been renovated since last I saw it and that made my gut ache. Everything changed. Everything. Nothing seemed to stay the same anymore. All the things I thought I could rely on, I realized I couldn’t.
I grabbed a basket and walked the store, taking things in. There were only two registers and they sat catacorner to one another. Behind the registers, I noticed the entrance to the diner. To my great relief, it looked much the same. The same red countertops and blue stools, though a little faded. The same lacquered table tops and red and blue chairs. But now the lights shone down on white vinyl flooring instead of the red I remembered.
I set my basket down on the countertop and sat on a stool, remembering all the biscuits and gravy I used to eat there with my mom and dad on either side of me. My hands glided over the counter and I found myself breathing deeper from the memory. I remember my dad liking the fact that he could get a cup of coffee for a dime. He mentioned it to us every single time we went there, and my mom would just smile at me and wink when he’d say so, only to agree with him as if it was the first time he’d ever told us.
God, I missed her with the fire of a thousand suns. Losing your mom is a kind of pain you never knew could exist. No one but others who have experienced the same understand with even an iota of comprehension how it desolates you. Their sympathy, although sweet in its intentions, is futile. Because losing a parent is life altering. Everything you come to rely upon shatters into such tiny slivers and into such abundance there is no hope for refastening it as it was. Yes, you can lace and reassemble as well as you possibly can, but no matter how attractive the weave, the strength in that foundation is never the same. Its new formation is a fragile, fragile thing despite appearance’s sake.
Which is why Cricket’s leaving me was so catastrophic to me. I’d come to rely upon her. She was a stable fixture in my world after my mom passed. She was my world. I realized even then that it wasn’t exactly the healthiest way to cope, but I was young and knew no other way. Besides, no one understood me as well as Cricket did at that time in my life, as she had lost her own mom as well.
I looked down at the countertop once more and remembered all the shared baskets of onion rings and huckleberry bread puddings and nearly froze to my seat. My hands began to shake so I brought them to my chest and tucked them beneath my arms.
“Haven’t seen you in a while! Can I get you somethin’, hon?” someone asked, startling me. It was Delia Phillips. Delia had been the head waitress there since before I could remember.
I looked up at her and the expression on her face turned from cheerful to worried in the span of a heartbeat.
“You okay, baby?” she asked.
I shook my head and stood up quickly, desperate to escape, nearly tripping over myself to reach the exit as fast as possible. I fought the urge to glance behind me, to drink that misery down deeper. Sykes was haunted now, swarming with the excruciating ghosts of my former life.
I bypassed the checkout counter, tossing my basket on top of the others and escaping out onto the sidewalk. My eyes searched my surroundings. The bank, the post office, the secondhand store. I was enveloped by memories of my mom carting me around to all these places. The memories beat down on me with such a furious pounding I grabbed at my head and squeezed, hoping to force them out. My breaths came hard and fast. I was losing it. So close to losing it all. I didn’t know how much more I could take and in that moment, I realized it. The sum of my miserable life came tumbling at my feet in the form of burnt ash. I had nothing left.
I closed my eyes. “There’s nothing salvageable,” I whispered.
Just when I thought I couldn’t think of a single reason to hang on to the small sanity I had left, a warm hand touched the back of my neck, subduing the war brewing inside my head, and I breathed an inexplicable sigh of relief. Finally, I lamented to myself.
I opened my eyes and looked toward the owner of that hand.
Finley.
Without thinking, I grabbed her and brought her to my chest, grasping with an almost wildness. For a second, I thought it would scare her and even contemplated letting her go, despite how much I needed her, but it didn’t and she hugged me back with the same kind of intensity.
“Finley, I—” I began, but she stopped me by pulling back a bit, her eyes wide and piercing mine with a resounding unspoken no before she pulled me back in.
It felt strange yet wonderful that I didn’t have to bend noticeably to hug her. I rested my cheek on the top of her head and breathed deeply, my dark hair swimming around her face, cocooning her. The sweet coconut smell of her hair was a balm to my disordered soul. Slowly, painstakingly slowly she pulled away from me and looked up at me. Her hands, her baffling and mysteriously pacifying fingers found my face, pushing my hair back from my eyes. Her palms held my hair back at my temples. We stood there quietly as she examined my face for something. Though I had no idea what she was looking for, I let her do it just to keep her hands on me.
“You’re a tortured soul, you are,” she finally said. I swallowed but kept my focus on her.
She began to pull her hands away but I quickly grabbed them and placed them around my neck. “No, please,” I begged her. She nodded in reply, asking for no explanation.