Resuming

My sister, dad and I hadn’t been alone together since my mom passed away six months ago. Like, we’d see each other in passing in the kitchen when we were grabbing breakfast, getting ready to go our separate ways in the morning. Or, we’d pass by each other in the hallway, one of us on the way to the bathroom, one of us on the way to the living room.

But we didn’t have movie nights anymore, all piled up on pillows on the floor with popcorn and chocolate and Hulu streaming all night. We used to do that every Friday night, and we’d take turns choosing the movies for the night. We were all so predictable. Dad would choose action movies like Die Hard. My older sister Cora would choose these weird, cerebral films, most of the time with subtitles. I always chose horror flicks, even though they always made me want to sleep with the lights on afterwards, or even crawl into Cora’s bed so I’d feel safer. 

And my mom...my mom always chose rom coms. Her favorite movie of all time was Sleepless in Seattle. She was the reason we had to make a rule that you couldn’t repeat your movie choice until an entire year had passed since you’d chosen it, because she made us watch Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks make eyes at each other like, 5 times in a row. 

Before she passed, my mom, Sara, was one of the best real estate agents in Fairhope, Colorado. My dad, Henry, owns his own mechanic business with three shops. He started out being a mechanic’s assistant when he was 16 and worked his way from the ground up. I’m Julia, 17, and still in high school, and Cora is 19 and goes to the nearby university. She works at the college’s coffee shop part time. Cora looks almost identical to mom, all creamy skin and dark auburn hair with light blue eyes. I got my looks from my dad - brown hair, tan skin and brown eyes. Now, Cora looks out of place. Like she’s adopted or something. 

We used to be this super tight-knit family unit, as close as they come. My friends would all tell me they were jealous that my parents were still together, or that I felt like I could talk to my mom about anything. I could even call her or my dad to come pick me up when I’d drunk too much at a party. Sure, they’d get mad and I’d be grounded, but they never yelled or screamed at me and always, always told me never to drive drunk. 

Which kind of adds a layer of sick morbidity to the way my mother died. She was coming home from work one day and a drunk driver crashed into her 4-Runner. She was declared dead on the scene. 

With her death, all of us seemed to die. Or change, I don’t know. We were just wisps of our former selves. Robots in our day-to-day. Of course we’d never be the same. 

I was thinking about this in my bed while scrolling through Instagram on my phone,  when the lights flickered. Once, twice, third time’s a charm, and the lights stayed off after that. My phone screen stayed glowing bright, and the battery powered twinkle lights framing my headboard. 

“Crap,” I muttered. 

My blue and white parakeet, Mr. Sir, was perched on the bird playground on top of his cage, and chattering to himself. Once the lights went out, he went silent. I guess he thought it was time to sleep.

I didn’t want him to get spooked and fly into the wall or something, so I turned on my phone’s flashlight, stumbled over to his cage and put him inside. I draped his nighttime blanket over the cage and playground. 

“Dad?” I heard Cora calling from down the hall. 

I ducked my head out into the hallway, phone’s flashlight still on, and immediately saw Cora’s head ducked out into the hallway from her room too. Her phone’s light was also glimmering in the dark. 

My dad’s sock adorned feet came padding toward us from the living room, his phone’s light on as well. We looked like we were at a concert. 

“I tried the breaker, but no dice. Looks like the neighbors’ lights are off as well. It doesn’t make sense, it’s not even storming...but you know how Fairhope is.” He sighed, then - “May as well break out the candles. Cora, do you know where...where your mom usually kept them?” His voice broke slightly mid-sentence, a wretched flash of pain slashing his face briefly. 

“Yeah, I’ll get some,” she replied quietly. 

Meanwhile, I was still just standing in my doorway uselessly. When Cora left my dad and me in the hall together, the silence around us became awkward. And I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand why we had to live this way. He was my father, for crying out loud. I didn’t understand what was wrong with us as a family - why couldn’t tragedy bring us closer together like normal people? Instead, we were just stuck walking on our tiptoes around one another, afraid to be humans anymore.

When Cora came back, fist fulls of candles in both her hands, I said, 

“Let’s go camping.” 

The shock on both their faces looked identical, and comical. 

“Huh?” Cora asked, mouth open. 

“Yeah. Like we used to! Just in the backyard in a tent with board games and cookie dough bites and soda. And Doritos? Anyone? We haven’t even tried our new firepit out yet.” My dad had set up a really nice firepit in the backyard right before my mom had passed. None of us felt like roasting marshmallows and weenies after that.

Their stunned faces made me falter. Maybe I was just being weird, thinking that we could go  back to normal together. Or, at least find some type of new normal that wasn’t this, whatever it was that we are doing. For six months. And forever. 

But then, my dad’s face, illuminated in kind of a creepy way by his phone light, slowly cracks into a grin. A really toothy grin. Cora is looking at him, then back at me, still unsure. Without changing her expression, she says, 

“I don’t think we have any cookie dough bites, but I saw some Snickers in the back of the pantry.” 

Maybe, just maybe, they were as sick of being strangers as I was. 

And so we hauled our tent out from the garage, a thick layer of dust coating the forest green material. I felt some kind of new energy buzzing underneath the surface of my skin, like I’d just downed half an energy drink. I was going camping. With my family. 

While Cora and Dad started setting up the tent outside, I grabbed as much sustenance as I could find - soda, some waters, the Snickers Cora saw, bbq chips, cheetos (my dad’s favorite), M&M Chips Ahoy (Cora’s favorite), and oreos with peanut butter to dip them in (my favorite). I put everything in a grocery bag with some paper towels and left it on the counter. 

I padded back to my room to grab my pillow and make sure Mr. Sir was doing okay, then back out to grab the snacks and head outside. 

Once outside, I saw that the tent was set up nicely, and Cora was unrolling the sleeping bags. Mine was from when I was a kid and had Tinkerbell on it. My dad was lighting the fire. Ah! Marshmallows! I put my load down and headed back to grab some marshmallows and skewers. 

15 minutes later, we had each claimed a chair around the merrily crackling fire, a skewer with marshmallows speared on the ends in our hands. My dad had a skewer for each hand. 

And we roasted marshmallows in silence for a moment, but it wasn’t awkward like usual. I think we were all lost in our own thoughts and feeling a sense of peace. At least, I was. Then my dad broke the silence as a slow grin spread across his face. 

“Cora...who is Jeremy?” I shoot her a look, with a slight pang. She and I used to discuss every detail about the boys we currently liked, but I hadn’t heard the name before. Cora wasn’t blessed with a tan that could hide the red creeping up her neck and turning her cheeks into blooming rose petals. The pang dissipated, though, because my dad was teasing. He used to tease us all the time. 

“H-he’s just this guy, dad,” she said, embarrassed. 

“He doesn’t seem like just a guy,” he needled, and I chuckled. She looked at me, her look clearly saying “traitor.”

“Well how do you even know about him?” She asked him as she flicked an unroasted marshmallow from the bag at his head. His face took on a totally bogus innocent expression. 

“I may or may not have seen a text pop up on your phone the other day in the kitchen.” 

“Oh God...which one?” 

She was mortified. I was loving it. 

“Just a ‘hey beautiful,’ nothing major,” he said, still smiling. He took one of his roasted marshmallows off the skewer and it fell in on itself with a little crunchy sound. He popped it into his mouth and then started playing around with the sticky remains. I hadn’t seen him play with his food in a while. 

“So who is he, Cora?” I asked, because I wasn’t letting it rest at “just some guy.” She rolled her eyes at me and her eyes darted back over to Dad. Like she was saying, come on sis, not in front of this one. She sighed resignedly as we both continued staring her down. 

“Okay, whatever, whatever. He’s this guy I’m sort of...seeing. He’s a regular at The Coffee House. He comes in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings, on his way to his English class and orders the same thing every day. So I started having it already ready for him and...I don’t know, I guess things just hit it off from there. He thought it was cute and nice that I did that so he could save a little time,” she said and got all glowy in the face again, but she was smiling to herself now. 

My dad looked thoughtful. 

“You know…” he started, thought for a moment and then continued. 

“Your mom used to do that. For me.” He was studying the sticky marshmallow strings in between his thumb and index finger. Cora and I looked at each other. 

“What do you mean, Dad?” I asked. He looked up at us. He didn’t look sad, just thoughtful and reminiscent. I felt like we were all walking on the same tight rope right now, like this moment was going to be some defining thing that either led us all crashing to the ground or allowed us to safely walk to the other side. 

“When she worked at the diner on Peach Street in high school, I would go in there after school, around 4 PM every day. I’d order a coffee and a slice of whatever pie was on special that day. Usually the apple. And she knew that when it was apple, I liked it to be heated up and served with a scoop of their homemade vanilla bean ice cream. I didn’t like the ice cream with any of the other flavors, though. She knew that, she learned it. And she started having my order ready, waiting for me in my spot every day.” He smiled wider. Cora and I sort of held our breath in unison.

“Man, their pie was good. It’s not the same anymore, now that Mrs. Darla has passed the diner on to her daughters. But that’s not really why I went in there. I was just so smitten with her, girls. From the day that I laid eyes on her in 9th grade Bio.” He finished his story and smiled down at the ground for a minute. After a beat, Cora spoke.

“So...what you’re saying is, Jeremy didn’t really start coming into The Coffee House for the bacon egg and cheese bagel and almond macchiato? It was to see my beautiful face?” She said, and we all grinned at each other. 

I said, “I don’t know, it’s kind of a toss up isn’t it?” and she threw a marshmallow at my head this time. 

But just like that, we all knew. We all knew that it was going to be different now. We’d had a conversation about mom, and it wasn’t like the ones we had directly after she passed, racked with sobs. And we weren’t avoiding the topic altogether like we started doing after the funeral. We’d started avoiding talking to each other at all then, I guess afraid that Mom would come up somehow.

 It was just...a conversation. A nice one. A nice memory. 

We felt different together. Not the same as when Mom was here - never the same as that. But we felt like a family again, like we weren’t afraid to love each other again. We were resuming.