Emily wrote fiction? What?

Hey guys,

Here's a story I've been fiddling with for awhile. (Part of it was once part of the horrendously confusing prose thing I brought to Scribblers last spring.) I think it's getting close to finished, but I'm not sure. Any suggestions? Specifically, does anyone have ideas for a title?

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“I don’t know what I’m going to wear to the funeral,” I mused irrelevantly.

“I’d recommend wearing clothes,” my brother Calvin said.

“Okay, smartass,” James snapped.

I’ve heard my older brother James cuss one time in my life, and that was the night after Louis Speaker died. I’m not denying that it’s true (Calvin is a smartass), but for Jim to actually come right out and say it was pretty weird. James is one of those guys who takes forever to say anything because he likes for it to come out just right. He also likes to iron his shirt and alphabetize his movies, but that’s not the point. The point is, some families are drawn together by grief (at least that’s what you hear), but that night James cussed at Calvin and then played computer games for a couple of hours. Calvin did the dishes, banging them around like an angry rocker. I closed myself in my room, cried a bit, then had an argument with my long-distance boyfriend over the phone. It was one of those fights that are about everything and nothing all at once.

I’ve lived with my older brother James since our parents died in a car crash when I was ten. Calvin lives with us sometimes when he isn’t in jail. Being the only girl, I’ve usually learned to avoid comments about what I might wear on any given occasion, but that night at dinner I needed to say something so we weren’t all just staring at each other, and that was what I happened to blurt out.

I don’t mean to be flippant, but if you’re looking for some deep meditations on death, stop reading this and go find yourself some Tennyson or C.S. Lewis or one of those guys. I like them both a lot.

We’d known the Speakers a long time. They were friends of my parents. They’d even offered to take me in when Mom and Dad died, but James was adamant that family takes care of family, so I moved in with him instead. He was twenty-one and fresh out of college, so we were pretty broke for awhile. But anyway, the Speakers had kept an eye on me a lot of times, and I’d even dated their son Tim for a little while in high school. It wasn’t a big deal, we both date around a lot and it was bound to happen someday. Nothing came of it, though. But anyway, I knew his family pretty well. There was a group of five or six of us that always hung out at his house on Friday nights after football games, but we’d kinda drifted since we graduated high school. I hadn’t talked to Louis or his wife Jane in probably a year when we got the phone call that Louis was in the hospital, and then a few hours later that he was gone.

So Tim was twenty when Louis died, and I was nineteen. We were all living at home that summer, which was a bad idea on all counts except for our pocketbooks. Gas prices were high that year and none of us could afford utilities in our apartments at our various colleges. We’d all scattered like aimless tumbleweeds after high school. People said we were ambitious, going to fancy-named colleges and majoring in things like International and Political Studies that sounded like they’d change the world, but I at least was never sure how a country girl like me had wound up in the Northeast. People always told me I was smart enough to change the world, but I’m not sure what smarts and changing the world have to do with each other. I’d just finished my freshman year and was in danger of losing my scholarship because I’d been more interested in boys than in classes. So really I was feeling more like a tumbleweed than an academic heavyweight at that point.

But then I went back to school a few weeks later, and I didn’t talk to Jim at all that semester. I should have. I know I should have. But I broke up with the boyfriend du jour I’d been fighting with the day Louis died, and started dating some other loser, and I just didn’t want to think about Tim at all.

I said that I’d dated Tim but it wasn’t a big deal: that’s not true. It was a big deal, at least to me, but that’s why I couldn’t call him that semester. It had been a couple of years but it was still kind of a sore spot for me.

It’s those stupid little things about grief that most college students don’t get that I would have understood if we’d actually been able to talk. Like how the other day I was making biscuits and I wanted to call my mom and find out if I was doing it right. It’s dumb, because my mom didn’t even make her own biscuits. She liked making breakfast for us on Saturdays, but somehow the biscuits never came out right. She’d over-mix them, or put in too much water, or something, I don’t know. One day she messed up the dough so badly she just went to the store and got a can of Pillsbury and baked them before anyone even woke up.

So then my brother James wakes up and smells biscuits and wonders what he’s in for. But he stumbles into the kitchen and they look good … He spreads some jam on one and takes a tentative bite. “Mom, these biscuits are actually GOOD!” he says. I think he was trying to be supportive in his fourteen-year-old boy kind of way, but I don’t think it worked. (This was before he started ironing his shirts, but after he started alphabetizing his movies.) Anyway, after that she decided she’d just as soon buy biscuits as try to make them. She didn’t make biscuits again the rest of her life—which was admittedly just a couple of years, but still.

See? How did I even get off on that tangent? Sometimes I forget that it’s not appropriate dinner-time conversation. I forget, or I don’t care? It’s hard to say, sometimes. Sometimes I guard it jealously, refusing to talk to anyone about it; sometimes I’m dumb and talk about it on dates, as if to warn potential suitors: “Yeah, I’m emotionally damaged property. If you’re still interested in me now that you see that I can’t go on a date without talking about my emotional baggage, that puts you a step ahead of the last guy.”

It’s not that I really mean to drive guys away. But this is who I am, and I’m not making any apologies for it. I mean, somewhere deep down we’re all pretty screwed up, right? Why not be honest about it? Sometimes I wish guys would tell me about all of their emotional baggage ahead of time, so that we’re spared the terrible realizations a few months down the road.

Anyway, making biscuits still makes me miss my mom. And I wondered if—I don’t know—changing the oil in his car or something made Tim miss his dad. But I never asked.

So Christmas break rolled around, and I hadn’t seen Tim or his mom or anyone since the funeral in August. A few days before Christmas I baked a batch of cookies and wanted to give some to Jim’s mom, but I didn’t know how to go about it. I supposed I could call her up and say, “Hi, Jane, I just thought you might like some cookies, since you don’t have a husband anymore.” But Tim, figuring I’d be in town for the holidays, called me himself. The old gang was going to his house that night, to play cards or watch a movie or whatever it was we always used to do.

Tim gave me an awkward side-hug when I showed up. It was awkward because side-hugs are always awkward, and because he was trying to close the door, and because I was trying to hand him the plate of cookies.

I’d imagined our reunion somewhat differently. There was supposed to be a real, two-armed hug lasting several seconds, which would communicate to him the depths of my sadness at his loss. (The hug was supposed to tell him this because I knew I wouldn’t say it aloud.)

I handed him the cookies.

“Oh. Thanks.” Pause. “People are in the living room watching the game.”

I didn’t know what game he meant. He’d always talked to me about sports, even though we both knew I didn’t know a baseball bat from Count Dracula. Especially since we broke up, and real topics were out of the question. But I walked with him to the living room. Only Jane and Bethany—the late Louis’s sister—were there. I wondered if I was early. Jane sat on the couch and fiddled with her cell phone, talking to Bethany.

“Louis’s number’s still in my phone.” She sighed. “ ‘Lou.’… I almost had Tim delete it once. He was about to, and then I said, ‘No, don’t do it!’ ”

“The number for the phone that’s at my house?” Bethany asked.

“Yeah. Tim said he texted it a few times after I’d had it turned off. ‘I miss you, dad,’ that sort of thing, not like he was ever going to read it. Said it made him feel better. Wouldn’t make me feel better.”

“Me, either.”

I kept my eyes fixed on the Mavericks’ game. I felt like a spectator in one of those dreams where you’re naked in public.