Then I got under the covers and lay in bed, just thinking. I thought, So this is what life is like now. Without Susannah, without the boys.
It had been two months. I’d survived June. I thought to myself, I can do this. I can go to the movies with Taylor and Davis, I can swim in Marcy’s pool, maybe I can even go out with Cory Wheeler. If I do those things, it wil be al right. Maybe letting myself forget how good it used to be wil make things easier.
But when I slept that night, I dreamed of Susannah and the summer house, and even in my sleep I knew exactly how good it used to be. How right it was.
And no matter what you do or how hard you try, you can’t stop yourself from dreaming.
chapter four
JEREMIAH
Seeing your dad cry real y messes with your mind. Maybe not for some people.
Maybe some people have dads who are cool with crying and are in touch with their emotions. Not my dad. He’s not a crier, and he for sure never encouraged us to cry either. But at the hospital, and then at the funeral home, he cried like a lost little kid.
My mom died early in the morning. Everything happened so fast, it took me a minute to catch up and realize it was al real y happening. It doesn’t hit you right away. But later that night, the first night without her, it was just me and Conrad at the house. The first time we’d been alone in days.
The house was so quiet. Our dad was at the funeral home with Laurel. The relatives were at a hotel. It was just me and Con. Al day, people had been in and out of the house, and now it was just us.
We were sitting at the kitchen table. People had sent over al kinds of stuff.
Fruit baskets, sandwich platters, a coffee cake. A big tin of butter cookies from Costco.
I tore off a chunk of the coffee cake and stuffed it into my mouth. It was dry. I tore off another chunk and ate that too. “You want some?” I asked Conrad.
“Nah,” he said. He was drinking milk. I wondered it if was old. I couldn’t remember the last time anybody had been to the store.
“What’s happening tomorrow?” I asked. “Is everyone coming over here?”
Conrad shrugged. “Probably,” he said. He had a milk mustache.
That was al we said to each other. He went upstairs to his room, and I cleaned up the kitchen. And then I was tired, and I went up too. I thought about going to Conrad’s room, because even though we weren’t saying
