Read Online Good Grief by Lolly Winston - Free Book Online Page B

whether I’d like to drive over to Half Moon Bay, where Ethan’s ashes were scattered, and maybe have lunch. She sounds a little frantic. I trudge through the kitchen and pick up.
    “Sure,” I say. Somehow this plan seems easier than taking a shower. I’m surprised that Marion sounds relieved. I’ve always assumed that she calls and takes me places to be polite. But maybe she needs me. Although she has her volunteer work and bridge club and luncheons, she lives alone, too. Maybe she needs me to be her basket case. Just as sometimes you need a person to be strong for you, maybe sometimes you need a person to be weak for you. Maybe I am to Marion what
Cops
is to me. Kooky screwups who help you tell yourself:
Hell, I could be worse.
    I pull on overalls over my pajamas and tie a kerchief around my snarled hair. As I’m getting a coat out of the closet, I notice spotted brown mildew creeping up the wall near the leak under the house. It smells funny—damp and sour. Maybe the house is filling up with invisible spores. Spores that drain the energy I would otherwise have for renting living room furniture. Maybe the whole place is going to rot and crumble and sink into the swampy earth with a giant sucking noise, taking me with it. They might find me thousands of years from now in my pajamas, like those bog people whose leathery brown bodies they discovered curled up under miles of earthy peat, their woolen cloaks still clinging to their limbs.
    Marion doesn’t mention my pajama top. Normally she would ask if I wanted to go back inside and put on a blouse or turtleneck. Her posture is always perfect—straight spine, chin leading her through a room—but today her composure seems manic. I notice she’s got her coat buttoned crooked.
    Ethan was an only child, and he said his mother always planned lavish theme parties for his birthday when he was little—dinosaurs or cowboys and Indians, with hours of games and bulging goodie bags. Even when he was grown she still baked his favorite, banana cake, every year for his birthday.
    We head up I-280 and over the hill on Highway 92.
    “Is this the right way?” Marion asks, suddenly panicked. There’s really only one way to get over the mountain to Half Moon Bay, so I’m not sure why she’s asking. Certainly she wouldn’t forget this route. I nod and her grip loosens on the steering wheel.
    “Beautiful,” she says vacantly, pointing to the wisps of fog strewn through the eucalyptus trees, which smell sharp and clean.
    We stop at a greenhouse, where I choose six yellow roses to throw out to sea for Ethan. It takes me a while to decide how many: A dozen seems like overkill, hard to throw into the surf, yet one or two seems too sparse, like when only a few people show up at a party.
    “Good afternoon, ladies,” says a white-haired man behind the counter, bowing ceremoniously at the flowers. “Will that be all?”
    “I’ll get those,” Marion says, waving a $20 bill at him.
    “You look
just
like your mother,” the man tells me. I glance up from a package of crocus bulbs and realize he means Marion. She looks shyly at the floor, her lips turning up slightly at the corners.
    I say, “Thank you.”
    We pass fields striped with rows of brussels sprouts as we head toward the sea, which is gray and chalky on the horizon.
    Ethan loved the ocean—scuba-diving and boogie boarding. After we were married, we had time for only a short honeymoon because he had just joined a start-up company and could take only five days off. We drank champagne on the beach and stayed in bed until two in the afternoon. But then engineers from his company started calling on his cell phone and he’d talk them through fixing bugs in the software code.
    “Enough,” I told him after we missed the sunset and our dinner reservation one night. I snatched his phone and tossed it into the bushes outside our room.
    “This is for
us,
” he said, running out to get the phone. It was always for us. He said I