When no one is watching and our work is done and my mind is still, we draw each other close again—his lips brushing mine on the far side of the house; my hands in his hair under cover of the big weeping willow out front; tiny bits and pieces mixed into the hours of work or the free time we share with Em. It’s almost enough to make me forget the weight of all that lies ahead: burying my grandmother. Selling the last of her belongings. Selling the house. Saying good-bye. It’s late one rainy night when I drift downstairs for a cup of hot tea with Patrick’s copy of Catcher in the Rye. He left notes for me in the margins of all the best parts, and we vowed to do the same after Red Falls, marking up and exchanging our favorite books so that through them we can still know each other, even if I can’t visit him as often as I’d like. After all my time muddling in the past, the future seems like a foreign land in which I understand neither the language nor the culture, wanting nothing more than a one-way ticket back to the present.
