Page 104 of When Wildflowers Bloom

As they clear the room and prepare her body, we end up on the couch, leaning into each other as she’s taken away. A voice says, “Bo, looks like she made a mistake with her pain meds.”

I look up. It’s John.The police are here?I missed that happen.

“Pain meds?” Bo asks, red eyed. “For the arthritis?”

John shifts his weight, eyes moving to me, no doubt trying to piece together what he knows. What he doesn’t.

“Bo…” He pauses, swallows, and clears his throat. “The paramedics found medication in thebathroom…paperwork in the kitchen—Veda had cancer.” Another pause, another glance my way, then, “Everywhere.”

I squeeze my eyes shut as Bo sags back into the couch beside me. When I open them, he’s rubbing a hand down the side of his face that’s now carved with deep lines of sadness.

“I didn’t know,” he says to John with a weak nod. “Thanks, man.” John gives a tight smile before walking out of the room with another officer.

Bo looks at me. “You okay?”

I almost laugh at the absurdity of the question. “Peachy,” I say morosely, forcing a small smile.

“Gran had cancer,” he says, more to himself than me. “She had it before, I don’t know if she told you.” He looks at me. “The treatment was hardly anything, but she told me she wouldn’t do it again if it ever came back. Here we are.” He laughs softly, unamused, and presses his palms in his eyes. He sighs, tone hardening. “Dammit, Birdie, I could have helped her if she would have told me. Anything!”

He shakes his head, hands clenched in fists.

His eyes are somehow both overflowing with devastation and completely empty.

I lean into him, wrapping my arms around him.

“You don’t know that, Bo,” I whisper against his shoulder. “Knowing her, she had her reasons.”

Forty-three

“I’ll drive,” I offer,locking the front door.

“I won’t argue.” Bo walks down the porch steps to the minivan, shoulders slumped, not looking at me.

After a couple hours with people in the house, once everyone left, once Veda was gone, we cleaned. Quietly. The only sounds were one of us randomly sniffling and our footsteps across the wood floor. By the time we finished, it looked like Veda’s house. Without her.

Walking across the yard, I’m so tired I want to curl up in a ball and sleep for a month.

I’m one step off the porch when everything starts to slip through my fingers like water in a fast-moving creek.

As if in slow motion, Bo opens the passenger door to the van and picks up the file on the seat. He lifts his eyes to mine—a split second—then lowers them back to the papers in his hands.

Opening.

Thumbing.

Dropping.

Papers about managing pain in terminal cancer float in the balmy November air and flitter across the yard.

A confetti of unspoken confessions. Grenades of guilt, silently detonating.

“You knew?” he asks, stunned.

My body reacts to his words first, weakening, muscles turning to heavy bags of concrete around my bones.

It’s hard to move. Hard to breathe.

“Bo,” I say, trembling, forcing myself forward. I reach for his arm; he pulls away.

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