Page 47 of Mostly My Girlfriend
Yes. My dad had also dropped dead of a sudden heart attack. Just like Ethan’s father. I’d been at school when it happened so when I got home… It was like all the life had been sucked out of my mother. As if she was the one who died, and my dad had just gone away on some trip.
Ethan sat on the wide leather couch that took up much of the space in the study and I joined him, sitting with my legs curled underneath me so I could be closer to him. Thinking about what my mother said. I didn’t touch Ethan very often. In the strictly professional sense, it wasn’t appropriate. As friends, neither one of us was overly affectionate. Beyond that, touching people always felt like reaching out a little further than I was comfortable with. But I needed to be here for him.
I wrapped my hand around the back of his neck and massaged the muscles there, let my fingers play at the base of his scalp.
“Tell me how you feel, Ethan.” Because it was the only way to do this thing. The only way to get from one side of grief to the other. To share it with someone.
“How I feel? I don’t feel anything. I’m numb.”
“That’s fair. But the numbness is going to wear off and when it was does, I need you to know that I’m here for you.”
He looked at me then, strangely, I thought. Like I’d given him something he wasn’t expecting.
“I’m your best friend, Ethan.” After all these years, I didn’t think that needed any kind of explanation. “You have to know there isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you.”
“I’m going to hold you to that,” he said gravely.
It was odd but it almost sounded like a warning.
* * *
Memorial service at Mt. Sinai hospital
Ethan
It was beyond excruciating. Almost to the point that I wondered if it was going to happen here. Because it was coming. I could feel it. The rage. The emotion. The loss of control. I was going to have what my father used to describe as anoutburst.
I hadn’t taken a pill other than aspirin since I left my parents eleven years ago. Now, I thought of the medicine cabinet in my old bathroom. Where I’d gotten the sleeping pills for my mother. Had there been something else in there? Something I could take that would, maybe, help me to lock it down?
Because it was always the anger that was the hardest emotion to control. It snuck up on me and before I could stop it, I wanted to smash and break things. That’s how I felt now.
Listening to these people talk about my father. Watching as doctor after doctor stood at the microphone to praise the work he’d done. Feeling my mother sink into her chair next to me, knowing her strength was limited.
All of it was pushing me to some brink and I couldn’t see where the ledge was.
We’d wanted the service to be small, but because of who my father was, who I was, it simply couldn’t be. It felt like all of New York’s and Seattle’s business elite were here. I could only imagine how my mother resented me being on the cover ofTimenow.
The last person finished his eulogy and I held my breath. If someone else walked up to the podium, if someone else started to speak, I was going to tackle that person. I was going to hit that person until I’d removed all their teeth for having the audacity to make my mother sit here in agony for one more damn minute.
I cracked my neck. It was a habit my father had broken in me when I was a child. But he was gone and hearing the crack made me feel like I had opened up a pocket of space for the anger to flow, so that I could have a hope of controlling it.
Thankfully the service was over. Jules stood on the other side of my mother. Daniel had flown in. So had several others of Phoenix’s top managers from both Seattle and Nebraska.
People who had come to show their support. To let me know that I had family beyond the father I’d just lost. I wanted them to make all these other people go away.
It was time, now, to take the urn holding my father’s ashes and go. Only I knew that wasn’t going to be possible.
Reaching around my mother, I grabbed Jules’s hand and tugged her toward me.
“You need to take my mother home. Get her to drink some water, at least, if she won’t eat anything. Make her take two sleeping pills.”
“Ethan…these people.”
“I’ll do it. I’ll stand in the receiving line and greet every one of them if I have to, but you have to take her and go. Tell Daniel to take the urn. And text the driver to let him know he can pull around the block and pick you up out front.”
“I can’t let you do this alone, Ethan. It’s too much.”
It was entirely too much. But it was of my own doing. My fame, which had brought all the gawkers out. That made nearly every damn doctor in this hospital want to say something to impress me.
