“Is it hers?” Her voice was breathy and shocked.
Grams chortled. She had a beautiful singing voice, and somehow it came through when she laughed. Like a melody you knew by heart.
“No,Chiquita, it didn’t belong to Stevie, but it looks a lot like hers,” Grams said, referring to the picture behind the counter. The one with my grandparents and the entire Fleetwood Mac crew at one of the very first Jam Fests they’d ever thrown.
Hannah put the hat on, and my throat closed up. She looked stunning. A smiling, happy child with her father’s eyebrows and chin but with my eyes, hair, and smile. Darren had missed it all. He’d barely seen her as a tiny six-month-old baby crying as she teethed. He’d never gotten to see her larger-than-life personality or the pure joy radiating through her whenever she was at a piano.
And he was missing another Christmas just like he’d missed her very first one.
Some days, the pain inside me was as large and sharp as the very first moment when they’d told me he was gone. The knock on the door and the sad eyes of his unit commander still haunted me. I’d lost my legs at his words. I’d collapsed on the floor, holding my gut, crying. But I’d also been filled with anger. Anger directed at Darren for leaving me. Leaving us.
Most of the time now, the pain was just a constant ache inside me. A hole that couldn’t be filled. Until moments like these. When Hannah did something that took my breath away, and I couldn’t share it with him. Reminding me that my soulmate was gone.
As if sensing the pain filling me, Gram’s eyes met mine. She made her way over to me and wrapped me in a hug so strong you would doubt she was in her nineties. “Let it wash over you. It’s okay.”
I nodded.
Four years later, there was barely anyone in my life who could handle the fact that I still grieved. Almost everyone I knew expected me to somehow have moved on, to have put it behind me. And no one seemed to understand I never would.
Grams was the exception. She got it.
“Better?” Grams asked.
I nodded. I was. I just had to let it flow over me before I came back to the present—to Hannah, with a top hat on her head and a blue, gauzy shawl wrapped around her jeans and sweater. She picked up one of the mics Grams had behind the counter, pulled herself up onto the scratched wooden counter, and started singing with Aly and AJ as their upbeat song, “The Greatest Time of Year,” filled the store.
Love and admiration replaced the heartache. I pulled Hannah off the counter, and the three of us danced and sang and laughed as the holiday music streamed through the room, my strangled-cat voice mixing with their two beautiful ones. I let the joy of it settle in my bones because Darren had shown me one thing: these moments were supposed to be lived and felt and remembered. And I would.
???
It was seven thirty when Grams sent me packing with a drooping Hannah. Grams herself seemed to have caught a second wind somehow. Maybe it was the coffee from the bakery three doors down or the energy she gathered just by being a happy extrovert. Whatever it was, she didn’t look tired. It wasn’t uncommon for her to stay until the store shut at nine o’clock as she scraped every last nickel from the holiday.
Hannah and I bundled up in our snow gear and left the store to walk the small distance from Main Street to Gram’s house a few blocks over. Hannah refused to take the top hat off, and it began collecting flakes of snow as they drifted to the ground, shimmering in the holiday lights strewn across the store windows.
By the time we got to the house, the hat wasn’t the only thing with a small layer of snow. We were almost covered, but I wasn’t ready to go in yet. Instead, I grabbed Hannah’s hand and twirled with her for a minute, sticking out my tongue and catching the first flakes, loving the idea that we would have a white Christmas. Hannah copied me, the soft fluff melting as fast as it landed in our mouths.
“It looks like sugar, but it tastes like water,” Hannah said with a hint of disappointment.
“There’s a pretty famous quote that goes something like, ‘The simplest things are often the most beautiful,’” I told her.
She looked doubtful and shivered as the cold finally set in to both of us.
We walked up the steps and removed our wet gear in the entryway. I sent her upstairs to put her pajamas on while I started the fire and let Molly out of the laundry room. The dog hated the snow and barely made it off the back steps before returning to me so that I could wipe her tiny paws. She settled down next to Hannah’s top hat by the fireplace.
I banged out a quick text to Grams.
ME: Will Irma and Floyd bring you home? It’s snowing, and I don’t want you to slip.
GRAMS: They already rang to insist.
At least I wouldn’t have to worry about her trying to traipse home over icy ground.
When Hannah came down, she was in a pair of fuzzy footie pajamas, making her look like the little girl she was rather than the mini-adult she often acted like. We curled up together on the armchair with a pile of books as the flicker of the fire and the lights of the Christmas tree sparkled over us.
Tomorrow, the rest of my family would arrive, and the house would be chaotic, filled with my parents, my sister, her husband, and the triplets who had recently turned three. But for tonight, it was peaceful. And I let the pleasure of it settle over me so it would be another moment of joy I had stacking up against the wall of pain. Someday, the wall would be completely hidden behind the better memories, and my body would release itself from its seized position. Maybe then, I would truly feel like part of the world again.
Brady
HARD DAYS
