Chapter 14

With the days growing longer and longer, my patience for dealing with my parents is shrinking. Dad’s rarely home anymore, and when he is, he’s facedown in a bottle, while Mom can’t function without medication. She, at least, has a routine down of getting out of bed now, but she’s gone from one extreme of not eating to the other of eating everything. Unfortunately, she’s learned groceries can be delivered to the door, so she doesn’t need to leave the house. Aunt Joanie has made appointments for her to speak to someone, but she’s only gone to get new prescriptions, not actual help, which has only pissed off the one person who has been around through all of this—Aunt Joanie.

And for as much as I wanted to move out of the house before, I can’t now. I’m the only one left. Without any outside help, I struggle to keep the strings of my family tied together. I have to try, though, to keep some semblance of normalcy, because if I lose them, that’s it. I’ll truly have nothing left. So I stay in my parents’ house, hoping one day they’ll snap out of it.

I spend most of my free time with Vince at the funeral home and discover he does a lot more than hang out with dead people. With only him, his dad, uncle, and a cousin working there, Vince performs a lot of the grunt work. He does all the landscaping and cleaning of the building’s exterior. Last week, I ate a pint of H?agen-Dazs while he power-washed the white siding until it gleamed. I basically follow him around, asking questions all day. He says I’m becoming obsessed with the macabre. I say I merely want to learn more about him. Though, I never go down the back left hall, where the mortuary is. It’s where they prepare the bodies, and he offered to show it to me to prove it wasn’t as creepy as what I thought. I absolutely refused.

Instead, I repeated what he told me weeks ago. “I’m okay with not knowing for now.”

Today, I sit in the back of one of the service rooms drinking pomegranate juice while he prepares for a funeral, laying programs on each chair. “Do you know the story of Persephone?”

He pauses halfway to a chair with a program in his hand. “No, rando, I don’t.”

I hold up the curvy bottle of juice. “I thought of it because of pomegranate.”

He stands up straight, waiting for me to continue, a habit we’ve picked up—me saying the first thing that comes to mind and him anticipating an elaboration.

“So, okay, long story short, Persephone’s the daughter of Demeter, the goddess of fertility and agriculture. Persephone’s all beautiful and delicate, and she’s picking flowers one day when Hades sees her, and you know Hades? Of course you know Hades. You are Hades, god of the Underworld.”

Vince shakes his head in amusement, biting back a smile, but I power through.

“Hades sees her, instantly falls in love, and carries her down to the Underworld in his chariot. But Demeter’s so upset for her lost daughter, she’s wandering around the earth, searching for her, crying because she can’t find her, and causes a draught. The earth changes, vegetation starts dying, people are starving, all because she’s so depressed. And she creates a new season—winter.”

Vince nods along.

“Finally, it gets so bad, Zeus is convinced he’s got to do something and sends Hermes down to the Underworld to bring Persephone back. He finds her, but before she leaves, she eats a pomegranate seed.”

I hold up the juice once again as if it should all make sense. Vince stares blandly at me.

“It was the pomegranate that sealed her fate. Anyone who eats anything in the Underworld has to stay there. To keep everybody calm, Zeus decided Persephone would spend some time on Earth with her mother, and then go back to the Underworld to spend time with Hades, essentially creating the seasons. Summer with her mother and winter with her husband.”

Vince considers me for a moment. “You learn that at college?”

I nod. “Knowledge of Greek mythology is evidently not a great skill for a résumé.”

He finishes up placing the programs on the chairs and meets me in the back row, reaching for my juice as he sits next to me. He takes a sip of it, no longer uncommon for us to share food and drinks. “A seed made her stay?”

“Uh-huh.”

“She didn’t ever love him?”

I take the juice back, our fingers skimming in the exchange. “I don’t know. There are a lot of versions of the story, but he kidnapped her. I can’t imagine she would love him.”

“She ate the seed, though,” he reasons. “She had to have known it would force her to stay.”

“Stockholm syndrome,” I suggest.

He raises a shoulder, and the movement causes friction between our arms. “Or maybe she loved him.”

I try not to lean into him and glare at him instead. The idea of loving the Underworld is absurd. “No one would actually want to stay there with him.”

“Not no one. Her.”

I don’t argue with him since some of the stories do claim Persephone learned to love Hades. “Whatever. It doesn’t matter,” I say. “The gods and goddesses were all wild. I mean, somebody had sex with a bull and gave birth to the minotaur, so take kidnapping women and falling in love with a grain of salt, I suppose.”

He doesn’t object and glances down at his grandfather’s wristwatch. It’s another old-fashioned piece that I’ve come to learn makes up this old-fashioned guy. I wish I could say there was something about him that extinguished the flame of attraction that began so long ago, but there isn’t, and I bury my feelings underneath the reality of my world.

“The family will be arriving soon. Are you staying or leaving?”

I check the time on my phone. I’m closing shift tonight at work, so I have a couple of hours to kill. “I’ll stay,” I say, and when we both stand, he casually drapes his arm across my back, his hand skating up to my neck, his thumb gently pressing the side of my throat.

I’m not sure if he knows what he’s doing by holding on to me like this, but he’s holding me together, and I tuck into his side as we walk back to his office, where Gracie is waiting for us. I set myself up at his desk and open the bottom drawer to nab one of the snack bars he stores there, saying, “Have fun,” as he dashes back out of the office with a folder in his hands.

I’m in the middle of making a new post about Persephone and Hades, drawing parallels between the seasons created by Demeter and the stages of grief—I’m a goddamn genius and quite proud of myself—when I receive an email. It’s a long message, starting with a reintroduction. Mr. Alvarado is the principal at the middle school where Ray taught and says we met at the funeral. I’m sure we did, but I don’t remember. He talks about how the school and Ray’s classes are working to keep his memory alive. He has pictures attached of artwork the students have made, along with one of the faculty wearing jeans and Bruce Springsteen T-shirts. Tears cloud my eyes, and I have to pause to blink a few times before continuing to read what Mr. Alvarado has written.

Knowing how RJ felt about teaching and coaching, I wonder if something can be done to fulfill his work. I’m sure you have often thought about this, and I want to let you know some of RJ’s colleagues and I would be more than willing to help put a benefit of some kind together, maybe a race or a baseball game to raise money for a charity. I think it would be a wonderful way to honor his memory and keep his spirit alive.

Keep his spirit alive? I haven’t thought about it at all. I didn’t know I was supposed to. I’d heard of scholarships in the name of someone or charity golf games or something, but I’d never considered I should or needed to do one. Were people expecting me to?

Obviously, Mr. Alvarado was. Rubbing at the pressure in my chest, I read the whole letter again as panic sets in. I assumed my duties with my brother were finished. Raymond is long since buried, and I have my hands full with Mom and Dad. But now they want more of him? More from me?

“Hey.”

I startle and glance up at Vince leaning against the doorframe, smiling at me and Gracie, the two of us practically entwined together on the floor.

“Do I need to have a fundraiser?” I ask.

“Huh?” He unbuttons his suit jacket and eases down to his chair, swiveling it to me so I catch sight of the purple-and-yellow triangle socks he’s wearing. The only bit of color with his uniform black suit and white shirt. His closet is full of black suits, white shirts, and patterned socks, or so he told me.

“A fundraiser…for my brother. Am I supposed to do one? To, like, raise money for his team’s baseball uniforms or something? Heart disease?”

“Rewind,” he says, making the universal “time-out” gesture so I’ll regroup my thoughts. I read the email out loud to him, and he reclines in his chair, connecting the dots. “Some people have fundraisers, yes. That’s a thing people do.”

“But am I supposed to do it?” Guilt courses through me. Why hasn’t anyone written an instruction book about what to do when people die? A step-by-step guide would be helpful.

“You can if you want to,” Vince says.

“It sounds like this Alvarado guy wants me to.”

Vince shrugs, and I’m annoyed at his indifference. It’s like, all of a sudden, I’m smearing my brother’s name by not doing something. I should open a library or have a street named after him. He was the local hero after all.

I hang my head, whispering, “This is so stupid.”

Everyone’s created a fairy tale out of Ray like he was this perfect person, changing the world one middle school class at a time. Sure, he was a teacher and a coach, charming, and the life of the party, but so are millions of other people. “Besides!” I shoot up, throwing my arms out. “It’s not like he was curing cancer or solving world hunger. I mean, he could be so condescending to me, as if he didn’t just luck into everything he got like the quintessential popular guy from some teen movie.”

Vince laughs, and I pout.

“I’m serious,” I say, raising my voice, forcing the truth out. “I had to work hard! Did you know why I didn’t come home summers during college? Because I was interning, subletting in railroad apartments with five other people, eating dollar-slice pizza every day. Meanwhile, he was here, being…you know, given everything from Mom and Dad and everybody else. No one helped me. No one pulled strings to get me a job.”

“I know,” Vince starts, but I hold up my palm to shush him.

“And he was having an affair. An affair!”

Vince grips my hand, pulling me toward him as he stands from his chair. “Okay. All right. Shh, sweetheart, you’re getting really loud. And I don’t mean that in the you can’t be loud way. I mean it in the you’ll disturb mourners kind of way.”

I exhale, relaxing my shoulders. “I’m just saying, he wasn’t exactly a prince.”

Vince hugs me the way I love, with one hand in my hair and my face pressed into his chest. He doesn’t take away my pain or anxiety, but with him holding me like this, he keeps the hounds from biting at my heels. Just like Hades.

And I could be convinced Persephone knew what she was doing with that pomegranate seed.

After a few moments, I let out a ragged breath. “Ray was my brother. Mine.”

“I know.” His mouth ghosts over my ear and temple. “That will never change.”

I feel him drop a kiss on the top of my head before moving his hands up to my cheeks, and the affectionate touch cracks me in half. I bite the inside of my lip to keep from crying as his thumbs stroke my cheekbones.

“I don’t want to share him,” I whisper.

He smiles tenderly and pushes me to sit down in his chair. “I can understand that,” he says and squats down so we’re eye level. “I can also understand why everyone wants a little piece of him too.”

I laugh because, yes, my brother was a pretty great son of a bitch.

Vince places one hand on my knee. We’ve gotten used to touching each other, contact that would normally be friendly, fraternal pats and hugs, but even this—his fingers curling around my kneecap—isn’t so platonic.

“No one is perfect,” he says. “But I think people want to remember the best of their loved ones. I’m sure this principal feels that way.”

“And if I don’t do this thing, I’ll be the terrible sister who didn’t care about her brother’s legacy.”

He blows me off with a flap of his hand.

“I already think that about myself,” I admit, dropping my gaze to the floor.

“Hey.” He tips my chin up, forcing me to meet his eyes, so gentle I don’t deserve it. He drags his thumb over my jaw. “Try not to stress out about it. If you don’t want to do it, don’t. If you want to, then do it. You’ll have more than enough help, according to the email.”

I hop up, avoiding any more physical contact with him, and grab my things then give Gracie a pat. “I’m going to head out.”

“I thought you had time before work?”

Slinging my purse over my shoulder, I keep my eyes anywhere but on his because I don’t want him to know how much he or this email have affected me. “I’ll talk to you later.”

When I shuffle into the kitchen at home, Mom is drinking coffee and eating a doughnut. She’s dressed in an old sweatshirt and sweatpants, which has become her standard form of attire. However, she smiles when she sees me, and I know she must’ve recently taken one of her antidepressants.

“Good day?” I ask, dropping into the chair across from her at the table.

She nods. “I’m making meatloaf and mashed potatoes for dinner.”

“Okay. I’m closing tonight, so I won’t be home to eat.”

“There’ll be plenty of leftovers,” she says, except with the way she’s been eating her emotions lately, the leftovers won’t last very long. I am not the model for perfect coping mechanisms, but the dramatic swing of extremes over the past few months can’t be healthy for her.

“Maybe we can go for a walk one of these days. The weather’s been great lately.”

She doesn’t acknowledge me, not that I expect her to agree to go. Since our last outing into the world ended in a trip to the ER, she’s refused to go any farther than the backyard or mailbox at the front of the house.

“Sunshine might do you some good,” I say, but she only sips her coffee. I tuck my hair behind my ears, the bangs my mother hated so much grown out now. “I got an email today from Mr. Alvarado.”

Mom gazes at me passively.

“He was Ray’s principal.”

She finishes off the doughnut.

“He wants me to do some kind of fundraiser in Ray’s name.”

“Oh?”

“What do you think?”

“I think that would be lovely,” she says, showing real signs of life for the first time in a long time, and the small glint in her eyes is the final nail in this coffin. I have to do this. Not for me, but for everyone else.

How novel.