It didn’t look freshly planted anymore, and new grass was growing all around it. The flowers that Dad must’ve left every few weeks were rotting, and I felt bad about not having new ones to replace them with. Mom loved flowers, and Dad always left them for her. It was clear he hadn’t been to visit her.
We used to have beautiful, vibrant flower arrangements with accents of greenery throughout the whole house. Mom would spend hours on Sundays laying out the flowers and foliage, putting together the arrangements while sourdough bread baked in the oven and one of her many records played in the living room. Most of the time, it was Diana Ross and The Supremes—Mom’s favorite.
We hadn’t had flower bouquets in some time now.
Or freshly baked bread.
I missed those smells.
We hadn’t had any music from the record player, either.
I missed those sounds.
Everything at home was now eerily quiet and dull. It was hard to believe our lives used to be filled with so much color.
I sat down on the grass in front of her tombstone and took in a deep, weighted breath. “Hey, Mom, it’s me, Karla,” I whispered, crossing my arms over my legs. “Just a life update—it still sucks without you.”
I told her about everything. I told her how Uncle Landon, Dad’s best friend, kept checking in on our family, even though he was busy with his celebrity lifestyle as an actor. Every now and again, Uncle Landon would fly into Illinois to spend quality time with Lorelai, Dad, and me. Even when we didn’t want company—especiallywhen we didn’t want company.
I loved Uncle Landon. He shared with me how he used to struggle as a kid, too, and he always helped me through my hard days. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that all my days were hard. That felt like too much for anyone to carry, and I knew Uncle Landon would’ve worried about me. I didn’t want to be a bother to him, so instead, I always told him I was OK. He never believed me.
I told Mom about Lorelai and how big she was getting. Grandma Claire had managed to teach her how to ride a bike. I felt jealous watching my little sister speed around the driveway with no training wheels on her bicycle anymore. I used to love riding my bike before the accident. Now I could hardly sit on one comfortably.
I also told Mom about Dad. She probably wouldn’t have recognized the person he’d become after her death. She probably wouldn’t have recognized me, either. That made me feel like a bad daughter.
I stayed at the cemetery until around two-thirty in the afternoon before I started heading back to school. And like always, I wrote her a letter that I left under a big rock that I had set beside her tombstone. There was now quite a collection of love letters I’d left for her, because Dad used to write Mom love letters all the time. She loved them so much, and well, since Dad was no longer writing them, I wrote my own type of love letters to her.
I knew she’d never read them herself, but maybe, just maybe, the wind could transfer the words up to heaven. You know, if heaven existed.
Grandma Claire pulled up to the school, only this time Lorelai was in the car, too. I climbed into the car. Grandma Claire smiled at me. “How was school, sweetheart?”
I shrugged. “Good.”
2Karla
“I don’t need a freaking nanny,” I said to Dad as he walked into my room. He always came into my room late at night, normally after he spent too many hours at work, to check in on me. Most of the time, I pretended to be sleeping, but after spending the day with Mom, I felt that the least I could do was stay up late to tell my father how he was ruining my life.
Mom would’ve never let Dad hire a nanny. She would’ve been there, involved in every area of my and Lorelai’s lives. Then again, if Mom was still alive, Dad would’ve still been involved, too. It was no secret that the accident changed everything when it came to our family’s dynamics. Based on his grumpy exterior, one would’ve thought that my father was always built on huffs and puffs and office paperwork, but that wasn’t how he’d always been.
Greyson East used to be Father of the Year, repeatedly. He was my best friend. There was never a day when he wasn’t sharing mindless information with me about anything and everything. I’d share the most random facts with him, too, and we’d laugh for hours.
We’d read the same books.
We’d eat the same foods.
I was a mini version of my father, and there was a time in my life when all I wanted to do was grow up and be as kind, funny, and driven as he was. He was the CEO of EastHouse Whiskey, a brand that his father, my grandfather, created manyyears ago. Grandpa wasn’t someone who was in my life much. Mom always said that was a blessing, because he wasn’t a good man. Dad didn’t talk about his father much, but once, before Grandpa passed away, I overheard them fighting in Dad’s study. I walked in to see Grandpa shoving my dad, but Dad never hit him back. After that day, I told Mom what happened, and she forbade Grandpa from ever coming over again. I guessed Dad got hit a lot as a kid, and it made me sad that even in adulthood, he still let his own father hurt him.
That was one thing about my father that he didn’t inherit from his own—he would’ve never laid a finger on another human being, no matter what.
Still, he was one of the grumpiest humans alive. I was the second-grumpiest. I guess that was something new I inherited from Dad after the accident. My bad attitude.
Dad stood in the doorway of my bedroom and crossed his arms over his chest. “It’s late. You should be sleeping.”
“I don’t need a nanny,” I repeated, noting how he skipped over my first complaint. He was a professional at avoiding real issues. It was probably why he worked so much. You couldn’t overthink your own dark thoughts if you clogged your mind with other bullshit.
“Yes,” he said sternly, “you do. We hired a new woman named Eleanor who will be here tomorrow morning to start. You will respect her.”
The hell I will.