The Beginning of After

the house and put her arm around me. “Everything’s in the car?” she asked.
    “It is now,” I said, opening the front door of the Volvo and putting the sandwich bag inside.
    “Then how about one last bathroom trip and we’re on the road?”
    I looked at her, with her gigantic, round sunglasses and her “driving clothes,” a velour tracksuit and white sneakers. It was one of many outfits she’d bought for Hilton Head. She’d be leaving for the fall and winter in just a few weeks.
    “Yeah, good idea,” I said. I didn’t have to go, but I was glad for a few minutes in the house before we left.
    I walked through the living room, did a lap around the kitchen, a dip into the den. Was I supposed to be feeling something specific here? I’d lived in this house my whole life. I was coming back, of course. Then I realized, it wasn’t the house I needed to say good-bye to. It was just this time, this state of being.
    I went upstairs and did a quick search of my room to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. Nana had made my bed, and I thought, It could be months before I lift back these covers again .
    A quick peek into Toby’s old room. It was empty of cats now; I’d found good homes for all of them and sometimes got emails from their people, with pictures.
    I opened the door to my parents’ room and looked at the bed, and had a flashback to a morning many years earlier, when we were leaving to go camping, and Toby and I were so fired up we had to wake our parents. “Let’s hit the road before it hits us first!” we yelled, jumping on the bed, throwing one of my dad’s favorite expressions at him.
    I went back downstairs and looked out the window.
    There was David.
    He sat on the patio, Masher’s head in his lap, talking on his cell phone. I opened the sliding glass door and he turned around to look at me.
    “Hey,” I whispered, “we have to leave in a few minutes.”
    He nodded and said, “Okay, thank you,” into the phone, then flipped it shut. “Sorry about that, it was Dr. Ireland.”
    “Is your dad all right?”
    David stood up and came toward me. “Better than all right. He wrote a few sentences by hand yesterday.”
    “That’s great,” I said, as David put his arms around me and rested his chin on my shoulder.
    “And he says that having my dad help me study for the GED is making a big difference.”
    “I knew it would,” I said, burying my face in his hair.
    One week after the memorial bench ceremony, we’d had the headstone unveiling at the cemetery. It was just Nana and David and me, by choice. The three of us sharing two umbrellas in the rain, as the rabbi spoke. We didn’t say a thing until after we’d placed three rocks on each stone. One for each of them, one for each of us. Nobody spoke until after we got back in the car, and Nana took off her hat and said, “Let’s go have wine with lunch.”
    By that time, David and Masher were living in an apartment two towns over, where David had a job specializing in sound equipment at a music store. He drove to the Palisades Oaks twice a week. Which was maybe half as much as he was coming to our house.
    Once Nana figured things out about us, she forbade David from sleeping here at night, even on the couch. He wasn’t allowed over if she wasn’t home, and if we were in my room the door had to remain open. But she loved having him stay for dinner or asking him to do odd jobs. She accidentally called him by my father’s name once.
    David was going to be looking in on the house while Nana and I were gone, stopping by, hanging out. I had a feeling the couch was going to get a lot of use at night. And once I was settled in at school, outside of my grandmother’s jurisdiction, he would be visiting me there. Overnight. The possibilities of it were too scary and wonderful to think about at that moment.
    Now David pulled away and looked at me, a hand on either side of my face. “So are you ready?”
    “Will everyone please stop asking me that?”
    “Okay. Are you not unready?”
    I laughed. “Yes. Yes, I am not unready.”
    “Then let’s go. We have a long drive ahead of us.”
    He took my hand and led me through the house to the front door. Masher followed us, and when we got to the foyer I turned and squatted down in front of him, burying my hands in the ruff around his neck.
    “See you later, boy. Be good. David and Nana will be back tomorrow night, but Meg will come to feed you. Make sure David doesn’t forget to feed the