The Beginning of After

I almost followed her, but David turned to me.
    “Masher seems great. Thank you for that.”
    I looked down at the dog and couldn’t help but smile. “He’s a good boy. And he doesn’t even mind the new cat.”
    “New cat?” David frowned.
    I’d been hoping for a way to tell him what I was doing, what was going on in my life. Suddenly it seemed easiest just to show him.
    “Come check it out,” I said, then simply stood and jerked my head toward the hallway.
    The next morning, I woke up late. I’d gotten used to Masher waking me up at a certain time to be let out, but there’d been no wet nose on my neck at seven. Then I remembered why.
    The couch in the den was neatly made up, and David’s army duffel bag lay on the floor next to it, its contents creeping out.
    “Where is he?” I asked Nana, who was doing dishes in the kitchen.
    “Well, look who slept in today! Good morning, lazybones.”
    “He’s gone already?”
    “Just to his house. Masher, too. He wanted to get an early start.” She paused and shook her head. “I don’t envy him that job. It’s one of the reasons why I keep putting off my trip home.”
    I thought of David sitting in his room, with his dog beside him, surrounded by all the things he ever owned in his life. Trying to decide what was important enough to keep.
    Then I remembered Suzie asking about what we were going to do with my parents’ and Toby’s things.
    “Are we going to do that here? With their stuff?”
    I regretted it almost instantly, as soon as I saw the anguish on Nana’s face.
    “I’m not ready to talk about that,” she said sharply. It was so easy for me to forget that where I’d lost a father, she’d lost her only son; where I’d lost a brother, she’d lost a grandson (“My darling boy,” she called Toby, which always made him cringe).
    “I’m sorry . . .” I mumbled.
    “Meg called,” said Nana, turning back to the dishes. “She said she also sent you a message.”
    I found my phone and read Meg’s text, which was the expected check-in to see if I was all right. I sent her a response that yes, I was fine, and I hoped she had fun. I knew I was supposed to call her and get a full report on what had happened at the dance, and I was supposed to tell her everything David said and did all night. But I didn’t feel like it, and didn’t think about why.
    So I grabbed my journal and tried to brainstorm ideas for my Yale essay.
    David didn’t come back until dinnertime, although Nana acted like that was too early.
    “Oh, you’re not having dinner with your grandparents?” she said, pleasantly surprised, as soon as she opened the front door for him.
    He looked tired and defeated, his eyes red. He just shook his head no and moved slowly over the threshold of our house, Masher behind him quiet but with tail wagging.
    I was sitting in the living room doing English homework but not making much progress. I’d given up on my essay for the day, and had just read the same paragraph in The Scarlet Letter three times, listening for footsteps up the driveway. Now I put the book down and followed him.
    David sat down at the kitchen table, and I wondered if he expected Nana to produce some food, but he just folded his head into his hands and took one, two, three deep breaths. Nana gestured that we should give him time alone, and we moved to leave.
    “Don’t go,” said David behind us.
    We turned and froze. Why had I been waiting all day for him to come back? Things were just weird when he was here.
    “I had no idea how much crap I owned,” he joked. “I don’t want to get rid of any of it, but my grandmother says there’s only so much room in the storage space they’re renting.”
    “Oh, a storage space! What a smart idea!” offered Nana, like it was the most brilliant thing she’d ever heard.
    “I thought so too, at first, but now the idea of all my stuff, my parents’ stuff, locked away in some concrete block somewhere depresses the hell out of me. My mom always thought those things were so ugly. She wouldn’t have wanted . . .”
    David stopped himself, his voice cracking. He ran a hand—dirty fingernails, callused knuckles—through his hair and sniffled quickly. Several seconds passed, and although he didn’t look at me, I felt that somehow he expected me to speak.
    “We can keep it here at our house,” I said, the words taking the express route from my brain to my mouth, with no thought stops along the way. “We have a huge