The Forever of Ella and Micha

yard.
    When I take the trash out back, a cloud of smoke engulfs my face when I round the porch. Dean is leaning against the house in the shadows smoking a cigarette and wearing one of his old heavy flannel jackets with the hood pulled over his head. I have a flashback of when I was fourteen and caught him smoking something else in the garage.
    “What are you doing out here?” I open the garbage lid and drop the bag into it.
    He scratches his head and takes another drag. “Do me a favor and don’t tell Caroline I’m out here. She thinks I quit. And I did. Kind of.”
    Nodding, I hug my arms around myself and turn for the house.
    “So it’s weird, right?” he says abruptly.
    I backtrack and squint through the dark to look at him. “What’s weird?”
    He blows out a puff of smoke. “Having him here sober.”
    Through the window of the house, Caroline is talking to my dad. He has a striped shirt on and a pair of slacks. His brown hair is combed neatly and his face is freshly shaven.
    “It is weird,” I agree, returning my attention to Dean. “And he looks so clean.”
    Dean bobs his head up and down. “I know… I swear there was, like, a year where he didn’t shower.” He takes another drag and kicks his shoes at the snow. “Did he… did he write you a letter too?”
    “Yeah…” I trail off at the awkwardness of standing her talking to him about personal stuff. “I’m guessing he wrote you one.”
    “I think his therapist or counselor or whatever made him.” The end of the cigarette glows in the dark as he inhales from it. “I’m not really fucking sure what I think of it yet.”
    “Me neither.” I rock from side to side to keep warm. Without a jacket on, my skin is numb and probably turning purple. “I like that he did it, but it doesn’t erase the past.”
    “Nothing can erase the past,” he states bluntly. “But we can fucking move on, which is what I’ve been trying to do for a while.”
    “Me too.” I wonder if we’re going to go down that path again; the one where he tells me it’s my fault this all happened.
    Snow floats down on top of our heads as I stare out at the street, where the lights from the streetlamp illuminate the ice on the sidewalk.
    “She inherited the car,” he admits. “That’s where she got it.”
    I whip my head back toward him. “What?”
    He takes a long drag. “The Porsche. I guess she had, like, this rich great-aunt or something who no one knew really, and when she died, she left every single one of her relatives something and that’s where she got it from.”
    “Did she tell you that?”
    “Yeah, a couple of weeks before she… before she died. It was the same time she told me that when she was gone, I could have it. I thought she was being weird at the time, but now that I look back I wonder if she was, like, preplanning her death.”
    I force down the massive lump in my throat. “Are you sure she wasn’t lying, because she told stories sometimes. Like how she and dad met at a train station when they both missed their train, when really they just dated each other in high school.”
    “The train story was better,” he says with a small smile as he ashes the cigarette. “And yeah, she was telling the truth. I could tell because it was one of her normal days.”
    I let out a wobbly breath, thinking about her infrequent normal days. Those days clutch at my heart because I know there won’t be any more.
    Dean offers me a cigarette. “It’ll calm you down. Trust me.”
    I pinch it in my fingers and take a hit. “You know it tastes as bad as the last time you gave me one,” I say with a cough, covering my mouth with my hand.
    Smiling, he drops the butt into the snow and puts it out with the tip of his shoe. “Yet, you still took it again.”
    Shaking my head, I trample through the snow toward the door, but it swings open and my dad steps out, tugging his hood over his head. “Jesus, it’s cold out here.”
    “Well, it is December,” Dean remarks with an arch of his eyebrows.
    My dad pops a cigarette into his mouth and lights the end of it. “It seems like we should have decorated the house or something. We never really did that, did we?”
    “We did once,” I say, scuffing the toes of my shoes along the snow. “But you weren’t here. I think it’s when you took off with Bill for that couple of weeks to go ice fishing. Mom wanted us to do it…” I trail off and we all get quiet.
    “Well, maybe we should start making it a