When You Were Here

its robot hands and turned her voice into a cold talking computer. “Danny, I’m in college now. I need to get my head on straight. I need to focus.”
    A clean break.
    I didn’t see her again until my mom’s memorial service. She even read at the service, a line from The Little Prince , something about living in the stars, or laughing in the stars, or something that basically is supposed to comfort you and shred your heart at the same time. I near about lost it when she got up and read, and she pretty much did too.
    Now we’re having lunch.
    “Well, college sucks,” Holland says after the waiter brings her an iced tea. “I hated literally everything about my freshman year.”
    “You did?” This is news to me. Then again, everything about her life for the last several months is news to me.
    “Every. Single. Thing.”
    She reaches a hand to her throat, feeling for her necklace, touching the tab with the word SARAH on it. I watch her fidget with it before she lets it go to take a drink. Then I realize why she’d say college sucks. Her friend died.
    Soon we’re eating our sandwiches, and she’s paying the bill, even though I try many times, but she keeps insisting. I thank her as we walk away from the café. She stops, takes a deep breath, and turns to me. “Do you want to go to the movies?”
    “The movies?”
    “Yeah, that thing where they project two hours of famous actors in impossible situations on the screen?”
    “I’m familiar with the concept.”
    But movies ? That was what we did before . We watched big shoot-’em-up action flicks. “The more stuff that blows up, the better,” was Holland’s mantra. She had no interest in Oscar contenders, or quiet dramas, or period romances with English accents. “I want fires, and I want chase scenes, and I want dudes jumping out of tenth-story windows and then running through the streets like it didn’t even hurt.”
    I wanted the same. Life was full of enough family drama. I didn’t need it on the screen.
    “There’s a new Jason Statham flick at the theater down the block, I hear,” she says, throwing out the name of our favorite action star. “We could get popcorn and gummy bears.”
    That was where we saw movies last summer, when we were together.
    “What do you mean?” I ask as my heart pounds against my skin, trying to make a mutinous escape to land in her hands. Does she mean go to the movies like we did when we were friends, or when we were more ? Because she alone could give me my reason to stay in California, if she wanted more .
    “Want to go? You know, for old times’ sake.”
    Right. For old times’ sake. Because we should be buds again, not more.
    “I’m not really up for a movie.” Movies, lunch, graduation-morning pop-ins—I don’t need her pity. I don’t need her trying to resurrect our friendship because she feels sorry for me.
    “Do you want to take Sandy Koufax for a walk then? We could walk and talk.”
    “Talk?” That four-letter word sounds so alien, like she’s speaking another tongue now.
    “Sure. Talk ,” she repeats, all tentative, like she’s not even sure how she’s forming words either.
    “I’ve got plans with Trina,” I say as I walk away so she can’t see my face as I lie to her.
    “Danny.”
    I turn around, and she looks like a snapshot, like she’s been caught taking one step toward me.
    “What?”
    “Nothing,” she says quickly. “It’s just… I trimmed the boat orchids earlier today. They look better now.”

Chapter Six
    The next day I check the mail for the first time in a week. There are no more sympathy cards. They have all come and gone. The sorry s, the prayers, the my thoughts are with you s are over. Everyone has said what they need to say to the bereaved, and everyone has moved on to their happy, joyful, noisy, everyday lives.
    The mail brings only memories. Catalogs from gardening-tool makers. Order forms from bulb suppliers for tulips, calla lilies, dahlias. There is even some flyer from this environmentally friendly tree company offering my mom a lilac bush. She loved lilacs. They were her favorite. Wild lilacs on trees. She stopped and smelled every lilac bush she ever saw, I’m sure. Every now and then she’d cut off a branch and put it in a vase, but lilacs were best enjoyedin the wild, she said. Then she’d wink and add, The wilds of Los Angeles .
    For Mother’s Day when I was ten, I woke up early and left the house with a pair of garden clippers. We had a