If I close my eyes, I can almost hear Mom moving around the kitchen, making dinner for Theo and me as a cool summer breeze blows through the house. Everything is exactly as she left it six days ago and it makes it so much harder to cope with the fact that she’s gone. But she is. Her ashes are currently floating around in the Gulf of Mexico right now, seeing the rest of the world like she always wanted to.
Theo comes bounding down the stairs behind me and I quickly wipe a stray tear away and sniffle as I raise my coffee mug to my lips. He steps into the living room from the archway in the kitchen and I glance in his direction as he sips his own coffee.
“What are we going to do with this place?”
He peeks over at me before glancing around the room and shrugging. “I don’t know. I suppose you could move in here.”
Theo and I were born in Denver but as soon as we were released from the hospital, Mama loaded us up and hit the road. We always stayed in cheap, roadside hotels and we never stayed longer than three months before she would pack us up again and move to some other part of the country. First it was Arizona, then Iowa, North Carolina, North Dakota, Maine, Texas… We’d visited almost every state in the country before we landed in Baton Rouge when Theo and I were six. I have no idea what changed for her here but she decided to finally put down some roots and this place has been my home ever since. There isn’t a single part of me that wants to lose it but I know I can’t afford to keep it.
“And take over her mortgage payment?” I ask, shaking my head as tears build in my eyes. “I can’t afford that, Theo.”
Compassion fills his eyes. “I’ll help you. I can send you money every month.”
“I can’t ask you to do that.”
Setting his coffee down on the table, he walks over to me and wraps me up in a hug. “You didn’t ask, I offered and I don’t want to lose this place either. This is our house, the only one we’ve ever had.”
Biting my bottom lip, I look up at him and mull it over. “Be honest with me. Can you really afford to send me money for the house?”
The moment of hesitation is all I need to see to know that as much as he wants to help, he’s not in a much better position than I am.
“We have to sell it,” I say before he can answer me and he shakes his head.
“Don’t be stubborn,” he growls. “This is our home.”
“We can’t afford it.”
“I’ll find a way, T. You need a better, safer place to live and Mom wouldn’t want us to lose the house.”
“Mom wouldn’t want us to kill ourselves to keep it, either.”
As he sighs again, I know that he’s on the same page as me. Neither one of us wants to lose it but there’s only so much we can do. Some things are just out of our control.
“If we’re going to sell it, we need to start sorting through her things,” Theo points out and I nod, gazing around the room.
“Where do we even start?”
He peeks over my shoulder to the storage closet in the hall. “There, I suppose.”
I let out a groan. The last time I peeked in that particular closet, I was almost buried under a mountain of boxes.
“Oh, goody.”
“Come on.” He laughs, slinging his arm over my shoulder. “Let’s finish our coffee and then we can get to work.”
We sit across from each other at the kitchen table and start sharing memories of Mom as we finish off our coffee.
“Do you remember that hotel in Kansas City?” Theo asks and I start laughing.
“With the guy that would shout movie lines all night long? I thought Mom was gonna tear him a new one.”
“For the love of God, it’s three in the morning,” Theo says, imitating Mom’s voice and I start laughing but they quickly turn to tears as I realize I’ll never hear that voice again.
“I miss her so much,” I whisper and he nods.
“I wish I’d come home more these past few years.” His voice breaks and a tear falls down his cheek. “The last time I saw her was almost a year ago.”
Reaching across the table, I grab his hand. “You’re all I have left now, Theo. We have to promise to not let so much time pass.”
He nods. “I promise.”
We finish our coffee as he tells me about what’s going on in Charleston and after we rinse our mugs out in the sink, we walk over to the closet and stop in front of the closed door.
“If we don’t make it through this, just know that I love you,” I quip and glance over at Theo as he rolls his eyes.
“You’re so goddamn dramatic.”
I scoff, vividly remembering one time when we were younger when Theo was convinced a simple cold was going to kill him as I step forward and grip the door handle. “Whatever you say, kettle.”
“Are you calling me dramatic?” he asks but I ignore him, opening the door and wincing. When nothing happens, I peek open my eyes and sigh. I half expected everything to just come pouring out of it like in cartoons. “Yes, clearly, I’m the dramatic one.”
“Shut up,” I say with a laugh, shoving him backward and he grabs onto my arm, almost sending us both crashing to the floor.
“Be serious. We have work to do,” he scolds, his face serious but playfulness still in his tone. Smiling, I turn back to the closet and the pain of the last few days crashes down on me again. It’s weird the way you can forget sometimes. Even though it just happened, there are still moments when I smile or something makes me laugh before I remember that my mother is gone and the guilt descends on me for daring to enjoy even a single moment of my life right now.
Sighing, I nod. “All right, let’s do this.”
We start gently pulling boxes out of the closet and setting them in various places around the room. When we run out of room to move around, we each go to a separate box and start digging through them.
“Do you remember these?” I ask, holding up the child-sized boxing gloves from when Mom made us start training.
“Shit, yeah. You hated it and Mom would drag us to class everyday.”
I turn the gloves over in my hand, remembering the horrific fights Mom and I would have whenever it was time to go to class or practice.
“Oh, God, and then she bought that bag, set it up in the garage, and made me practice for hours a day.”
Theo laughs. “Yeah, but look how good of a boxer you are now.”
“I still hate it,” I pout. Out of all the things our mother made us train in, boxing will always be my least favorite.
“You’ll thank her when you get in a fight.”
Arching a brow, I meet his gaze. “When am I ever going to get in a fight, Theo? When am I going to need to be able to reload a gun in two seconds or less? And yeah, sure, I can hit a target at fifteen hundred yards but who cares? I know all this useless stuff that I’m never going to need because I’m not a goddamn super spy or assassin.”
“Come on, T. Some of that stuff she taught us is useful.”
Sighing, I sink onto the ottoman and nod. “Yeah, it’s useful and I guess, if it ever comes down to it, I’ll be glad to have those skills but can you really say we had a childhood? As soon as we stopped bouncing from place to place every couple months, she started in with all this training. And for what? We may never know why she felt the need to teach us these things.”