The Trouble Is

Chapter 47: At the End of the Day

Today I am watching television. That's my plan for the day. I hear Doug gathering his followers in the back yard. He ran through here earlier wearing Skip's old college graduation gown. The front is gathered up in his fist and the back drags behind him, looking more like a wedding gown than anything else. He gives me a jerky little head nod as he passes.

Skip comes home mid-afternoon. I don't even know where he's been all day. It's Saturday, so he's probably been scouring the country for a certain type of honey. He plops down beside me and drapes his arm across the back of the sofa. I channel surf through all the weird channels. I pause on the commercials that sell stuff. I become absorbed in the Grill Mat and the 1-Second Slicer. I think the Snuggie Tails don't look anything at all like mermaid tails. I get that the brand is Snuggie Tails because they have all kinds of tails that snuggle you. But it's the mermaids that seem to be popular. Every girl wants to be a mermaid, regardless of whether she admits it. They would have been better off calling them mermaid tails and dumping the whole gray-shark version.

I can feel Skip wanting to say something but holding back. That's good, I think. I'm in no mood to talk. I'm seriously considering ordering the Egg-Tastic Ceramic Microwave Egg Cooker when he shifts to look at me. I don't look back. I hold firm to the vibe I'm trying to give off—the I-don't-want-to-talk-right-now vibe.

We go on like that through an entire episode of Family Feudon that channel that runs game shows nonstop. Skip starts guessing along with the families, nudging me with his elbow to get me to play along. I move over to the channel that shows all those tiny houses. There's no mystery in those shows. You know the outcome before the episode even starts. The families are going to hire people to build their tiny houses. The houses fit on some kind of trailer so they can be driven from place to place. to put the beds up in some kind of loft. So with the loft and the whole trailer thing, a house might be so tall that they have to be extra careful when moving it. It will have some stairs that look cool, but no real person is going to be happy climbing up steps where their feet don't fit on the actual steps. It's a show.

Skip appears to get the message and doesn't try to contribute to the tiny-house movement. He makes it through a complete episode before he speaks.

"Annabelle," he says quietly and ever so carefully.

I wait. He is going to say what he is going to say, and no amount of channel changing can stop him after he gets started.

"I'm not going to say that I understand," he says. "No one can understand. People who say they do are just ignorant. It doesn't matter if it was a spouse, a sibling, a parent, or a best friend who dies. Everyone's grief is unique. Even knowing that, people want to connect. They want to connect to your grief because they have unending grief of their own. There's some basic human instinct at work that tells you to share, share it all. We are a connected species—this is nothing new."

"Are you making a point here?" I ask, already impatient with so many words.

"I'm trying to," he says, "and must be doing a poor job. I used to have a boss who would start a lot of sentences with the phrase "At the end of the day . . ." God, I hated that phrase for some reason. It made me want to scream at her. Her point was to help you focus on the goal, to figure out what you wanted to have accomplished at the end of the day.

"I think that the hardest part of grieving is the understanding that it is, indeed, the end of the day. It no longer matters what you meant to do or hoped to do or planned to do with someone who has passed away. For your friendship, it is the end of the day. All you can do is reflect on it, learn from it, remember it fondly, and pray to have something like it again.

"Sometimes we try to bargain with whatever god we believe in or some that we really don't believe in at all. We wish upon a star and whatnot. Eventually we have to face the fact that wishing won't make it so," Skip adds. "It can be a terrible day when you realize that part of life. As your dad, I would have liked for this to be many years down the road for you. But it's here and now, and wishing can't make it not so."

I look back at him for a minute, wondering where all this came from. When did Skip become the oracle of truth in our house? Where is our king of denial? Maybe he wasn't ever really that, I think. Maybe I only saw a piece of him all along.

I don't have the answers for any of that, so I just lie down with my head in his lap. He gently rubs my back in circles until I fall asleep.