Days Of Us

18-Day The Eighteenth (pt2)-

-Day The Eighteenth (part 2)-

Saturday, week 7

"God, why would you bother with all these people?" Lydia sighed as soon as they got out of earshot of the other wedding guests. Ray laughed, looking down at her as he searched in his pocket.

Lydia pulled her hand out of his as they stepped outside and away from the wedding party and Ray felt the loss immediately. They were away from the city by a few miles and had gotten there by bus. Outside was a large expanse of garden, decorated with flowers and shrubs and trees of all colours. Lydia looked around the place, breathing deeply, as Ray pulled the box out of his pocket and put a cigarette between his teeth.

Lydia turned to him and pursed her lips. "I thought you wanted to get some fresh air?"

"Yeah, I am," he answered cupping his hand around the cigarette and flicking his lighter.

"You're not. You're doing the opposite of getting air, you're corrupting your lungs with poisons," she stepped away from him by a few feet as he sucked in his first lungful. "You're going to die young," she said pathetically, wrapping her arms around herself as the cool wind rippled. Ray didn't understand why girls never brought warm clothes to these events. It was obviously going to get cold in the evening since it was already the beginning of autumn.

"Here," Ray pulled off his suit jacket and walked over to her, placing it over her shoulders. She stared ahead, ignoring his presence. She did, however, pull the jacket around herself tighter. She looked smaller than usual, even with the heels that were easily four inches, because Ray's jacket looked as if it was drowning her, almost covering the hem of her dress near her knees.

Ray took another few puffs of smoke, staring out at the pond at the bottom of the garden. It had water spraying into it from little fountains all around it.

"Who's Lilian?" Lydia asked, turning her head to him with a look of curiosity that he had never seen in her before. Ray's body tensed and he put the cigarette in his mouth with a shaky hand, hoping that the smoke would calm him down after hearing her name.

"It was Lily," he said sharply. "Everyone called her Lily."

"Your mother?" Lydia asked, though Ray thought that she could probably tell what the answer would be. He nodded his head. "What happened to her?"

"It doesn't matter because she's gone now," he said, trying to sound final but his voice broke, making him sound as vulnerable as he really was.

"I want to know," she told him, her voice loudening impatiently. Ray could feel her stare on him from a few feet away, penetrating his skin and making him feel increasingly tense.

"Throat cancer. It was too far on by the time they found it. The hospital couldn't do anything."

"Chemo?"

"For a while, yeah. It just made her sicker." Memories of his mother lying in the hospital bed for the last few months of her life flooded into his mind. Near the end, she had been unable to talk so Ray had sat by her bed, telling her everything that he could think of telling her as she slipped in and out of consciousness. He remembered her weak smile as he told her all about Lydia the first time he met her. He remembered her once healthy size reducing to a skinny shell, barely able to keep her alive.

Ray took one last drag of his cigarette and walked over to a nearby bin, throwing the butt of it in. When he turned around, Lydia was holding her shoes in one hand. "What? Why don't you try wearing these things for six hours straight?"

Ray let out a laugh, glad of the fact that Lydia wasn't dwelling on the topic of his mother's death like everyone else seemed to. She didn't act like he needed to talk about every little thing, she was satisfied with his brief explanation.