Only Saints

« iv. »

"Listen, I'll come with if you want." Drew sits at the end of my bed and studies the sewing kit that I pulled out of my dresser drawer. He's sorting the bobbins of colored thread in order from darkest to lightest, and I know he is, because he's done it every time I've given him anything to hold onto. It is—according to him—just the most sensible way of organizing things. Finding information at a glance. I haven't stepped into his room since he moved in with us, but I wouldn't be surprised if he did the same thing in his own closet.

"You really shouldn't." I can't believe I let my mother talk me into this. I hook my phone up to my wireless speaker and turn up some sterile radio pop. It's easy to listen to, something to fill my brain and keep me from overthinking this.

This: an open suitcase and a half-dozen outfits laid out across my bedspread. My best friend sitting on the foot of my bed with my sewing kit in hand. The kind of comfort that comes only from things that I know inside and out, and the terrible fact that I'm going to be leaving this behind for a week, and I'll be back in a place I can barely remember.

The funeral went as badly as I thought it would. I couldn't look while they lowered Old Mère into the ground. Even worse, I couldn't stand listening to my father grumble in the back row of the family; he was only there because I was, and the same with Drew, and the awful knowledge that I had forced two other people to suffer through something I didn't even want to go to. The guilt twists in my chest. I sit down and pull a couple of shirts into my lap to fold them as small as possible. Tuck them into the corners of the suitcase. Try to forget what I'm about to do.

"It's not like I have anything better to do." Drew gives up on my sewing kit. It's kind of funny to watch the frustration on his face when he can't make it close properly, and he squishes one of the paper bobbins down to make the plastic lid close. He tosses it into my suitcase, where it's just going to pop open later and spill into my clothes anyway, but I can't be mad about it. He's just trying to help. "Classes got delayed until January, remember?"

I turn the music up a little louder so I don't have to think about that.

"It's just family bullshit." And if he comes with, I'll have to explain craft. And I'd have to introduce him to my cousins. Somehow that seems worse than letting Drew talk to my aunts—maybe because I know my aunts, more or less, but I can't remember most of the cousins. Some of them were even younger than me when I left the fold, and who knows how much they've changed since then.

"Paul, I—"

"No. Please." I set a hand on his shoulder and try to smile. To make it a little calmer, a little less anxious, the way I can't stand the thought of him coming with me. If I don't belong in that trailer park, Drew should never set foot there. "I'll be fine, man. Seriously. It's only an hour out of town."

"And a half," he points out.

"Whatever." I turn the music up just a bit more, until it drowns out his voice and the thought that I'm going to spend a week out of town. I haven't spent a week out of town since that ill-fated trip to Orlando back when I was in school, when my dad thought it would make us something like a real family, and his girlfriend broke up with him while I was in line for food at Universal Studios. I don't think we've done any big family trips since then.

I don't think he wanted to try, after that.

I'll admit I was a bit of a bitch about it. But what am I supposed to do, fifteen years old, echoing with anger and someone else's words stuck in my head?

Only saints are saints, I thought, over and over again today while I was staring at the cedar box with Old Mère laying in it. As if I could christen her a saint, beatify her, while her body was still cooling. While I could still remember the last faltering beats of her heart under my fingertips. A hundred beats a minute—that was chest compressions. Eighty beats a minute—a healthy heart rate. Sixty beats a minute—my heart, in my throat, thinking about that dark porch and my mother's steel-gray eyes and steel-gray hair down around her face and the phone in her hand while she was calling Aunt Etta.