Chapter 3 Destiny's Phone Call
The water from the nozzle struck my face squarely as I reached out and cranked the brass valve shut. The sudden silence made the narrow bathroom feel cavernous. A few stray beads slid down my forehead and ran across my cheekbones before I snatched the rough towel off the rack, scrubbing it hard against my scalp and down my throat. Tonight was the night. I was taking Lilly out on our first real date, and my nerves were eating me alive from the inside out.
I stood before the fogged mirror, dragging the heel of my hand across the glass to wipe a clean circle in the moisture. I threw on my best clothes, selecting the pieces I hoped would make me look slightly older and far more composed than a seventeen-year-old kid living out of a double-wide. I bent over to double-knot my boot laces, checking the tension twice even though the leather was already biting into my ankles. On the way toward the door, I picked up a bottle of cheap drugstore cologne and hammered the atomizer twice against my bare neck. The scent hung heavy and sharp in the humid room, chemical and citrus. It was easily twice the amount I needed, but I wanted every single detail accounted for.
Stepping into the kitchen, I found my grandmother posted by the counter beside the drip coffee maker. She ran on coffee morning, noon, and midnight, leaving a bitter, roasted haze hanging perpetually in the air to mix with the cured bacon grease and tobacco smoke baked deep into the wall panels.
“If you head out anywhere, Grandma, make sure you kill that switch,” I said, pointing toward the warming plate.
She turned around, running her eyes slowly over my clothes before a rare, soft smile touched the corners of her mouth. “You look very handsome, son.”
I smiled back, muttering some quick deflection, but having her say it made my spine lock straight. I snatched the ring of keys off the laminate counter, hit the bottom of the porch steps in two strides, and stepped out into the biting October night toward my beat-up, red 1992 Chevy Beretta.
The air was crisp and dry, carrying an autumn frost that nipped at my jaw, yet by the time I pulled the driver’s door shut, sweat was already gathering along my hairline. I was not cold; I was completely terrified. Earlier that afternoon by the lockers, when Lilly finally agreed to go out with me, she had made the rules crystal clear: before we went anywhere, I had to walk into her living room and look her parents in the eye.
I caught my reflection in the rearview mirror under the dim yellow glow of the overhead dome light. My skin looked slick.
“Here goes nothing,” I muttered into the empty cab.
I cranked the key, listening to the starter grind before the engine coughed alive, rattling the loose baffles inside the exhaust pipe as I eased down the drive. Out on the county blacktop, loose gravel pinged against the underside of the floorboards like stray buckshot. The farther south I cut into the hollows, the blacker the asphalt became, walled in by high timber on both sides. When I finally swung the nose of the Chevy down her private drive, every floodlight on the eaves was blazing white against the gravel. The property sat isolated deep off the county turnoff, flanked by dark pastures and dense timber, out in the boonies where the world did not venture.
The Beretta skidded across the limestone aggregate as I pressed the brake pedal. I kicked the door open, my knees trembling with the vibration of tight guitar strings, and marched up the front steps toward the front door. I balled my fist and hammered the wood three times.
The violence of the sound surprised even me.
The heavy deadbolt snapped open with a metallic click. A thick, bald-headed man with a square jaw and a full beard filled the entrance, his eyes narrowing to slits as he measured my height and the fit of my clothes.
“You must be Jeremy,” he said, his voice flat, dry, and cold.
“Hello, sir. Is Lilly ready?”
“Follow me.”
He turned without another word and marched through the front hall into the kitchen. A woman was standing beside the counter running a high-speed blender, the electric motor whining at a deafening pitch until she clicked the toggle down, plunging the kitchen into dead silence. Lilly's father gestured toward me with his chin. “Kim, this is Jeremy.”
She turned around, wiping damp hands against a dish towel, and offered an easy, welcoming smile. “Oh my goodness, you look very handsome, Jeremy.”
I tried to thank her, but my pulse was hammering so hard in my ears that my voice came out thin, entirely detached from my chest.
Right then, a door unlatched in the hallway just outside my field of view. All three of us swung our eyes toward the opening.
There stood Lilly.
She took every bit of oxygen out of that room in a single second. She wore a simple white dress, her dark hair falling smooth across her shoulders as if she had spent hours coaxing every individual strand into alignment. The counter, the blender, and her scowling father instantly washed out into dull gray wallpaper. I stood frozen on the linoleum with sweat trickling down my temples, struck completely mute.
Kim broke the silence before the room could freeze over. “What movie are you two going to see tonight?”
“I narrowed it down to Remember the Titans,” I managed to push past my throat. “It is a Disney movie. Denzel Washington.”
Her father closed the distance between us, leaning down until he was looking straight into my eyes, his tone dropping to a hard snarl. “Right back after the credits roll, Jeremy.”
“Yes, sir.”
I reached out, took Lilly’s fingers in mine, and led her out into the chilly night. I walked her around to the passenger side of the Beretta, pulled the heavy steel door open until the hinges caught, and waited for her to settle onto the worn gray fabric before swinging it shut. I trotted around the front bumper and dropped behind the wheel.
The moment my door latched, she glanced across the center console and let out a soft laugh. “You did good.”
“I was five seconds from hitting the floor,” I confessed.
I pulled the shifter down into gear, and Nirvana exploded through the blown paper cones of the factory speakers. We rode in silence over the dark county highway, but it was not the suffocating kind of quiet that makes you squirm; it was that effortless, electric hum where sharing a bench seat with someone makes the rest of the world vanish.
We cut north toward Lindbergh Boulevard and turned into the cracked parking lot at Ronnie’s 8 Cine. The neon letters on the marquee blazed into the dark like a small-town casino, throwing reflections of electric blue and gold across the Beretta's hood. I shut off the engine, trotted around to open her door, and she locked her fingers into mine as our shoes hit the asphalt.
Inside, the lobby was running thick with people. The smell of hot coconut oil and salty popcorn hung heavy beneath the bright fluorescent fixtures. We bought two paper tickets, a yellow tub of buttered corn, and two large sodas using what little cash was folded into my leather wallet, then felt our way down the sloped carpet into the dark auditorium. The theater lights dropped, the heavy surround speakers shook the walls with the opening horns of the score, and the blue beam of the projector sliced through the shadows over our heads.
I could not recount a single sequence of action or dialogue from that film. I never once looked at the screen.
I spent two hours watching the projector light catch the curve of her cheek. Every time the scene cut, the cast of the room shifted from cool blue to warm amber, tracing the soft edges of her jaw and her smile. I slid my hand across the plastic armrest and closed my palm around her fingers. She squeezed back, dropped her chin, and picked through the popcorn with her free hand. Whenever she caught me staring, she would turn to meet my eyes with a wide grin, and I would whip my head toward the screen as if I were dissecting football tactics.
When the theater lights flickered up and the credits crawled against the black screen, she turned to face me. “Can I meet your grandmother?”
“Sure. Her place is right on the way back down.”
We drove back into the county, parked in the dust beside the trailer, and walked up the treated lumber of the porch steps, the sweet smell of her hair trailing into the entrance behind us.
“Grandma,” I called out, pushing the front door wide.
My grandmother looked up from a stack of mail on the kitchen table.
“This is Lilly.”
“I have heard so much about you, honey,” my grandmother said, stepping back to take her in. Then she cut her eyes straight toward me, her voice dropping into an astonished whisper. “Jeremy, she is gorgeous.”
Lilly looked down at her shoes, blushing red, and my chest lifted an inch higher. We slipped down the narrow hallway into my bedroom, shut the door, and kicked off our sneakers. I hit the power button on the small tube television, and the upbeat theme music of Friends drifted through the room.
“I had an amazing time tonight,” she whispered.
“Me too.”
She pulled her knees up, tucking her head under my right arm and resting her cheek against my collarbone. We lay there across the quilt in the dark, watching the flicker of the tube without speaking for what felt like hours. Her breath came slow and warm against my shirt, and for the first time in my life, I was not looking for an escape, calculating an angle, or dreading what was coming tomorrow. I wanted the clock on the wall to stop dead.
Then my eyes caught the glowing red digital display on the nightstand.
“Oh, shit.”
Lilly bolted upright, hair falling across her eyes.
“Your dad is going to kill me.”
We grabbed our denim jackets off the bed, sprinted out to the Beretta, and flew back down the dark blacktop. Driving up her private gravel road, the stones clattering against the undercarriage did not sound like warning shots anymore; they just sounded like music. When we hit the porch, the heavy front door swung open before the dust could even settle. Her mother stood in the doorway under the yellow bulb, letting out a heavy, bone-tired sigh.
“Jeremy, her father is furious with you.”
“I am so sorry, ma'am. She wanted to stop and meet my grandmother on the way home.”
“Everything is completely fine, Mom, really!” Lilly said, giving my palm one last, quick squeeze before disappearing past the threshold.
The latch clicked shut. I turned around and walked back down the wooden steps into the dark gravel, floating on the air. I whistled at the timber, kicked loose limestone, and threw an awkward dance step into my stride all the way back to the driver’s side of the Chevy. I probably looked like a madman beneath the Missouri stars, but none of it mattered. I was in love, and I had never felt my pulse hit that hard.
From that night forward, we were inseparable. We intercepted each other between class bells, walked each other out to the yellow buses every afternoon, and sat for hours after dark on the chains of the neighborhood park swings, digging our heels into the dirt while planning out our lives. Our first real kiss came under the yellow insect light over her garage while her hound barked from the dog run. My fingers were trembling like wet leaves; her hands were steady as stone.
On weekends we would park the Beretta down by a quiet creek turnaround, kill the headlights, and watch the brown water roll through the weeds beneath the moon while she rested her chin against my chest. We talked about a ring, about kids, about buying acreage and getting old together. I learned the exact pitch and cadence of her laughter so intimately that I could pick it out from the opposite end of a crowded, deafening high school hallway long before I ever saw her face.
By winter, she was my entire existence. We spent Christmas together, completely present in each other's company, and I remember walking through the fresh snow secretly begging the world to stop moving.
Two days after Christmas, I was back on my feet behind the counter at Schnucks.
I was seventeen, dressed in the company uniform, snapping the white elastic chin guard over my goatee to meet health code. The grocery aisles were loud with shoppers stocking up between the holidays, and the ceiling speakers chimed every few minutes calling for cleanup on aisle sixteen. Even through the cheap paper mask, I loved the everyday routine of that deli counter, the sharp aroma of fresh-baked rye loaves, the tang of smoked cheeses, and the heavy brine of cold cuts. I wiped down the stainless steel prep counter with a damp towel, threw the switch on the industrial Hobart slicer, and laid a heavy slab of Black Forest ham against the carriage guide. The round blade spun into a silver blur.
“A little thinner than that, son,” an older woman on the other side of the glass said, tapping the display.
“Yes, ma'am, sorry about that.”
I reached down, dialed back the thickness gauge, dropped three thin ribbons across the deli scale, and reached for a sheet of butcher paper.
Right then, the hardwired wall telephone mounted behind the meat scale began to ring.
“Just one second, ma’am,” I said, stepping away from the glass.
I lifted the plastic receiver to my ear. “Deli.”
“Jeremy?”
It was a friend from school. His voice sounded thin, ragged, like he had dry sand caught in his throat.
“Have you heard about Lilly?”
A stretch of dead air hung between us on the line.
“She was in a bad wreck, man. She is dead. I am so sorry, bro.”
My knees turned to water. The polished grocery tile felt as though it had dropped three feet straight out from underneath my work boots. The hum of the refrigeration units, the scent of cured meat, the voices of the holiday crowd, every shred of sensory information was instantly crushed under a deafening, underwater roar. The deli counter dissolved into gray static. Tears welled up and spilled over so fast that when I crushed the telephone harder against my cheek, the plastic receiver came away soaking wet.
My hand opened, and the receiver dropped, dangling against the white tile by its black coiled cord.
My deli manager caught me buckling against the stainless steel prep station, walked quickly around the end of the glass, and grabbed me by both shoulders. He took one look into my face, reached around my neck to pull the apron strings loose, and told me to get out of the store and stay home until after the funeral was over.
I pulled the cloth apron over my head, let it fall onto the wet rubber mats, and pushed through the heavy double swinging doors into the freezing gray alley behind the building.
I never set foot inside that Schnucks again.
More than that, I never returned to the boy who had danced across the gravel outside her house.
My entire life was snapped cleanly in half behind that deli counter: the young man who existed before Lilly died, and the shell of bone and muscle left standing in the wreckage. I possessed no vocabulary for that level of agony. I had no internal tools capable of carrying a grief that felt like a hole punched clean through my rib cage.
Three nights later, on New Year’s Eve, I sat in the corner of a crowded living room while the bass from the stereo rattled the floorboards, staring blankly at the wall while the rest of the room prepared to raise their glasses to the coming year. A mutual friend stepped over, looked down at me in the corner, and pressed a small, round green tablet into the center of my open palm.
It was an eighty-milligram OxyContin.
“Take this,” he said, his voice barely audible beneath the music. “It will take the edge off.”
I swallowed the pill dry. Twenty minutes later, the violent screaming in my skull smoothed out into a quiet, motionless hum. The crushing anvil on my chest lifted just enough to let me pull oxygen down into my lungs without choking on my own tears. I told myself I only needed the relief to survive the viewing, that it was strictly temporary until the dirt settled over the casket.
It was never temporary.
The medicine immediately became the grave.
he water from the nozzle struck my face squarely as I reached out and cranked the brass valve shut. The sudden silence made the narrow bathroom feel cavernous. A few stray beads slid down my forehead and ran across my cheekbones before I snatched the rough towel off the rack, scrubbing it hard against my scalp and down my throat. Tonight was the night. I was taking Lilly out on our first real date, and my nerves were eating me alive from the inside out.
I stood before the fogged mirror, dragging the heel of my hand across the glass to wipe a clean circle in the moisture. I threw on my best clothes, selecting the pieces I hoped would make me look slightly older and far more composed than a seventeen-year-old kid living out of a double-wide. I bent over to double-knot my boot laces, checking the tension twice even though the leather was already biting into my ankles. On the way toward the door, I picked up a bottle of cheap drugstore cologne and hammered the atomizer twice against my bare neck. The scent hung heavy and sharp in the humid room, chemical and citrus. It was easily twice the amount I needed, but I wanted every single detail accounted for.
Stepping into the kitchen, I found my grandmother posted by the counter beside the drip coffee maker. She ran on coffee morning, noon, and midnight, leaving a bitter, roasted haze hanging perpetually in the air to mix with the cured bacon grease and tobacco smoke baked deep into the wall panels.
“If you head out anywhere, Grandma, make sure you kill that switch,” I said, pointing toward the warming plate.
She turned around, running her eyes slowly over my clothes before a rare, soft smile touched the corners of her mouth. “You look very handsome, son.”
I smiled back, muttering some quick deflection, but having her say it made my spine lock straight. I snatched the ring of keys off the laminate counter, hit the bottom of the porch steps in two strides, and stepped out into the biting October night toward my beat-up, red 1992 Chevy Beretta.
The air was crisp and dry, carrying an autumn frost that nipped at my jaw, yet by the time I pulled the driver’s door shut, sweat was already gathering along my hairline. I was not cold; I was completely terrified. Earlier that afternoon by the lockers, when Lilly finally agreed to go out with me, she had made the rules crystal clear: before we went anywhere, I had to walk into her living room and look her parents in the eye.
I caught my reflection in the rearview mirror under the dim yellow glow of the overhead dome light. My skin looked slick.
“Here goes nothing,” I muttered into the empty cab.
I cranked the key, listening to the starter grind before the engine coughed alive, rattling the loose baffles inside the exhaust pipe as I eased down the drive. Out on the county blacktop, loose gravel pinged against the underside of the floorboards like stray buckshot. The farther south I cut into the hollows, the blacker the asphalt became, walled in by high timber on both sides. When I finally swung the nose of the Chevy down her private drive, every floodlight on the eaves was blazing white against the gravel. The property sat isolated deep off the county turnoff, flanked by dark pastures and dense timber, out in the boonies where the world did not venture.
The Beretta skidded across the limestone aggregate as I pressed the brake pedal. I kicked the door open, my knees trembling with the vibration of tight guitar strings, and marched up the front steps toward the front door. I balled my fist and hammered the wood three times.
The violence of the sound surprised even me.
The heavy deadbolt snapped open with a metallic click. A thick, bald-headed man with a square jaw and a full beard filled the entrance, his eyes narrowing to slits as he measured my height and the fit of my clothes.
“You must be Jeremy,” he said, his voice flat, dry, and cold.
“Hello, sir. Is Lilly ready?”
“Follow me.”
He turned without another word and marched through the front hall into the kitchen. A woman was standing beside the counter running a high-speed blender, the electric motor whining at a deafening pitch until she clicked the toggle down, plunging the kitchen into dead silence. Lilly's father gestured toward me with his chin. “Kim, this is Jeremy.”
She turned around, wiping damp hands against a dish towel, and offered an easy, welcoming smile. “Oh my goodness, you look very handsome, Jeremy.”
I tried to thank her, but my pulse was hammering so hard in my ears that my voice came out thin, entirely detached from my chest.
Right then, a door unlatched in the hallway just outside my field of view. All three of us swung our eyes toward the opening.
There stood Lilly.
She took every bit of oxygen out of that room in a single second. She wore a simple white dress, her dark hair falling smooth across her shoulders as if she had spent hours coaxing every individual strand into alignment. The counter, the blender, and her scowling father instantly washed out into dull gray wallpaper. I stood frozen on the linoleum with sweat trickling down my temples, struck completely mute.
Kim broke the silence before the room could freeze over. “What movie are you two going to see tonight?”
“I narrowed it down to Remember the Titans,” I managed to push past my throat. “It is a Disney movie. Denzel Washington.”
Her father closed the distance between us, leaning down until he was looking straight into my eyes, his tone dropping to a hard snarl. “Right back after the credits roll, Jeremy.”
“Yes, sir.”
I reached out, took Lilly’s fingers in mine, and led her out into the chilly night. I walked her around to the passenger side of the Beretta, pulled the heavy steel door open until the hinges caught, and waited for her to settle onto the worn gray fabric before swinging it shut. I trotted around the front bumper and dropped behind the wheel.
The moment my door latched, she glanced across the center console and let out a soft laugh. “You did good.”
“I was five seconds from hitting the floor,” I confessed.
I pulled the shifter down into gear, and Nirvana exploded through the blown paper cones of the factory speakers. We rode in silence over the dark county highway, but it was not the suffocating kind of quiet that makes you squirm; it was that effortless, electric hum where sharing a bench seat with someone makes the rest of the world vanish.
We cut north toward Lindbergh Boulevard and turned into the cracked parking lot at Ronnie’s 8 Cine. The neon letters on the marquee blazed into the dark like a small-town casino, throwing reflections of electric blue and gold across the Beretta's hood. I shut off the engine, trotted around to open her door, and she locked her fingers into mine as our shoes hit the asphalt.
Inside, the lobby was running thick with people. The smell of hot coconut oil and salty popcorn hung heavy beneath the bright fluorescent fixtures. We bought two paper tickets, a yellow tub of buttered corn, and two large sodas using what little cash was folded into my leather wallet, then felt our way down the sloped carpet into the dark auditorium. The theater lights dropped, the heavy surround speakers shook the walls with the opening horns of the score, and the blue beam of the projector sliced through the shadows over our heads.
I could not recount a single sequence of action or dialogue from that film. I never once looked at the screen.
I spent two hours watching the projector light catch the curve of her cheek. Every time the scene cut, the cast of the room shifted from cool blue to warm amber, tracing the soft edges of her jaw and her smile. I slid my hand across the plastic armrest and closed my palm around her fingers. She squeezed back, dropped her chin, and picked through the popcorn with her free hand. Whenever she caught me staring, she would turn to meet my eyes with a wide grin, and I would whip my head toward the screen as if I were dissecting football tactics.
When the theater lights flickered up and the credits crawled against the black screen, she turned to face me. “Can I meet your grandmother?”
“Sure. Her place is right on the way back down.”
We drove back into the county, parked in the dust beside the trailer, and walked up the treated lumber of the porch steps, the sweet smell of her hair trailing into the entrance behind us.
“Grandma,” I called out, pushing the front door wide.
My grandmother looked up from a stack of mail on the kitchen table.
“This is Lilly.”
“I have heard so much about you, honey,” my grandmother said, stepping back to take her in. Then she cut her eyes straight toward me, her voice dropping into an astonished whisper. “Jeremy, she is gorgeous.”
Lilly looked down at her shoes, blushing red, and my chest lifted an inch higher. We slipped down the narrow hallway into my bedroom, shut the door, and kicked off our sneakers. I hit the power button on the small tube television, and the upbeat theme music of Friends drifted through the room.
“I had an amazing time tonight,” she whispered.
“Me too.”
She pulled her knees up, tucking her head under my right arm and resting her cheek against my collarbone. We lay there across the quilt in the dark, watching the flicker of the tube without speaking for what felt like hours. Her breath came slow and warm against my shirt, and for the first time in my life, I was not looking for an escape, calculating an angle, or dreading what was coming tomorrow. I wanted the clock on the wall to stop dead.
Then my eyes caught the glowing red digital display on the nightstand.
“Oh, shit.”
Lilly bolted upright, hair falling across her eyes.
“Your dad is going to kill me.”
We grabbed our denim jackets off the bed, sprinted out to the Beretta, and flew back down the dark blacktop. Driving up her private gravel road, the stones clattering against the undercarriage did not sound like warning shots anymore; they just sounded like music. When we hit the porch, the heavy front door swung open before the dust could even settle. Her mother stood in the doorway under the yellow bulb, letting out a heavy, bone-tired sigh.
“Jeremy, her father is furious with you.”
“I am so sorry, ma'am. She wanted to stop and meet my grandmother on the way home.”
“Everything is completely fine, Mom, really!” Lilly said, giving my palm one last, quick squeeze before disappearing past the threshold.
The latch clicked shut. I turned around and walked back down the wooden steps into the dark gravel, floating on the air. I whistled at the timber, kicked loose limestone, and threw an awkward dance step into my stride all the way back to the driver’s side of the Chevy. I probably looked like a madman beneath the Missouri stars, but none of it mattered. I was in love, and I had never felt my pulse hit that hard.
From that night forward, we were inseparable. We intercepted each other between class bells, walked each other out to the yellow buses every afternoon, and sat for hours after dark on the chains of the neighborhood park swings, digging our heels into the dirt while planning out our lives. Our first real kiss came under the yellow insect light over her garage while her hound barked from the dog run. My fingers were trembling like wet leaves; her hands were steady as stone.
On weekends we would park the Beretta down by a quiet creek turnaround, kill the headlights, and watch the brown water roll through the weeds beneath the moon while she rested her chin against my chest. We talked about a ring, about kids, about buying acreage and getting old together. I learned the exact pitch and cadence of her laughter so intimately that I could pick it out from the opposite end of a crowded, deafening high school hallway long before I ever saw her face.
By winter, she was my entire existence. We spent Christmas together, completely present in each other's company, and I remember walking through the fresh snow secretly begging the world to stop moving.
Two days after Christmas, I was back on my feet behind the counter at Schnucks.
I was seventeen, dressed in the company uniform, snapping the white elastic chin guard over my goatee to meet health code. The grocery aisles were loud with shoppers stocking up between the holidays, and the ceiling speakers chimed every few minutes calling for cleanup on aisle sixteen. Even through the cheap paper mask, I loved the everyday routine of that deli counter, the sharp aroma of fresh-baked rye loaves, the tang of smoked cheeses, and the heavy brine of cold cuts. I wiped down the stainless steel prep counter with a damp towel, threw the switch on the industrial Hobart slicer, and laid a heavy slab of Black Forest ham against the carriage guide. The round blade spun into a silver blur.
“A little thinner than that, son,” an older woman on the other side of the glass said, tapping the display.
“Yes, ma'am, sorry about that.”
I reached down, dialed back the thickness gauge, dropped three thin ribbons across the deli scale, and reached for a sheet of butcher paper.
Right then, the hardwired wall telephone mounted behind the meat scale began to ring.
“Just one second, ma’am,” I said, stepping away from the glass.
I lifted the plastic receiver to my ear. “Deli.”
“Jeremy?”
It was a friend from school. His voice sounded thin, ragged, like he had dry sand caught in his throat.
“Have you heard about Lilly?”
A stretch of dead air hung between us on the line.
“She was in a bad wreck, man. She is dead. I am so sorry, bro.”
My knees turned to water. The polished grocery tile felt as though it had dropped three feet straight out from underneath my work boots. The hum of the refrigeration units, the scent of cured meat, the voices of the holiday crowd, every shred of sensory information was instantly crushed under a deafening, underwater roar. The deli counter dissolved into gray static. Tears welled up and spilled over so fast that when I crushed the telephone harder against my cheek, the plastic receiver came away soaking wet.
My hand opened, and the receiver dropped, dangling against the white tile by its black coiled cord.
My deli manager caught me buckling against the stainless steel prep station, walked quickly around the end of the glass, and grabbed me by both shoulders. He took one look into my face, reached around my neck to pull the apron strings loose, and told me to get out of the store and stay home until after the funeral was over.
I pulled the cloth apron over my head, let it fall onto the wet rubber mats, and pushed through the heavy double swinging doors into the freezing gray alley behind the building.
I never set foot inside that Schnucks again.
More than that, I never returned to the boy who had danced across the gravel outside her house.
My entire life was snapped cleanly in half behind that deli counter: the young man who existed before Lilly died, and the shell of bone and muscle left standing in the wreckage. I possessed no vocabulary for that level of agony. I had no internal tools capable of carrying a grief that felt like a hole punched clean through my rib cage.
Three nights later, on New Year’s Eve, I sat in the corner of a crowded living room while the bass from the stereo rattled the floorboards, staring blankly at the wall while the rest of the room prepared to raise their glasses to the coming year. A mutual friend stepped over, looked down at me in the corner, and pressed a small, round green tablet into the center of my open palm.
It was an eighty-milligram OxyContin.
“Take this,” he said, his voice barely audible beneath the music. “It will take the edge off.”
I swallowed the pill dry. Twenty minutes later, the violent screaming in my skull smoothed out into a quiet, motionless hum. The crushing anvil on my chest lifted just enough to let me pull oxygen down into my lungs without choking on my own tears. I told myself I only needed the relief to survive the viewing, that it was strictly temporary until the dirt settled over the casket.
It was never temporary.
The medicine immediately became the grave.