Page 27 of To the Moon and Back

DELLA VISITATION

Freshman Summer

My grandmother died. Matthew didn’t tell me till I visited him in Oklahoma, on my secret stupidly-out-of-the-way layover between New York and Connecticut.

I’d told my parents I was going straight to Hollis from Poland, and on principle they never looked at my debit card statements. They trusted me to choose the right.

Matthew emailed me the name of a diner outside the Tulsa airport. No tattered welcome home sign, no porch overflowing with relatives. I had missed the funeral. Would I see them again?

At the counter where we met and placed our orders, Matthew gave me a light hug—like I was a stranger he was scared to touch. He looked off into the distance when it was time to pay for my coffee, an insult my entire body was screaming to tell Steph about.

At the table, Matthew looked down at his hands. “Well, what can I say. She suffered.”

There was a moment there when I could have learned more.

I’d thought her cause of death was old age, or the complications of Alzheimer’s, and I still thought it most likely was.

But I had just spent two months in death, in different stories of different ways to die. I didn’t want to know how she had hurt.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said.

“You were in Europe.”

Was he looking past me, over my shoulder? I turned around. There was a window behind me, and an endless parking lot. Past that, an airport budget hotel.

I turned back to him. “But… you thought I was in Utah! Until I emailed you to set this up last week, you never would have guessed I was in Poland !” The word “Poland” felt important.

A gray palette of former communism, the non-chicness of the place.

My parents had more money than Matthew did—what if he thought I’d been in Paris?

“You could’ve told me,” I added. “I would’ve come back—”

“—home?” Matthew said. “You mean, my home? You don’t have to do that anymore. You’re busy.”

His face was blank. Was he angry I hadn’t come in June, for our first non-mandated summer visit?

I’d long assumed this layover would count in its place. The extra day of flying. The long wait outside baggage claim. The apparently pay-your-own-way coffee. The coffee was cold in this thin mug, on this wobbly table—he had chosen somewhere cheap.

“I’m so sorry for… the loss,” I said quietly. I was afraid to say “your,” equally afraid to say “our.”

“You still don’t call me anything,” he said. His voice was hoarse, pained.

I pretended to sip from my stupid cup, pretended to swallow.

“Not ‘Dad,’ which, whatever—but not even ‘Matthew’? You thought I’d never catch that?” He pretended to read his watch, tucked too far up his stained sleeve. “But hey, I gotta get you back for your next flight.”

He looked out the window again, paused, sighed. He held his palms flat against his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I’m being an asshole. I miss her. I wish you’d… It was an absolute disgrace— ”

He stopped.

He choked back a sob, but it came out anyway, a short wail. A waitress holding a coffee pot took two steps backward and turned on her heel.

Then Matthew said, almost in a whisper, “I didn’t want you to see it. It was a disgrace, how she suffered.”