“The boys are what I look forward to, Granny.”
She put a kind hand on his arm.
“Then why are you sending Brian away?”
Jeff was silent awhile before he spoke.
“…because he’s slipping away. All he does is spend his time in an imaginary world, and I can’t seem to pull him out of it. I don’t know what to do.”
“I think when he’s ready, he’ll come out of it on his own.”
“What if he doesn’t?”
Granny smiled. “He will.”
“But what if he doesn’t?”
“Jeff…I think you ought to be more concerned about when you’re going to come out of it.”
“I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not. You don’t really have any friends…and God forbid you had any lady friends. Almost three years now, and I haven’t heard even a peep of maybe possibly considering asking a woman to a movie. The only people you do anything with are me and the boys. I know you love us, but you need someone else in your life, Jeff. Someone who can love you as much as Susan did, God willing.”
Jeff grinned ruefully. “This isn’t what I expected to hear from the mother of my wife.”
Granny paused. Finally, she said it.
“Your former wife, Jeff.”
He cringed, and looked back to the cup of tea.
“It’s painful to hear. I know, because it’s painful to say it. But life does go on. And it’ll go on without you if you wait too long.”
“You say ‘three years’ like it’s forever. To me, it feels like maybe a couple of months. Sometimes it feels like yesterday.”
“Well, that’s no wonder, since you’ve been doing exactly the same thing every day for the past three years. You go to work, you come home, you do it all over again. Nothing changes, because you don’t give it a chance to change.”
Jeff didn’t say anything.
“Susan would want you to be happy, Jeff.”
Jeff managed a little half-hearted chuckle, mostly for effect. “With another woman? I don’t think you knew Susan very well.”
“If you believe she wants you to be miserable and alone until you join her…I don’t think you knew her very well.”
Jeff didn’t know what to say to that.
***
He sat under the dining room table, peeking out from beneath the low-hanging tablecloth. He sat crosslegged in his pajamas, and spoke in a whisper to his left, then to his right, as though a semicircle of tiny fairies were badgering him with questions.
“Yeah, he’s nice now…I think he just had a temper tantrum…yeah, I know he tells me not to, but he’s sad about Mommy…
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Copyright © 2008 Darren Pillsbury. All rights reserved.
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