Days of Awe Read Online Free

says. “Sometimes I’d wake up on a Saturday morning and go downstairs, and she’d still be there, crashed on the sofa from the night before.”
    An old man carrying a bouquet of pink roses wanders past us, head high, peering left and right, unbothered by the wind and the rain. He looks otherworldly to me, as if he’s searching for his own grave. I want to say this to Josie, and for the millionth time, I’m stunned by her absence.
    Chris falls silent for a moment, then clears his throat and starts again. “There was always a half-eaten container of something on the coffee table,” he says. “Sometimes she would have it for breakfast, no matter how much it had…” He waves his empty hand in front of him and smiles a little. “Congealed. She was always so happy in the morning.” He glances at me and I can read his mind:
Unlike some people.
“So easy to talk to. We’d have coffee together before Izzy got up.”
    That’s it?
I want to say, grief and rage reacting chemically inside me, creating a new and volatile alloy, something bright and flaming. Furium.
That’s it? Leftover Chinese food for breakfast? Coffee on a Sunday morning? Tidying up the living room together, maybe?
She was more cheerful than my wife!
I want to tear his glasses from his hand and fling them against Josie’s headstone. But now Hannah is crying harder, and she pulls up the collar of her red windbreaker and presses her face into her father’s solid chest, and I remember how on the night Josie died Chris wrapped his arms around me. We hadn’t touched each other in months, it felt like, and he just reached for me in that blank, horrible moment, with everything good that he had. Even if I had wanted to shake his arms off, he wouldn’t have let go.
    Chris rests his chin on Hannah’s head, and they stand there together. The geometry of holding your growing daughter is a changing thing: she fits in your arms a certain way when she’s four, another when she’s six, unwieldy when she’s nine, and hardly at all when she’s almost twelve. Some nights when she’s sleeping, sprawled out like a starfish on her bed, I crawl in next to her, stealthily, taking up just the smallest sliver of mattress, to feel the ghost of the baby she used to be. Motherhood has reduced me to such a pathetic creature that I don’t even care how pathetic I am. I’d like to share that thought with Josie. Having an eleven-year-old daughter is like pining over the college boyfriend who dumped you, I would tell her.
    Childless by choice, sweetie!
Josie would say.
    “It’s all right,” I say now, to no one. “We all loved her so much.” To my surprise, my voice sounds clear and calm. Josie observed one of my classes once, as part of Principal Coffey’s peer-review program.
It’s a wonder Isabel sings so terribly,
she wrote in her assessment,
with that pretty speaking voice.
    Mark and Hannah are both crying freely now, they’re a chorus of sobs, Hannah still pressed hard into Chris’s chest; we’re just a huddled mass of mourners in the rain, a single entity, despite all the ways we’ve been blasted apart over the last year. I’m thinking, with a sort of empty resignation,
This is it,
this is how it will be for the rest of my life, lost in this darkness. But then Hannah turns and looks at Mark, and there is a moment, a strange moment between them, and as if by psychic agreement, they both start giggling. It comes over them as quick as a cloudburst. Hannah first: a swipe of her nose with the back of her hand and a chuckle, her recognition of the sad ridiculousness of the occasion offering a glimpse of the kind of adult she will be, savvy and kind. Then Mark, a small part of him opening up to Hannah, a clearing in the bleakness, and then they’re both laughing, just shaking with it.
    Chris looks at me over Hannah’s blond head and raises his eyebrows and smiles. She is one thing we usually agree on, the best thing about us. Lately I find myself thinking about