The One That I Want Read Online Free PDF

myself.
    “Did you call Lulu to meet us?” I flick on the blinker to signal a right turn down the long lane leading us to our mom. The sun lets off a sudden, last-gasp flare for the evening, and both of us reach to lower the windshield shade, moving together like synchronized swimmers.
    “She went by earlier,” Darcy says without rancor. “She was working tonight.”
    “And did you touch base with Dad?” I hold my breath.
    “He doesn’t know I’m back.”
    I pull into the parking lot and kill the engine.
    “Darcy.” I meet her gray eyes and affect a tone I hope she doesn’t find patronizing. “You should’ve called him.”
    “Would’ve, should’ve, could’ve,” she says, opening the passenger door and grabbing the almost-wilting irises. “Welcome to life. Now let’s get on with it.”
    Darcy leads the way through the maze of headstones. Dusk has settled into darkness, and the caretaker, lurking but never seen, has thought to flip on the slightly too-bright lights, which give the cemetery a shiny sense of false daylight, and the overhead beams bounce off the headstones and the sad reminders of the tragedies that inevitably await all of us. We tread through the winding pathin silence, an old habit from Darcy’s childhood when she still believed in ghosts and always shushed Luanne and me if we chattered, the better to keep the spirits away. Sometimes the air wafts with the scent of cut grass or heavy rain, but today it smells of mulch, of dirt, the sign that someone else’s family recently laid a loved one to rest.
    As I approach her headstone, with a solitary bouquet of roses resting at its foot, I unconsciously slow down with a complicated mix of dread, respect, and the sense that even after so many years, I never quite get used to the words MARGARET EVERETT, BELOVED MOTHER, WIFE, AND TEACHER , carved into the granite, staring out at me, unable to respond to all of the things I’ve told them in the fifteen years since she’s been gone.
    “Oh, Mom.” Darcy plunks cross-legged, swooping down into herself like a comma, while I stand behind her and give them their moment. From my view, she reminds me so much of the child she used to be, sitting out here for hours, just eight years old, imploring our mother to come back, eyes full of tears I didn’t even know she still had.
    “Happy birthday,” Darcy whispers, her head bowed to her chest, and I step back even farther, too embarrassed to intrude on whatever secrets Darcy will pass on to the only person who could ever seem to tame her.
    When she finishes, I move forward to have a quiet moment with my thoughts and my mother, whose departure left its scars on me as well. When she first died, I visited all the time. I asked her how to cope with my father, who had begun to drink himself into a blind stupor, left with a household full of too much estrogen—and communication skills that were stunted as best—and I’d share how I was doing all that I could to shield Darcy from the agony of what had now become our life. When Ty and I started dating, just amonth after she passed, I sat for hours, pulling grass up with my fingers and casting it about, pouring out all the details of heady, teenage love.
    But eventually, time found a way to move on. I headed to college in the next town over and spent my weekends visiting Ty, who’d been handed a baseball scholarship to the University of Washington. As the years went by, I still visited my mother, but life also got in the way, which is what I always thought she’d want for me anyway. Weekly visits turned into monthly, and soon monthly turned into special holidays, and sure, I missed her so terribly at times that it felt like my heart had been exorcised, but I also found a way to move beyond it. Burrowed safe in the enclave of Westlake, where life repeated itself like Groundhog Day—no rapid movements, no figurative earthquakes that sent damaging fault lines through our world—I found a way to mostly feel