“You’ll always know where to find me.”
***
She went to the river on the morning of my birthday. Fishing with her older brother, the way they did every few weeks.
I was supposed to go.
I woke up with a fever instead, shaking and useless.
I was supposed to go.
Lily stood in my doorway in her rain jacket with her tackle box.
She kissed my forehead and said, “Don’t die on me. I’ll bring you back the biggest fish you’ve ever seen.”
She never came back.
***
They said she slipped on the bank, hit her head on a rock, and went into the current. Her brother said he had tried to reach her. By the time anyone else arrived, there was nothing to find.
She never came back.
The casket at her funeral was closed.
I sat in the front pew and stared at it for an hour, absolutely certain, in the way that grief sometimes produces its own logic, that if I just waited long enough, she’d walk in the back door and apologize for the joke.
She didn’t.
I stayed in this town. I worked. I had relationships that mattered and then didn’t, each one eventually running aground on the same quiet fact that part of me was never fully present.
