But they gave it all to me.
So I didn’t need the money. I just didn’t know it yet. So I did open the bar, even though I wanted to just shrivel up and die like the people I lost.
But I’d find myself upstairs in those early weeks. Just sitting in our bedroom asking myself how things went so sideways.
I couldn’t even open the door to baby Bonnie’s room. Could barely walk past it without just dropping to the floor in sobs that felt like they’d last forever.
It was all too painful.
So I closed the bar again. Hired some construction workers, and they ripped out my cozy, middle-class two-bedroom life upstairs and replaced it with some new, one-bedroom version. Some new high-end version built for one that didn’t really belong to me.
I made them erase my sadness.
And when my sisters and brothers-in-law came to visit, to check on me, they saw it and… oh, how I adore them. They said it was beautiful. And I deserved to be happy.
How? How do I deserve to be happy? When the only man I’ve ever loved and our baby daughter were killed in an “accident” just two months after my new, and much-loved, father-in-law died of cancer?
I didn’t deserve it. Not one bit of it. I didn’t deserve them, either. Those patient and supportive brothers-and-sisters-in-law.
But I didn’t throw everything away when I remodeled the apartment. I took some things down to Daniel’s bedroom. The room he died in. The room where cancer took everything from him. And I put some things in there. Pictures, mostly. But their clothes too. I kept Chris’s clothes. And my favorite outfits that baby Bonnie never got to wear along with the one dress she wore all the time.
I didn’t touch the shop, either. Never went in there again, in fact. We didn’t drive those cars in there. They were just projects. The Corolla was the first car Chris ever had and the Jeep was some old clunker he bought back when he was twenty-one. To fix up and take mudding and climbing eventually. Once he fixed it up.
Which he never did. So it sits there, never used by us at all.
I never turned on the generator when Chris was alive. He took care of that stuff. So even though I have it, and the power has gone off at least a dozen times since the “accident”, I never bothered to go flip that switch.
But remodeling the apartment didn’t really help. Didn’t fix much. Nothing, really. In fact, I think it made it worse.
But I got up every day and put on my yoga pants and my Snowbunny t-shirt. I tended bar and served lunches and sometimes dinner too, but more often than not, I never even opened the kitchen.
They say time heals things like this and I’m sure that’s true for some people. It just wasn’t true for me.
So two nights ago I made a decision. I went into Daniel’s room—which I did not change in the remodel and which has been sitting closed up for a whole year—and found his bottle of painkillers. I filled that prescription the day he died. Drove all the way down the mountain to Pagosa Springs to get them. But he never had a chance to take them.
But I knew where they were. And I could take them.
So last night I got out a piece of paper and wrote my final words. Stuck it inside that journal for someone to find, planned an outfit to wear on my last day—I wanted one last day at the bar. One last chance to take care of people because there was no one left to take care of. And I got dressed up this morning. I did my hair, and put on makeup. I even put on some sexy lingerie.
And I got drunk as the snow rolled in.
It felt fitting to go out with a storm.
It felt right.
But then, just as I was about to go upstairs and take those pills, two mysterious, handsome strangers walked into my bar and all my best-laid plans were ruined.
I look up, because I’m looking at the floor, and realize I just said all that out loud. Just told AJ and Logan my whole story.
Well, not the whole story. Just the parts that count.
I stare at them and they stare at me.
AJ says, “Oh, shit, Yvette. Oh, shit.”
Logan says nothing.
“I’m so sorry,” AJ says, coming towards me. He takes the stack of clothes from my hands and places them on a nearby chair. I appreciate that. That he didn’t just drop them on the floor. It’s like he heard everything I just said and gets it. Like he knew they were precious things and not just faded and oil-stained jeans my dead husband used to wear. That they were more than just well-loved worthless t-shirts.