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of the
house, the door slamming behind me.

    “Ugh!” Jonathan cried, laying on his horn,
the sound shattering the memory, sending it spiraling into
sun-glinted glass. “This traffic is ridiculous!”
    “You in a hurry to get rid of me?”
    Jonathan grinned. “I’m not female, and I
don’t need one of your Kleenexes.”
    My mouth twitched. “Don’t knock the Kleenex,
buddy. They come in handy.” Outside, the city kept moving. My gaze
slid to the sky. The clouds were bunched up hankies swollen with
water we couldn’t see. “There’s always someone crying
somewhere.”
    “Yeah,” Jonathan murmured. “There’s
that.”
    Again, my thoughts strayed to the girl on the
roof. Not because I had a sudden insta-obsession, but because
there’d been no real tears. Not the kind I understood. A single
tear and a lost look, but no maelstrom of emotion. Only regret and,
strangely, relief.
    What were you thinking, Tansy?

THREE
    Tansy

    We were a few miles away
from the hospital when Deena started crying angry tears, the kind
that said “Fuck off!” not the kind that
said “Hug me through the hurt”.
    “I hate him!” she sobbed. “I hate him so
much!”
    “Deena,” my grandmother cautioned from the
driver’s seat, her fingers gripping the steering wheel.
    “You don’t know!” Deena continued. “You
weren’t there, Nana! You didn’t watch him kill himself.”
    “Deena!” Jet growled from the passenger
seat.
    I stared out the window, my gaze on the
passing city. There was no reason to go home. The rented house we’d
lived in was two months behind on payment. After Dad’s admission
into the hospital, our landlord told Hetty it was either pay now or
go elsewhere. She’d gathered our things, packed what she could into
the back of her van, shipped what she couldn’t, and told Mr.
Yarbrough we wouldn’t be back.
    It was all so fast. A single blink. Our
house. Dad. All gone. Everything I’d spent the last three years
focusing on. Now, it was like I was floating in the middle of an
ocean with nothing around me.
    Boats. Maybe I should have asked the guy on
the roof for a ship. One I could knit a sail for. Away, the pattern
would say.
    A knitted sail. The thought made my lips
twitch with the urge to giggle.
    “You’re hella blind if you can’t admit Dad
committed suicide!” Deena bellowed.
    Jet whirled in his seat, his face red, his
eyes flashing.
    I was so tired of the screaming, the
accusations, and the fear. “Stop!” I choked out. “Just stop, okay?”
I glanced at Jet. “She’s right. There’s no use denying it.” My eyes
slid to Deena. “But the anger … is it really helping you any?”
    “What is this whole suicide talk?” Hetty
groused. “He died because his organs failed.”
    “Because he’d been pumping his body with pain
meds, sleeping pills, alcohol, and anxiety medications, Nana,” I
pointed out. “Anything to keep him sedated and not here. We might
as well get it out in the open. Otherwise, it’s just going to
fester. After Dad lost Mom, he just couldn’t do life.”
    “He gave up on us ,” Deena argued.
Crossing her arms, she fell back into the seat. “This van smells
like dog shit.”
    “We’re going to work on that mouth, missy,”
Hetty advised. “Your mama would have had your hide if she heard you
speaking like that.”
    “Do you see her here?” Deena asked.
    Jet sighed, his gaze meeting mine before he
faced forward, defeated.
    Hetty glanced in the rearview mirror. “I miss
her, too, Deena.”
    Nana was our maternal grandmother. Mom had
been her only child. When Mom passed away, Hetty, a well-respected
veterinarian in Atlanta, had retreated to the countryside, to a
small animal clinic.
    “I should have come back,” Hetty went on. “I
shouldn’t have stayed away all of these years.”
    Deena snorted. “It’s a little too late now,
isn’t it?”
    Too much blame. Too much time between all of
us. “In all fairness, we didn’t contact you,” I pointed out.