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GH - 192
🕑 Added 2024-01-02 05:39:15 +0000 UTC“Herald, why don’t you put that big basket away?” Sawyer popped over the shoulder of my seat. “Jimmy can’t see the right side-view mirror.”
On my lap was a nicely woven basket full of white flowers, piled so high that the top ones were level with my forehead. I couldn’t see the road, and Jimmy definitely couldn’t see the window on my side. A few leaves tickled my chin. The sensation of phantom tusks arose as if something long and weighty pulled my jaw down—that’s what she said.
Resisting the urge to scratch what wasn’t there, I explained to Sawyer, “This car doesn’t have any side-view mirrors. We have cameras and sensors all around. Jimmy has everything he needs to see on his screen. Isn’t that right, Jimmy?”
“Yes, sir,” he replied. “No problem at all, sir.”
“Oh, sci-fi fancy,” Sawyer whistled. “Scifancy. I’ve seen ads for these ‘cars of the future’ stuff. Pretty expensive. Is this safe, though?”
“We can paint all the windows black,” I said, “and Jimmy can speed through the highway just fine.”
“Herald, dear,” said Mum, leaning forward between the driver’s and passenger’s seats. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what? Me, speeding? Not going to happen because I don’t drive if I can help it. Hate searching for parking space. If you’re talking about Jimmy, he never goes over the speed limit.”
“I always follow the traffic rules, madame,” Jimmy said.
“I wasn’t talking about speeding,” Mum said. “I meant don’t blot out the windows. Why would you do that? You can’t see the road otherwise. Don’t ruin a perfectly good car.”
“Mum, that was just an—” I scrunched my nose and decided to let it go. “Yes, you’re right. I shouldn’t paint over the car windows.” I heard Sawyer snicker behind me. Nelly was probably smiling.
“There’s no need to upgrade what works just fine,” Sawyer said. “Just turn your head left and right, and ta-da! You’ll see the side-view mirrors. What’s the big improvement with using cameras? Relaxing your neck muscles, hmmm?”
“Streamlining the car for greater speed?” offered Nelly.
Sawyer let go of my seat as she talked to Nelly. “I don’t think removing side-view mirrors have much effect in… whatchamacallit? Aerodynamics?”
“What about an easier time parking?” Nelly said.
“If you’re parking that close you might bump your mirrors, then that’s way too close. I don’t think you can even get out of the car in that case.”
“It probably has an advantage somewhere, else they wouldn’t have made it,” I said, knowing all too well people did many expensively useless tweaks to technology and mislabeling them as innovations even if they weren’t.
“Whatever it is, doesn’t seem worth it to me,” Sawyer said. “I’m gonna take a guess and say that a side-view mirror is way cheaper than hi-tech cameras, sensors, all those wirings, computer systems, and stuff.”
I shrugged. “Well, that’s true.”
“I thought you didn’t want to pay for unnecessary expenses?”
“It’s a company expense to show off,” Nelly and I answered simultaneously. We burst out laughing. After a groan of resignation, Sawyer joined in.
I spotted Mum’s confused face in the rear-view mirror, making me laugh harder. She didn’t know what we found so funny, but then she just smiled and nodded as if she understood, simply happy that her children were happy. There was something relaxing about laughing with my sisters at a dumb joke—not the adult kind of laughter that was reserved, bound by social rules, with nagging worries not to get too happy. That last part especially was present the older I got. Some anchor of foreboding and stress that dampens relaxing.
I couldn’t recall the last time I laughed this much along with Nelly and Sawyer. Rare when we three got together. Too rare. It felt like I went back in time, and it wasn’t a bad feeling.
“You’re learning the trade, Nelly.” I wiped the tears from my eyes as I cleared my throat. “Think of it as the upgraded version of buying the latest WeeCee so you can whip it out and assert delusional dominance over others.”
“I haven’t bought a WeeCee in four years,” said Sawyer. “Wouldn’t have bought a new one that time if I didn’t drop my old one in cow dung.”
“How did that—?”
“Anyway!” Sawyer cut in. “Herald, are you fine with a bunch of flowers on your lap ‘til we reach the cemetery?”
“It’s not far.” I glanced at the holographic map. “Less than ten minutes, and we’re there.”
“Pass it over. I’ll toss it in the back.”
“Too many flowers there already. Some might get crumpled.”
The SUV’s trunk was filled with tall flower arrangements as if a solid hedge of rainbow petals was stuffed in there. Baskets of white lilies, like the one I held, occupied the backseat row behind Mum and my sisters. We bought all of these flowers partly as a family tradition prank.
And partly as an apology.
Pops was allergic to shelling out money for celebrations, whether they were big or small. He wanted a small candle jammed into a loaf of bread for his birthday. We settled with giving him a cupcake with a number candle of his age. And we all had cupcakes too—he couldn’t deny us those—so, putting them all together, it was like we got him a cake. For our birthdays, he’d buy the simplest cake he could find, which Mum would decorate with sprinkles and chocolate bits to spruce it up.
We weren’t well-off back when Pops was alive. But we weren’t poor either, and it was mainly because of his closed fist around money. He wasn’t exactly stingy, but he didn’t want to shell out if he couldn’t see tangible returns. Celebrating the living was somewhat defensible in his eyes. The person was made happy, if nothing else.
However, spending for the dead was nonsense to him.
“The dead don’t care, and can’t care about all these,” was what Pops would say whenever we attended funerals, paired with a disapproving stare at the extravagant coffin, flowers, and dozens of guests in suits and dresses. “Better save your money for something worthwhile.”
Then he’d make us swear to put him in a cardboard box and bury him in a hole when he passed away, and not to bother with flowers when visiting him. Our presence was enough, he’d say. No need to waste money.
Mum would get angry at him for being a ‘gloomy scrouge,’ but Pops would stick by his words. I could hear their voices from years past, reverberating in my ears. Memories so distant, yet so familiar.
And so, we bought him lots and lots of flowers.
If there was an afterlife, we hoped he’d appreciate the joke. We had plenty of money to spare we could flood the whole cemetery with flowers, so he shouldn’t complain about this amount.
Or maybe he still would. He had no use for flowers in the afterlife.
But the thought should count for something, right?
The thought to prank Pops—it was funny, I supposed—and also the thought to apologize to him. An apology meant to make us feel better for not visiting his grave as often as we should.
Our excuse—not a valid one—was that we avoided returning to Egret City to forget everything we lost when we had to move away to some cheaper place. Unfortunately, our losses included Pops, and he was inadvertently included in what we avoided.
Inadvertently.
Hopefully, now that my Goal #101 was completed, and we had a house here in Egret City, Mum could visit Pops every day if she’d like to.
Mum…
I clenched my jaws and moved my chin up and down, brushing it against the leaves, hoping I had tusks to scratch while I pondered. We still hadn’t told Mum that we bought back our old house. She might not even recognize it given the extensive renovations and repairs, with its second floor, new paint, and landscaping.
Or maybe she would recognize it… for it was the house she and Pops wanted to build as newlyweds—a generic two-story suburban home with a slight farmhouse tinge—but couldn’t afford, settling for a quaint bungalow. As close as we could get to the original plans of the house.
Would Mum like it? It looked nice from the pictures Nelly sent when she checked it yesterday.
Would Mum live there? That was the big question.
She was quite happy in the countryside with Sawyer, having a peaceful farm life. And we also knew Mum had bundled up her memories of our old house and tucked them away. She rarely spoke about it, probably agonizing over abandoning it a decade and a half ago. After all, it was supposed to be her dream house. In a way, it turned into a nightmare.
She’ll like it, I tried to convince myself.
When we reached the cemetery, only one other car was in the parking area—a convertible with its roof retracted. A teary-eyed, middle-aged couple returned to it. They gave us perplexed looks when we opened the trunk of our car and began taking out the mini-flower shop we brought along.
Plenty of birds chirped in the trees surrounding the cemetery, white tombstones peppered the sea of green in uniform rows, and all the noises of the city faded away. It had been a few years since I last stepped foot here. It looked the same as the last time, plus a few rows of graves by the far end of the cemetery, almost out of sight as the slight hill sloped down.
“Yeah… this is too much,” said Sawyer, passing a basket to Nelly, who then put it on the ground among the half dozen others already unloaded.
“That’s the point,” Nelly said. “These are supposed to be too much. But I have to admit that we do look weird.” She subtly nudged her head at the couple who entered their car but were still looking at us.
“This is a cemetery,” I said. “What’s weird about bringing a flower? Or a dozen? Or a thousand? I think we got more than a thousand individual flowers here, right?”
“Maybe?” Sawyer shrugged.
“I don’t think we bought a thousand flowers, dear.” Mum bent down. “Let’s see… one, two, three…”
Nelly, Sawyer, and I looked at each other, exchanging knowing grins.
“We’ll carry the flowers to Pops, first,” I said. “Then we can count—hey!” Sawyer elbowed me. “Okay, we’re not going to count.”
“This is going to take a few trips.” Nelly bent down to pick up one flower basket with each hand. “So, let’s get going.”
“Then, so be it,” I said. “Let us bring our maybe a thousand flowers to Pops.”
The four of us—we told Jimmy to stay with the car to keep the whole thing a family moment—entered the cemetery. I paused at the first row of tombstones, trying to recall where Pops’ grave was. Well… I admit I’ve forgotten its location. The row and column numbers were somewhere in my head. Definitely. Maybe.
I deliberately misplaced those memories because I didn’t want to visit Egret. And so, I had a ready excuse why I wouldn’t be able to find Pops’ grave even if I came here. I was so good with my intentional intention that I actually forgot about it.
Mum and my sisters also stopped walking. Did they forget the way too? Or were they expecting me to lead, the eldest son sort of thing?
I scanned the graves. Everywhere looked the same. The groundskeeper glanced at us before returning to his job sweeping away dried leaves. Maybe I could ask him for directions to Pops’ grave?
“This way, Herald,” said Mum, stepping forward. She didn’t ask me if I forgot where to go, but it was obvious she knew. I was thankful she didn’t pry. It was rare that I’d feel ashamed. This was one of those times.
I followed her, with Nelly behind me, and Sawyer bringing up the tail of our line.
