Page 81 of The Lonely Hearts Book Club

“Will you tell me about her?” She hopped up onto the counter, her floral skirt fluttering around her ankles as she settled one prim knee over the other. I had no idea how a woman could make sitting on formica seem like a lesson in decorum, but she managed it. “If it’s not too painful, I mean.”

“My mom?”

She nodded, and with such earnest friendliness that I knew she wasn’t just offering for form’s sake. People did that all the time—murmured condolences and made vague promises of assistance—but Sloane was different. When she fixed those big, knowing eyes on me, I knew she was actually looking. Actuallyseeing.

“I wouldn’t know where to start,” I said, leaning back against the opposite counter and allowing myself to relax.

“How about the sound of her voice?” Sloane suggested.

This was such an unusual request that I answered. There was no time to put up a filter or any kind of emotional blockade first. One second I was standing alone in the kitchen with a woman who made me feel every inch of my skin. The next my mom was there with us, and all I felt was good.

“It was an ordinary voice, for the most part. Lower than most women’s, raspy when she was tired and almost like a growl when she got annoyed.” I smiled, remembering how often that growl had been directed at me in my teens. Being a single mom with a kid like me had been no treat. “Her laugh, though, that was anythingbutordinary. It was like it always took her by surprise—a shout that popped so suddenly out of her that everyone else was just as surprised. God, I miss that sound.”

“It was cancer that took her?”

I nodded. “She got it twice—right after I graduated from college, and then again last year. In a lot of ways, we were lucky to have that space in between. We’d lost enough time to value the little bit we had left.”

“Any smells you associate with her?”

Huh.That was another unusual question. Unusual but nice.

“Coffee,” I said, landing on the first thing that popped into my mind. “Maple syrup. And…cotton balls?”

“Favorite memory?”

“Um…would it be pathetic to say it was a trip to the zoo we took when I was a kid? I feel like everyone’s favorite childhood memory is at the zoo.”

“This isn’t a test, Greg. There aren’t any wrong answers.”

The speed with which she asked her questions was starting to feelexactlylike a test, but I didn’t say so. I was afraid she might stop asking them if I did.

“What would you say to her if she was standing here right now? Just the two of you?”

I felt my eyes mist over. If my mom were here—in the kitchen where she’d grown up, the kitchen where my grandfather’s anger had sucked up every last bit of happiness she’d been able to hold onto—I wouldn’t be saying anything at all. I’d be getting her as far away from this place as possible.

“I’m sorry you had to live here,” I said. It was as close as I could get. “I’m sorry you had to leave. I’m sorry I don’t know how to help him.”

Sloane didn’t say anything then, only sat with me while I absorbed the enormity of the moment. It was strange. For a few minutes there, I’d felt as though my mother were alive again, her memory awakened by a few simple questions and my just-as-simple answers. In the five months since I’d lost her, no one else had done anything like that. It was as if Sloane knew that what I needed more than sympathy and support—more than all the condolences in the world—was a chance to talk about her.

I was about to thank her for it when I remembered something she’d said the other day, when Maisey and I had sat in her daughter’s room discussing my mother’s death. She’d mentioned burying her heart six feet deep. I’d felt then that she understood something of loss, of the gaping hole that was left when someone you loved was cut out from your life.

Now Iknewit.

“Who did you lose?” I asked.

She blinked, startled by the sudden shift, but not in the same way I’d startled her upon our first meeting. “My sister, but it was a long time ago—a lifetime ago.”

I nodded to show my understanding. In many ways, every death was separated by a lifetime. There was before and there was after, and the only thing that linked them was a wisp of a memory that seemed to be fading with every passing day.

“What did her voice sound like?” I asked, since it seemed like the only way I could repay her.

A quick smile of understanding crossed Sloane’s face. “It’s been twenty years, so I barely remember anymore. Let’s see… It was like mine, probably, but more assured. More confident. She was my older sister, and she never once let me forget it.”

“Associated smells?”

“Popcorn. Chewing gum.” Her smile fell. “Antiseptic cleanser. We had to be really careful about germs toward the end. Her immune system couldn’t handle them.”

Every part of me wanted to wrap my arms around her and pull her in for a hug—not romantically, but because I’d never seen anyone who looked like she needed it more.