Page 146 of The Fall Classic

“I’m not telling you what to do with them. I’m asking how many you need.”

“Maybe six.” I’m pushing it. If my mama’s crocheted blankets were unique, I could probably get away with saying more, but as it is, most are variations of the same colors and patterns. The difference is in which ones are symmetrical and which ran out of yarn mid-square.

Liv is walking all over my small apartment now, looking at the stack of pot holders, piles of discarded watercolor projects Mama once started, and even the old Chuck Taylors that pinched my toes for so long—until Logan bought me a pair that actually fits.

And suddenly, the apartment looks different to me. Not cozy and comforting, but cramped and claustrophobic. Less museum, more mausoleum.

“I—” I sigh. “It’s hard, okay? It’s complicated.”

Liv shakes her head, her short hair whipping around her face at the movement. “Don’t listen to me. If it doesn’t fit in my backpack, I don’t take it.”

“You don’t have anything from your family? From growing up?”

“Those aren’t memories I want to keep,” she says simply.

I look around, looping my fingers through the holes of one of the crocheted blankets, thinking about the way Mama once held up one of her more tragic projects—with holes far too big in some places and too small in others—and looked at me through two big lopsided holes.

I swallow the heat crawling up my throat, but it doesn’t budge. “A lot of these are tied to memories I do want,” I say, feeling almost guilty for having such an embarrassment of riches in the memory department.

“I can tell. You clearly love your mom,” Liv says, walking around my couch, through my small kitchen. “But the way I see it, your apartment tells me a lot about what your mom loved and almost nothing about what you love, other than her.” She stops and looks at me. “Where’s the space for you to make new memories when you’re so busy guarding hers?”

“That’s not fair,” I say, my lungs feeling heavy and my nose stinging. “I love books and … coffee.”

“And Mullet Ridge baseball,” she says, pointing to the pennant, like she’s throwing me a proverbial bone.

I squirm. “I have dreams, you know.”

“No, I don’t know. I don’t know that you want anything other than what your mom wanted then and what your stepmom wants now.”

“Ouch,” I whisper.

“I’m not trying to be harsh, Georgie,” she says.

“I know,” I say, looking around my sad apartment like I’m wearing a pair of glasses with two different lenses in it. Past and …

Past.

All of it is past. One lens may make the past look rosier than the other, but they’re both showing me the same picture.

I chew my bottom lip, wishing I didn’t feel so weak and lifeless. “If I put her things away, it feels like I’m DNF’ing the book on my own mother—on our life before she passed.”

“DNF’ing?”

“It’s a reader term for a book you abandoned partway through. Did not finish,” I say, my throat aching.

Liv gives me a kind smile. It’s not that it looks out of place on her face, but it feels like she has to drop a piece of armor to show it.

“I didn’t know your mom,” Liv says, “but if she’s as good a mother as you say she was, then you’re missing a pretty huge plot point, G. She was writing that book with you. About you. I bet wherever she is, she’s eagerly waiting for you to stop rereading the chapters you two already wrote together so she can see where you take the story next.”

Warmth floods me at her words, spilling out of my eyes.

“Where do you want your story to take you?” Liv asks gently.

I glance around the room, and my watery eyes stop on the pitiful unfinished Paint by Number before taking in more and more.

Then I stop letting my gaze land where it may and instead look deliberately at the small kitchen table where I keep my laptop. And where Jane’s card rests, tucked halfway under a cup like a coaster.

“I don’t want this. I don’t want to keep rereading the same chapters and never find out what happens next.”