Jen Frederick: Unraveled

"I'm so glad you came today, Sam." Will's mom patted my hand. That made one of us. It was a strained meal, what with Carolyn drinking her lunch, David criticizing her for it, and both of them wondering what I was doing to uphold Will's memory. The slight ache at my temples that had hummed in the back of my head when I woke up was spreading across the entire surface of my skull and face. I lifted a shaky hand to my temple in an effort to relieve the pain.

"Have you registered for your classes this fall, dear?" Carolyn handed me the butter dish.

"I did. I'm taking eighteen hours."

Carolyn tsked. "That sounds overly ambitious. Will wouldn't have wanted you to work that hard."

I slid a dollop of butter in the shape of a flower onto my bread plate and swallowed a sigh.

"Smart to try to catch up for lost time," interjected David. “Since your dad gets you free tuition, you might as well take as many credits as possible.” If Carolyn had said the sky was blue, I swear David would have told her it was green. Mom said that David was a great law partner, but a sucky life partner. Lucky for Mom she got David as a law partner. It was Carolyn who had to live with him every day. He continued. "If you do eighteen credit hours every semester and at least twelve in the summer, you'll be on to law school in two years. You got a full year under your belt before you quit the first time."

I gave David a tight smile. He couldn’t resist getting his jabs whenever he saw an opening. "Let's just take one semester at a time."

"You should start planning now what prerequisites you'll need to get your major and when's the best time for you to take those classes." David buttered his own roll and then pointed his butter knife at me. "Otherwise you'll be stuck waiting around an extra semester trying to finish out your degree. No need to waste more time. After all, wasn't going to college the reason you stayed here instead of moving to Alaska?"

Yes, David, stick the knife in deeper. Twist it around. I don't think you've caused enough pain yet.

"Will would be so proud," Carolyn added.

I fought back a grimace. He would not be proud. He hated school. Why else had he escaped to the Army right out of high school? What other reason was there to spend more and more time in the ROTC during high school, playing at drill on weekends? It was because he couldn't stand school. And he didn't want to be a lawyer like his dad. Like my mom.

"It'll be nice to finally have one of you kids join the firm." Carolyn smiled at me.

"If I don't," I demurred, "then Bitsy for sure will."

"Bitsy is whipsmart, but she's only fifteen. It'll be eight, nine years before she can join. You can be there in five, maybe even four if you apply yourself." David waved his knife at me again. The likelihood of anyone finishing college and law school in four years was so low that I wasn't even going to respond.

Not that it mattered to David. He could argue both sides of a topic for hours on end. I guess it made him a great lawyer, but he was a shitty dad. Reason two why Will had hightailed it out of here before the last high school bell had rung.

David must have recognized the ridiculousness of his statement because he set down his knife and leaned closer to me. "We're just anxious to get some young attorneys in so your mom and I can take some time off."

Carolyn leaned in on the other side, and I felt like they were squeezing me like a lemon. "Yes, dear. David keeps promising me that Austria river cruise and we can't do that if Anderson and Miller have no associates."

Will would've told you to hire some already and stop living out your fantasies through your kids. Mom has told me that I didn't have to sit through these lunches or all the other landmark days of Will's life with Carolyn, but if not me, then who? Tucker, who had abandoned family events long ago, showed up only at Christmas and then only for a few hours. He refused to play Carolyn’s games, as he put it. But grief wasn't a game. My counselor had told me that everyone grieved in their own time and in their own way. Who was to say that Carolyn was somehow wrong just because it created more pain for others around her? Will had loved his mother and I just couldn’t abandon her.

"I'll get there," I said. That was suitably vague. I'd agreed to go back to college, but I hadn't fully bought into becoming the legacy that David and my mom were looking for. Well, mostly David. Mom had Bitsy. And David? He had Tucker, who was supposed to have entered the firm a couple of years ago, but he’d bailed to become a tattoo artist.

"I'll be fine, though," I assured Carolyn. "After this summer, I won’t be working at the bar anymore. Only classes."

The mention of the bar brought a disappointed moue to Carolyn's face, her lips puckering and flattening. Carolyn thought tending bar was too low class but I wasn't sure that folding shirts at the Gap was a more honorable occupation.

"What will you be studying then?" David asked. "I think literature would be a good basis for a law degree."

Once more David didn't need a response. He loved the sound of his own voice and it was just best to allow him to drone on about the different majors I could take to prepare me to be the best lawyer ever.

"Will would've loved this place," Carolyn said in between cocktails. I nodded but inwardly disagreed again. It was like Carolyn's vision of Will was remade into who she thought Will should have been instead of who he was. The food wasn't even that good but Carolyn felt like Will deserved this nice restaurant. As if he was keeping a scorecard in his afterlife of how we marked his passing. Year two. Spent at a two-star Michelin restaurant. Five cocktails. Twenty Kleenexes. A deduction for lack of crying from the wife. C+.

And lunch lurched on. I looked at the clock and then the waiter. Please bring the main course, I pleaded silently but he looked away.

EXHAUSTED AFTER LUNCH WITH THE Andersons, I wasn’t prepared to face the same question that Mark, the manager, had taken to asking me every time I walked through the door. “You okay to work the bar?" He never looked at me as he asked. The floor, the bar top, the stage where the live band performed, all held more interest, but ordinarily I’d have my work face pasted on—the one with the fake smile and happy-to-be-here attitude.

Ever since I’d had the episode, Mark had been acting awkward around me. Apparently if you start sobbing just one time while salting a margarita glass, you’re marked as a difficult employee, even if you showed up on time, didn’t try to set up dates with the bar rats, and got along with the other staff.

Mark should have cut me some slack. The days around the anniversary of Will’s death were always the worst. A newspaper reporter had contacted me wanting to know if he could interview me for a two-year retrospective on the war that wasn't a war anymore. Pass. I was still suffering the results of the nonstop coverage that had blanketed the city the first time Will died. Every year, they tried to kill him again. Or to at least make us suffer through his death again by reporting on me, his family, and the snuffing out of the promise of his young life.

It didn't help that a photograph of his mother and me at Will's funeral had gone viral. We'd clasped hands over the flag given to me by the Army Honor Guard during the service. Two generations of sad women captured in one picture.

Grief porn, Bitsy had called it. Just looking at the picture made hearts ache. I'd become the girl who was widowed before her twentieth birthday. So no, I didn't want to rehash to the media about how my nineteen-year-old husband was killed by an IED or comment on the growing epidemic of young widows. I’d hung up on him before he'd finished asking his question. But ever since the phone call in February and my subsequent breakdown at the bar, Mark had been uneasy around me, giving me looks like I was too emotionally unstable to work around regular humans.