Miss Me When I'm Gone (3 page)

Chapter 6

After the church memorial service, some of the guests gathered at Gretchen’s parents’ house.

Mr. Waters sat on the couch, listening to a leather-tan woman wearing several strings of chunky beads. His hands were folded neatly on his skinny thigh, but his gaze was fixed somewhere beyond the woman, at the coffee table or the carpet.

“I always felt that about her,” I heard the woman say. “The care she took with every word. Her thoughtfulness.”

Gretchen’s brother, Nathan, tended a tableful of cold cuts and salads and bread, his sandy-blond cowlick bobbing earnestly above him as he worked. I wanted to offer him my help, but knew that he’d refuse it on account of my belly. Recently I’d hit the size where my offers seemed to embarrass people.

Mrs. Waters was nowhere to be seen, which didn’t surprise me. She’d looked ready to collapse at the church. I didn’t recognize many of the other guests.

I stood in the corner and clutched my paper plate and plastic cup. Glancing down at the windowsill, I noticed that the potted plants lined up there were all dry, one of them very wilted. As I considered whether I should dump the remains of my seltzer water into them, Jeremy approached me.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he said softly, nudging my elbow gently.

“Really?” I said. “I’m not. I can’t think of a worse place to be.”

He gave me a funny look.

“Than an old friend’s funeral, I mean.”

“Oh. Right.”

“But it is nice to see you. It’s been too long.”

And it had been. Jeremy and I had exchanged e-mails briefly after the divorce to assert to ourselves that we were still friends, but I hadn’t actually seen him since he and Gretchen had split. He seemed older and chunkier than when I’d last seen him—but maybe it was just the suit and tie. His innocent brown eyes seemed to have sunk a bit, and his hair was cut close to his head—a Caesar cut that wasn’t entirely flattering.

“You look great, by the way,” he whispered.

“I don’t feel great.”

“I mean, you’re like the perfect little pregnant lady.”

“Perfect,” I scoffed, pouring my drink into one of the plants, then setting my cup down. “Absolutely.”

Jeremy picked a kalamata olive off his paper plate and put it in his mouth. As he tried to chew, his eyes filled with tears.

“
Fuck,
Jamie.”

I watched as he extracted the half-chewed olive from his lips, too distraught to swallow.

“The last time I talked to her, I didn’t really—”

I put my hand absently on his upper arm, silently willing him not to break. If he did, I probably would, too.

“I didn’t really give her . . . uh . . . the attention she deserved.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was caught up in my own things. I have a girlfriend now . . . she thought it was a little weird, Gretchen calling. Gretchen wanting, suddenly, to talk to me.” Jeremy sniffled and cleared his throat. “Wanting to talk to me about her new book.”

I handed Jeremy a napkin. “What was happening with her book?”

Jeremy blew his nose before answering.

“Uh . . . I don’t know, exactly. It was complicated. She had sort of a love-hate thing going on with it, I guess. She said something kind of weird to me. She said, ‘Last time, I had to make things up to keep things interesting. This time I don’t need to, but I’m starting to think it’s harder to write about what’s real.’ Whatever that meant.”

“What did she make up last time?”

“Um . . .” Jeremy stepped closer to the refreshment table and flopped a couple of cold-cut rolls onto his plate. “Well, in
Tammyland,
you know the whole thing with the guy Eugene near the end?”

“Of course,” I said. Gretchen met a guy at a Nashville nightclub, and they had a little romance that she wrote about in the final chapters.

“Never happened.”

“What?”

“She made it up to make the book more chick-lit-y.”

“No! She didn’t tell me that!”

“Well, the guy existed. She chatted with him a little at the nightclub. But she said the music was too loud to have a real conversation, and it kind of ended there. She made up the rest.”

I didn’t know what to say to this. “Was his name really Eugene?”

Jeremy shrugged. “No idea.”

“That’s interesting,” I said. “I’ll have to keep an eye out for that sort of thing if I end up helping with her manuscript.”

“Helping with her manuscript?” Jeremy repeated, and I explained about my appointment with Mrs. Waters the following day.

Jeremy didn’t reply.

“So you two were talking a lot these days?” I asked.

“Not a
lot
. Some. More than right after the divorce. There were, uh, some things that came up with the writing of the second book, I guess, that made her want to reconnect.”

“But what did her second book have to do—”

“I could have done better,” Jeremy interrupted me, his voice shaky again. “I should have done better for her. When she called, and . . .”

Jeremy’s voice cracked. He couldn’t talk anymore. We were both quiet for a couple of minutes.

“We all feel like that sometimes,” I said, trying to think of something comforting to say. “There is no way you could have known . . .”

Known what? I wondered. That Gretchen would tumble down a flight of stairs to her death? It seemed a dumb thing to say. Unfortunately, no smarter or more sensitive words were coming to mind.

Jeremy nodded vaguely and wiped one eye with his fingertips.

“I could’ve been better, too. I owed her an e-mail,” I admitted. “She sent me one of her philosophical sort of e-mails, you know?”

“Those could be hard to answer sometimes.” Jeremy nodded.

“Yeah,” I said.

Jeremy gnawed down a piece of salami.

“Some other time, when I can really talk,” Jeremy said, “I’d like to talk to you a little more. Just about Gretchen. About Gretchen and me.”

“Okay, sure,” I said.

“I mean, sometime.”

“Yeah. Sometime.”

I poked at the fruit salad on my plate. We said nothing more about it.

“I’m not sure how this is going to go,” Nathan whispered to me as he led me into the house. “But thanks for coming. Really, very sweet of you. It means a lot to my mother.”

The kitchen decor belied the Waterses’ recent tragedy. There was plenty of sunlight glinting off the pale yellow walls and many framed photographs of lemons and lemonade stands. For breakfast, Nathan had put out a plate of leftover buns, cookies, and fruit from yesterday’s gathering.

“Of
course,
Nathan,” I said. “Whatever I can do . . .”

Before Nathan could say anything more, Mrs. Waters shuffled into the room. She looked slightly less terrible than she had at the memorial service. Her eyes were still red, but her gray hair was more neatly combed, parted awkwardly close to her right ear. Yesterday’s wrinkled black dress was now replaced by jeans and a salmon-colored sweater.

“Hello, dear,” she said. “My goodness, have a seat. Nathan, you didn’t offer Jamie a seat?
Look
at her.”

“I was just getting to that,” Nathan mumbled.

“How far along are you, dear?”

“Six and a half months,” I said, taking the chair she offered.

“Oh. Well, you look nice.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“I don’t think Gretchen was ever going to have kids.” Mrs. Waters sighed. “The older she got, the more she talked about getting dogs.”

Nathan threw me a helpless look.

“Mom, do you need anything else here?” he asked. “Or should I leave you two alone?”

“This all looks good,” Mrs. Waters said, sweeping her hand over the spread on the table. “We’re fine.”

Nathan nodded and left the room.

“You are probably wondering why I wanted to chat with you,” she said, pouring herself a cup of coffee, then raising the pot. “Nathan didn’t offer you any?”

“He did.” I showed her the juice in my hand. “I don’t drink it lately.”

“Oh. Yes, of course,” she said, sitting at the table with me. “Anyway, I know Nathan filled you in that I’m hoping to find someone to help me organize Gretchen’s writing. And you came to mind first, since you’re such a good friend to Gretchen. And since you’re a writer, too.”

She was talking fast, twisting her rings, arranging and rearranging the coffee cups, sugar bowl, and creamer on the table. I was surprised at her words. It had been years since anyone had referred to me as a
writer.

“You look surprised. Now, I know you have a lot on your plate, with the little one on the way and everything. It’s not an urgent thing. It would be at your leisure.”

“Oh, well . . . whatever I can do,” I said.

Mrs. Waters waved at the food and said, “You go ahead and start. I’m gonna show you something.”

With that, she slipped out of the kitchen. I grabbed a roll but hesitated to nibble at it. My stomach and my nerves were already pretty weak from watching Mrs. Waters try to hold it together.

She returned lugging a cardboard box.

“You want help with that?” I asked, standing up.

“You go ahead and sit down,” she said sharply, putting the box next to me on the linoleum floor. “I’ll be right back.”

I glanced into the box. It was full of manila envelopes and paper. Stacks and stacks of paper, bundled with thick elastic bands.

Mrs. Waters returned with a purple plastic crate full of more paper, CDs, and a ton of notebooks.

“This is all Gretchen’s,” she said breathlessly. “It’s all here but her laptop. I’ll tell you about that in a minute.”

“This stuff’s . . . all from her apartment?”

“Yes. From her office. Gregor was very nice about helping us with it.”

Gregor
. Gretchen’s twentysomething hipster boyfriend, with whom she’d been shacked up for about six months. Another reason I hadn’t felt particularly close to her lately: I’d met him once and the relationship perplexed me.

“Oh . . . Gregor,” I said. “Was he around yesterday? I don’t remember seeing him.”

“He visited with us yesterday morning. And he was at the church service.” Mrs. Waters sighed heavily as she fell into her kitchen chair. “He didn’t come to the house afterward. Anyway. I wanted to know if you’d take these things with you.”

“Um, of course,” I replied. “If that would help in some way.”

Mrs. Waters dumped a teaspoon of sugar in her coffee.

“Now . . . you know Gretchen’s deadline was coming up soon? And I believe she was almost finished with the book.”

“Oh?” I said. “Okay.”

“What I’m asking you, I suppose, is if you’ll be Gretchen’s . . . literary executor, I guess, is what you’d call it. I mean, we don’t have to be official about it. But that would be the basic idea. Do you know what that would entail?”

“Uh . . . Sort of . . .”

“Now, Nathan talked with Gretchen’s agent a little bit, and the publisher is taking her book out of their next catalog, putting it off indefinitely. They understand the difficult circumstances here. Although I think they’d like to publish what she had at some point, if it’s mostly done. And I would, too. Because I’d hate to see all of her work go to waste.”

“Of course,” I said.

“And it’s not about money, anyway. But whether or not this is published, we will work something out that would be fair to you, where you’d be compensated—”

“Oh, I couldn’t . . .”

“And to be honest, publishing or not publishing isn’t my main concern at the moment. I just want these things in the right hands. I want these things to be treated with care, but I don’t feel right about one of us doing it. I have to confess to you, Jamie. Part of the reason I picked you is because you’re
not
family. I don’t know how objective I can be—how objective any of us can be—with some of this material.”

I stared at all of the manuscripts. “You’ve read all of this?”

“Oh . . . no. But I’ve glanced through some of the notebooks. I’ve seen enough to know
I
can’t be objective about it.”

Mrs. Waters paused and bit into one of yesterday’s tea cookies. Light green crumbs fell onto her pink sweater. She sighed, put down her cookie, brushed them off.

“Tell me, Jamie. Did Gretchen ever talk to you about Shelly? Do you know who that is?”

It was a name that had come up in conversation several times in college, during late-night talks between Gretchen, Jeremy, and me. But it startled me to realize how long it had been since I’d heard Gretchen mention it again.

“Yes. She was your sister . . . Gretchen’s . . . uh . . .”

“Gretchen’s biological mother. Yes. So you do know. She talked about it.”

“Yes. A little,” I said.

It was easy to forget—that Gretchen’s parents weren’t her biological parents. She barely ever talked about it—and when she did, she always stressed that as far as she was concerned, they were her parents and that was that. They had adopted her when she was very little. Shelly, her biological mother, was her mother’s much younger sister, who had had Gretchen as a teenager, had a lot of drug problems, and died very young. It was sad, she maintained, but the woman had never really been her mother. And her father was the only father she’d ever known. It wasn’t like she was orphaned.