who: @auroravandelli where: the common house
With much smaller hands in hers, Emery had one of the younger kids in town sitting on her shoulders, pointing at all the things on their way back that would distract the kid from feeling bad. ''Did you see that, Joey, that was a yellow-rumped warbler, cute looking birds they are. They got a bright yellow spot woven into their feathers, like they got spray painted or something.'' She gently bounced the kid around on her shoulders, getting his sweet laughter to bubble up and echo off the buildings around them.
As she neared the common house - her common house - she found Rory's eyes in the midst of the other folk. ''Here you go kid,'' she helped Joey down to let him walk by himself and escape her handholding if he so wanted to run to his mom. Closing the distance between them, Emery explained right away. ''He's alright, he got a little too excited at the playground and scraped his knee. Good thing the kind doctor patched you right back up, huh kid?'' Pointing at the ripped pants and the bandaid that was mostly there to make Joey feel so brave at the doctors' post.
Today was a hard day. One of the days where she woke up haunted by the schedule and process of her old life. What time is it? Have to get the kids ready for school. Elizabeth's bus leaves earlier, have to make sure she's ready, need to pack lunches, need to— but she didn't need to do any of that, because not only was Elizabeth gone, but she no longer needed to worry about things like regular school hours or getting herself ready in time to get down to the office. That was a life lost, gone unreachable past the fallen tree in the road.
So the rest of the morning passed in a grief-coated haze that sat heavy on her shoulders. She helped her husband get the boys up and got everyone fed, then they went down to the playground while Rory sat on the bed in the bedroom they all shared, letting time pass until she couldn't justify it any longer and set to fixing up the house.
But alone, working on a stubborn crooked door in the kitchen that needed to be resized just slightly in order to close without sticking, that sadness caught up to her again and she found herself thinking of the home they left behind, all the memories they'd never have again, and Elizabeth—the grave that would grow unruly and lonely in her family's absence.
"Mama!" An automatic reflex, Rory quickly wiped her face free of any misery as soon as she heard the sound of her youngest child. He raced up, babbling away about something that happened on the playground, something about falling on the slide and getting a band-aid with Emery because he'd been very brave at the doctor. There was immediate guilt, the kind that bubbles up from not being present for your kid when anything bad happens, but she tried her best to sweep that under the rug. It was always a little tricky for her to think of the positives when she felt stuck in the spiral of negatives. She was able to grab onto one: Em had been there and clearly made her son feel safe and okay. Her swift breakdown of the situation quickly reassured Rory. A scraped knee was nothing to spill milk over.
"Wow! Look at this band-aid, you must have been so strong. Everything okay? Doesn't hurt anymore?" And when Joey confirmed with a shake of his head that no, it didn't hurt anymore, she gave a kiss to his head. Then she looked up to Emery, a grateful smile on her tired, weary face. "Thank you for taking care of him, I swear if I had a day where none of them got hurt I'd be afraid hell had frozen over," she said to the woman she considered her closet friend here in this small but mighty community of survivors. "Though I gotta say we're already well into hell freezing territory out here aren't we—Joey, that hammer isn't a toy. Why don't you go upstairs and find your pictures you drew and show Emery?" And then he was off, racing with clumsy little feet up the stairs as Rory pushed one hand through slightly greasy hair and sat down at the small kitchen island. "Seriously, thank you. I should have been there I was just...tired, today."
