Things Too Huge to Fix by Saying Sorry Read Free Page A

there was no crack in the curtains, and there weren’t any deadpeople right behind me, none at all. No drama, no drama, no drama . . .
    Mom didn’t respond to me or look up from her papers.
    â€œWorm Dung. That’s my new name for Mac Richardson,” I said a little louder, and really trying to mean it. “What do you think?”
    Mom scooted a bunch of reports into a stack, then laid her pen on top. I was too far away to see what she had been working on, but I knew it was diagrams of a human body with stuff marked with Xs and circles. It was kind of weird, knowing that she turned whole lives into shapes on a page. How could people get shrunk down to outlines and pen scratches when they died? But Mom had to check everything out, to see what went bad inside people and what killed them. Those Xs and circles didn’t say a thing about who could play cornhole or understand humans and relationships or write world-changing novels. They didn’t tell anybody which people were sad because their mom or dad had to go to war, or tired because they were taking care of a sick grandmother. For all I knew, one of those dead people might have been dumped at a locker too, somewhere in their lives.
    â€œWhat I really think is,” Mom said, “you’re too young for a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship, so it doesn’t hurt my feelings that Mac’s out of the picture.”
    I managed something close to a respectful frown, I hoped, because Mom didn’t do disrespectful any more than she did drama. “You never liked him, did you?”
    Mom gave me a puzzled glance and leaned back in her rolling chair, the one with Ole Miss stitched into the leather in fat red and blue letters. Her navy skirt and white blouse were perfectly tucked together, but wrinkled at the end of the day. Her makeup still looked flawless, and she had her long brown hair braided into a tight knot on the top of her head. Mom was tall to my short and skinny to my chunky. Her skin paled in the bright blue-white ceiling bulbs, next to my in-between color that was darker brown, like Grandma and Dad. Everything about my mom was beautiful and professional, always, except when she got tired—and she had been tired a lot this past year.
    â€œI barely know Mac Richardson,” she said in a voice that reminded me of my third-grade math teacher. “So how could I dislike him?”
    My eyes roved around the pine paneling of her office walls, bouncing off her degrees and pictures of her with important people and framed newspaper articles about her work on high-profile cases. “Well, he is a Richardson.”
    â€œOld Polish proverb, Dani.”
    I sucked down a sigh. Old Polish proverb was Mom-shorthand for, Not my circus, not my monkeys . That was one of her favorite sayings, even though she was a lot more Irish than Polish.
    What Mom meant was, the fight between Grandma and Avadelle Richardson wasn’t her feud, or Dad’s, or mine either. People could write news articles all day long aboutBeans vs. Richardson, but we didn’t have to fight just because they wanted us to.
    â€œI know,” I said. “The Magnolia Feud is Grandma’s battle.”
    Mom nodded. “It was hers, yes.”
    My breath hitched. Mom gazed at me without blinking.
    Was .
    That word seemed to hang in the air like a sad balloon tethered by Mom’s silence. She was waiting for me to get something, but—
    Oh.
    That Grandma Beans wasn’t able to feud with anybody anymore.
    I had a sudden image of the day Grandma moved in with us, how she drove up in her huge black Lincoln, threw open her door, and stretched her arms wide for me to run into her hug. Then she spouted off a quote and waited for me to tell her the author, novel, and year it was written. That’s how she was with me, my whole life—before.
    Now, if Mom drew one of her outlines of my grandmother, there would be a big X where Grandma’s brain