Some things cannot be returned. They can only be grieved honestly and placed somewhere, and then you keep going.
But she got this: a kitchen table in her son’s house, with crayons on it and a lunch box and a half-finished spelling worksheet with Mason’s name at the top. She got the cold Sprite bottle on the counter and the look on her son’s face when he held it. She got her grandson appearing in the kitchen doorway at some point late in the evening, still awake because children always know when something important is happening, holding a plastic dinosaur in one hand and a sheet of stickers in the other.
He looked at her with the direct, uncomplicated assessment of a young child evaluating an unfamiliar adult.
Then he walked over and pressed a dinosaur sticker into her palm.
“Do you like green?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
