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Three months, two weeks, and two days
David crosses and recrosses his legs, shifting on the generic loveseat in the overly pastel office. He looks up and down at the therapist who introduced herself to him earlier as Vanessa. She’s visibly pregnant, and he feels a flash of irrational anger that she could get herself in such a state when she’s got patients to see. When she’s taking on new patients like him who are going to need her full attention. What right does she have to have a baby? What right does she have to have a happy family when he’s so—
“I’m sure it’s been a difficult few months,” she says.
He laughs bitterly.
“I know, that goes without saying. What prompted you to make an appointment to start seeing me?”
“My best friend kind of insisted.” He drags his hand up and down on his thigh, scratching at the soft denim. “She worries.”
“Well, that’s understandable. It was brave of you to actually go through with it, though.”
David sneers. He doesn’t want to hear someone calling him brave. He isn’t brave. If he were brave, he wouldn’t have spent the last hundred and eight days ghosting through the empty remains of his life like he has. He’d have done something dramatic. Something concrete. Sell the house. Sell the stores. Leave town. Walk into traffic.
“Can you tell me what a typical day is like for you right now?”
David heaves a sigh. “I sleep late. I have employees who open the stores.”
“The stores?”
“Yeah, we own…” He stops and corrects himself; even the act of correcting his language is becoming a habit now. “I own three general stores in the area. Schitt’s Creek, Elm Glen, and Elmdale. It’s called Rose Apothecary.”
There’s a spark of recognition in Vanessa’s eyes. “I’ve been to the one here in Elmdale. It’s great.”
“Thank you.” He looks down at his lap. “I sleep a lot.”
“That’s common, with grief,” she says in a kind voice. He doesn’t want that kindness from her. He wants her to fix him. He wants her to tell him if feeling like this will ever end. He wants her to tell him he deserves to feel like this, for daring to be the one of them left alive.
“I usually go in and check on the Elm Glen or Elmdale stores by noon. Spend the afternoon calling vendors, or…” Or staring at his laptop, not doing anything.
“You live in Schitt’s Creek, though, right?” Vanessa asks.
“Yes.”
“You don’t go to that store? The one near home?”
“Not if I can help it.”
“Why not?”
He rolls his eyes. She’s sussed out the answer, she just wants to make him say it, obviously. “That was the first one we built. Before we were married. Before we were even a couple. We…” He feels tears burning behind his eyes. How can there still be tears left, David wonders. It doesn’t seem possible.
“That store symbolizes your relationship with…” She consults the clipboard she’s holding. “Patrick.”
He’s instantly furious with her for speaking his name out loud, and also for having to check what his name is, for not having it seared into her brain. For having it written on a piece of paper like it isn’t something sacred. Perhaps together with words like ‘aneurysm’ and ‘grieving’ and ‘widower’.
“Yeah, I fell in love with my husband there, so it’s not a huge fucking mystery why I don’t want to be there,” David says, crossing his arms and giving her his haughtiest, cruelest look. Vanessa seems unphased. She just gives him more of those kind eyes. He hates her. He imagines himself storming out of her office and never coming back, but Stevie would be disappointed in him, and Stevie is the main reason he’s made it through the last three months, so.
David sighs and stays put.
“How long were you married?” Vanessa asks.
“Thirteen years,” he says, his breath betraying him and hitching on the words. “Unlucky thirteen.”
“So what do you do after you go to work in the afternoon?”
“I go back home.”
“Do you still live—”
“In the house we shared? Yes.”
She waits, letting the silence stretch out. It’s excruciating.
“I packed up all of his things in the first couple of weeks. It gave me something to do. Boxed up mementos to give to his parents. Donated his guitar to the high school. Same with the piano — I paid a special moving company to come and take it away. Boxed up all of his boring clothes to go to Goodwill.” He stares at an ugly painting of purple flowers up on the wall.
“You didn’t keep any mementos for yourself?” Vanessa asks quietly.
“No.”
He expects her to ask why not, figures he’ll have to describe how Marcy Brewer had asked him the same thing, causing him to break down in front of her for the fourth time in as many days. She doesn’t ask. What she asks is worse.
“Do you ever think about harming yourself?”
“Yes, but not— I don’t have a plan.” He remembers that from a psychiatrist whose care he’d been under in high school. The overheard murmur as Dr. Herndon spoke to his parents. He has intrusive thoughts, dark thoughts, but he hasn’t made a plan to commit suicide. Having a plan was important.
“What form do these thoughts take?”
“I’m not going to kill myself,” David says with a huff. “He’d be so angry.”
“Patrick would?”
David nods. Not that he believes in an afterlife, but Patrick would find a way to be angry anyway.
~~~
Seventeen days
Alexis crouches next to him on the floor of the bathroom, and he can feel her hand resting on his back as he empties the contents of his stomach into the toilet.
“I can do this on my own, thanks,” he says after spitting into the bowl. His stomach is still churning.
“I know you can.” She doesn’t move, other than to rub his back.
He was crying before his stomach decided to reject the dinner he tried to feed it earlier, and the tears coming out of his eyes now as a result of vomiting don’t seem that different. He wonders if they are different. If some scientist with a fancy piece of equipment somewhere could measure a chemical difference between the tears that come from your eyes when you’re throwing up, and the tears that come from missing someone so desperately that you literally don’t think you can go on living without him.
He heaves again, but nothing is left to come up.
A few more minutes has him cleaned up and back on the sofa, Alexis wiping the sweat on his forehead with a damp cloth. She’s 44 now, and elegant, and as beautiful as he’s ever seen her.
“You should have gone back to New York a week ago,” he tells her.
“Actually, it was L.A. that I was supposed to be in a week ago, but it’s fine.” She combs her fingers through his hair, her eyes roaming over his face. He wonders if she thinks the way his hair is flecked with bits of gray now makes him look too much like Dad. “What good is all of this technology if I can’t do these meetings remotely?”
“You can’t babysit me forever.”
“I’m not planning to babysit you forever, David.” She sounds annoyed, and the sound of her annoyed voice is weirdly soothing. It’s the cadence of those years in the motel. It’s her being irritated by his cologne and his time spent in the bathroom. It’s her pining over Ted and talking him down from bumps in the road with Patrick. It’s the morning of his wedding when she fluttered about, making sure that everything was perfect on the best day of his life.
He starts to cry again, and Alexis pulls him into her arms. She’s deceptively strong, his sister, and he lets himself be held.
~~~
Four months, three weeks, and one day
“What did you do this week?” Vanessa asks, and he doesn’t want to disappoint her, he actually doesn’t. He wants to be the kind of person who can walk in here and say, I’m a little bit better this week. I went to the gym. I looked at a flower. I appreciated the ephemeral nature of life and love.
“I watched three seasons of Justified.”
Vanessa doesn’t show any judgement on her face. “How was that?”
David shrugs. “I don’t remember. Timothy Olyphant is hot, if you’re into that sort of thing.”
She smiles then. “What sort of thing?”
“That cowboy thing.”
“Ah.” She’s silent then, doing that thing again where she lets the silence settle to see what he’ll do to fill it. David studies his nails, trying to call her bluff. The seconds tick by.
He loses the battle.
“Sometimes I think if I’d just had time to prepare for it. If he’d been a heavy drinker or a drug user or if he’d gotten cancer. Something to ease me into the idea of him… of him dying. Instead one day I’m having a completely normal, mundane day, and the next day my whole world had fallen apart.” He stares hard at the ugly flower painting. “I gave him a handjob the night before, did I mention that?” His eyes slide down to Vanessa’s, to see if he’s shocked her. It doesn’t look like it. “After he… I kept thinking over the next few weeks that if I’d known it was the last time, I’d have… I would have made the sex more special. Not just given him a stupid handjob.”
“Any type of sex is special if it’s between people who love each other,” Vanessa says, and David throws his hands up in frustration. She’s missing the point.
“My point is, I didn’t get to say goodbye. I didn’t get to do anything to make his last day on earth good. He deserved… he deserved a good day. All the good days.”
“Who’s to say he didn’t have a good day? Also, you were married for thirteen years. I bet you gave him lots of good days.”
David shakes his head. “I was difficult. We were very different, and sometimes we argued.” He inhales shakily, trying not to cry. “I gave him bad days too.”
“Another thing that is totally normal with someone you were married to for thirteen years.”
His laugh is sharp. “Stop being so understanding.”
“You want to feel like you didn’t deserve him?” she asks.
“I didn’t.”
“It’s a way of explaining why he was taken away from you too soon. That it was karma or something. That you deserve this.”
David looks away, blinking rapidly.
“You don’t deserve this, David.”
~~~
One month
The edibles kick in just as the second episode of Great British Bake Off is beginning. He wouldn’t say he feels good — he hasn’t felt good for a single solitary moment since he lost Patrick — but the edge of the huge knife buried in his chest feels a little blunted. He can stop treading water for just a minute and float. He’s still in the icy cold water, still drowning, but he doesn’t feel the cold at the moment.
Stevie giggles at one of Sue Perkins’ terrible puns. David snuggles deeper into their blanket and tries to let himself get lost in the drama of baking a perfect Opera cake, but his mind wanders and he imagines that Patrick is at baseball practice, or out having beers after the game with his team. That he’ll come home late while David is on step four of his nine-step skincare regimen, smelling vaguely of cigarette smoke from the cluster of smokers who loiter outside the door of the Wobbly Elm. Patrick will shower to wash off the grime of the day and they’ll snuggle in bed together, David letting him be the little spoon for once.
He’s so lost in the fantasy that when he finally notices Stevie crying, her face red and puffy, it seems like it’s been going on for a while.
“Sorry,” she says, wiping under her eyes with her sleeve. “These weed gummies might not be for me.”
David watches her for a second, feeling like the biggest idiot on the planet. “You miss him too.”
“David—”
“Stevie, fuck, I’m so sorry.”
She eyes him with annoyance. “Don’t you dare apologize.”
“No, I’ve been leaning so hard on you that I didn’t even think about the fact that you’re… that you’re hurting too.”
“David, you lost…” He can see the wheels turning as she tries to come up with some way to say it that doesn’t just lay it all bare, ragged and bleeding like it is. “What I’m feeling is not relevant compared to what you lost. It’s a mosquito bite compared to your…”
“Gaping chest wound?”
Stevie laughs, and then just as quickly claps a hand over her mouth. “I’m a monster. I’m the worst friend.”
“No, you aren’t,” David says, pausing Netflix and turning to face her. The high is making words need to spill out of his mouth. “Do you know what I was thinking last night?” Stevie shakes her head. “I was thinking that Patrick would be so pissed off at himself for dying. Because it totally messed up all of his plans, and he hated having his plans messed up.”
Stevie laughs again, and this time she doesn’t try to stop herself. “God, you’re so right. He’d be fucking furious.”
“Not that he didn’t plan for it. I mean, we had wills only because he insisted on it, and he left me a file with all of his passwords in it, and to be honest, I kind of wish he hadn’t? Because now I have no excuse not to pay the bills.”
“David, I’ve been paying your bills.”
“Right, like I said.”
She kicks his shin under the blanket, and they regard each other in silence for a moment across the length of the couch.
“I started jerking off again,” David says with a sigh.
“Congrats,” Stevie says.
“Shut up.”
“No, I’m being sincere, I think? It’s a little piece of normal. It’s like… life moving on.”
“I don’t want life to move on.”
“Of course you don’t, you want to wear funeral blacks and pace around at the top of a lighthouse until you die of grief.”
“Consumption would also be acceptable,” David says, sniffing imperiously.
“David, I know it’s a long way away, but the day will come when things will get normal again. When you’ll wake up and feel okay, when you can go to the store and not be constantly thinking about him, when you even—”
“Don’t say it—”
“Date again.”
“I’m not going to date again. I lost the love of my life; why on earth would I date again?” He’s once again glad for the weed gummies, because speaking those words out loud sober would probably ruin him.
“Because some day you’re going to get tired of your hand, and I’m not going to fuck you.”
He picks up the remote to unpause the TV. “Well, warmest regards to you.”
Stevie shifts over, nudging and prodding him until they are snuggled together on the sofa. “Best wishes, David,” she whispers against his chest.
~~~
Six months, one week, and six days
He pours himself some of the terrible, burned coffee that percolated from the ancient coffee pot to give his hands something to do. He hates being here. He’s only here because Vanessa made him promise right before she gave birth that he go to group therapy at least three times during her maternity leave. David can stand three hours of anything, even sitting in a sad circle with other sad people with this sad styrofoam cup clutched in his hand.
The facilitator of course makes him introduce himself, because he’s new, and in that moment he despises Vanessa and her stupid baby more than he’s ever despised anyone.
“I’m David. My husband died six months ago,” he says simply, hoping that can be enough. The expectant looks on everyone’s faces tells him it isn’t. “It was a ruptured brain aneurysm, so there was no warning. One day I was married to the love of my life, and the next day I was wondering how the hell I was supposed to organize a funeral for…” He inhales and exhales slowly. “... for the best person I ever knew.”
People around the circle greet him with sympathetic smiles and platitudes, and he bites the inside of his lip to keep himself from telling them to fuck off. They go around the circle and talk about their grief — an older woman whose husband died of pancreatic cancer, another whose son died of an opioid overdose, a man whose teenage daughter committed suicide. All of their stories are tragic, as tragic as David’s, and maybe it’s supposed to make him feel better, knowing that people in the world are struggling the same way he’s struggling, but it doesn’t. It makes him think that the world in general and humanity in particular is irredeemably fucked up.
When he’s forced to talk again, he can’t think of what to say, so he ends up telling these strangers about the phone call he had with his mother-in-law earlier that day.
“She wants me to come out for Thanksgiving in a few months, but I just… I don’t think that would be good for anyone.”
“Why do you think it wouldn’t be good for anyone?” the facilitator asks.
“Because the last thing the Brewers need when they’re mourning their only son is to have their son-in-law who is different from him in every possible way — and generally agreed to be too much in every situation — in their house, reminding them of what they’ve lost.”
One of the older women reaches over and pats him on the arm. “You said your husband was their only son, but looked at another way, you are now their only son. Maybe it would help them to be with you. And maybe it would help you too.”
He tunes out the rest of the sad stories, and when the group session mercifully ends, David flees before anyone can talk to him. He doesn’t go back, his promise to Vanessa be damned.
He does tell Marcy he’ll think about coming for a visit, though.
~~~
Two months, three weeks, and three days
“David Rose,” Ronnie says when she encounters him in the cereal aisle of the Brebner’s. She looks at him as balefully as she always has, which is a comfort when he’s still getting sympathetic glances from everyone in town every damn day that he manages to leave the house. As if he didn’t have enough reason to avoid the café, Twyla’s eyes well up every time she sees him. It’s more than he should be expected to endure when he just wants a grilled cheese.
“Mayor Lee,” he answers before returning to his contemplation of the cereals on offer. Patrick liked cereals with nuts and granola in them. David is trying to decide if there is any reason not to buy a giant box of Fruity Pebbles.
Ronnie is looking in his cart, which actually isn’t the collection of shameful frozen meals for one that she probably expects to find. He may not have known how to cook when he moved to Schitt’s Creek but he knows now, and he’s trying to get into the kitchen again now that he’s run out of the frozen casseroles from friends and acquaintances that filled his freezer for the past several weeks. Besides, there’s something meditative about chopping things, even if he does end up throwing most of the leftovers away. It’s a step.
“How are you, David?” she asks, her eyes coming up from the contents of his cart to meet his own.
He shrugs. “I’m out of bed.”
She nods, and then reaches out and touches his arm. “It’s good to see you,” she says, and he feels his eyes burn with tears at the unexpected affection.
He turns and grabs the Fruity Pebbles, holding it up to her. “There’s no one to shame me about buying garbage cereal,” he explains, his mouth pulling to one side as he puts it in the cart.
“As long as that’s not your dinner,” she says.
“No, I’m actually making a stir fry for dinner.”
She eyes him sidelong. “Sounds like you might need company to help you eat all that food.”
David tilts his head. “I’m sorry, but are you inviting yourself over to my house?”
“Call it the mayor's prerogative,” she says. “I’ll bring the whiskey.”
An unfamiliar smile comes to his lips. “See you at six-thirty.”
Ronnie turns out to be the perfect houseguest for a grieving person. She talks about the problems she’s having with the current council members (“I never would have thought I’d long for the days of Moira Rose on city council, but here we are”) and her contracting business and she asks after the store, and whether he’s still liking the cabinets she installed two years ago. She doesn’t mention Patrick, but she also isn’t visibly avoiding mentioning him the way some people do. It’s only when they’ve finished eating and she pours a measure of whiskey for both of them that she gives David a nod and clinks her glass against his and says, “Patrick was a good man.”
David scoffs. “You hated him.”
“I didn’t hate him.” She takes a sip of her whiskey and tilts her head back. “He rubbed me the wrong way at first, but I got over it.”
“I think he’d be surprised to hear that.”
She smirks. “He just needed someone to keep him on his toes. Everyone else thought he was too perfect.”
David drinks his whiskey and mulls that over. “You had a lot in common, you know. Queer, small-business owners, an unhealthy fixation on baseball…”
Ronnie laughs, a satisfying cackle that’s as smoky as the whiskey they’re drinking. They both stare into their glasses. The constant ache in David’s chest swells with how much he misses Patrick.
“I’m furious with him sometimes for leaving me,” he whispers, surprised that the words have come out of his mouth. He’s not sure if he could have said them to anyone else, even Stevie.
“You’re allowed to feel that way,” Ronnie says. “You gotta go through all that to come out the other side.”
He lets go of a half-laugh, half-sob. “There’s another side? I’m starting to doubt that.”
“So they say. Give it time; you’ll get there.”
“Thanks for coming,” he says after a while, his voice raspy. “This was… it helped.”
She pats his hand. “I can always go for a meal I don’t have to cook myself. Anytime you want some company, you just give me a call.”
~~~
Seven months, two weeks, and two days
“Thanks for… helping me with this,” David says to his father.
Johnny Rose glances up at him over his reading glasses. “That accountant you hired could probably help with this as well as I can.”
“I’m sure she could, but the stores are keeping her plenty busy. I don’t want to burden her anymore than I already do.”
“It’s her job, David; it’s not a burden.” His hands tremble as he sets the paperwork down on the table. His father is getting old, David thinks, and he resists the urge to bundle his parents off to the hospital to have every possible test done, to try to extend their lives as long as he possibly can. “But I’m happy to help, of course,” Johnny continues. “Are you sure this is what you want to do with the money, though? Patrick’s life insurance money is there to help you. There’s no shame in using it to make your life a little bit easier.”
David’s been thinking a lot lately about the fact that he was once a person who grieved for the loss of his money, for the loss of luxury. Now he knows he’d go through that a million times over just to have his husband back. He’d sleep in a moth-infested tent, he’d give away all of his clothes, he’d spend the rest of his days in a pair of overalls from Walmart if he could just see Patrick standing in front of him again. It puts a lot of things he cares about in perspective.
“I’m keeping some of it. But this is what I want to do with the rest,” David says, tapping the papers.
His father gives him a smile, his eyes glassy with unshed tears. “He’d be so proud of you, son.”
~~~
One year, two months, one week, and six days
He stands next to the grave marker. It was several months after the funeral before he could even bear to drive by here. Then the anniversary of Patrick’s death came and went, and he started to feel a pull to come stand next to the grave. Now spring is in full bloom, and David looks around and has to admit that it’s a beautiful spot. Maybe he should have been coming here all along. Maybe it would have helped.
“Ronnie fixed the leaky pipes in the basement. And she gave me a good quote for the upgrades to the Elm Glen location. I know you’d say get quotes from at least two other contractors, but you aren’t here so I’m just going to give her the work.” He imagines the look Patrick would give him, the indulgent annoyance of it, and he smiles.
“They named the new band room at the high school after you because of the money I gave them. The plaque they put up is horrible, but I was gracious about it. You would have been proud.
“I still miss you every day,” David says, his voice husky. “Stevie suggested maybe it would help to stop wearing your rings, but I told her to eat a bag of razor blades. Maybe she’s right, but I don’t think so.” He twists one of the gold bands now. “It makes me feel better, I think, to have this tiny piece of you with me.”
The wind blows gently, rustling through the grass.
“I did go on a date with that alpaca farmer, though, the one I told you about. Chloe.” He runs his hand over the top of the headstone. “We realized we were at Coachella three of the same years, back before she left Los Angeles. She might have been even more ridiculous in her early thirties than I was.” He imagines Patrick laughing at that. “It’s true,” he protests, laughing a little bit himself.
“I don’t think I’m ready to love anyone else. Maybe I never will be. But it’s nice to… it’s nice to be with someone sometimes. Not all alone, rattling around the house. You always said I was starved for affection, so… Anyway. I think you’d like her. I think she’d have liked you.”
He stays for another several minutes, staring out over the rolling fields, watching a hawk circle in the sky.
Before he turns to go, he pats the headstone again, gold rings against the granite. “Love you, honey.”