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It’s by unfortunate coincidence that they see the sign at all.
Bobby doesn’t leave the house much, you see. It’s only been two months since his tragedy at the Orpheum—two months of Ray and Rose struggling to get him to eat and sleep and talk to them. That Rose managed to convince him to take a walk with her this morning is a miracle in and of itself.
They’re walking slowly down the street, only a few blocks from the townhouse, and Rose is so focused on Bobby—on his hunched-up shoulders and hesitant strides, his nervous eyes darting this way and that like he’s waiting for a monster to appear from out of the shadows and pounce on them—that she doesn’t notice the flyers plastered to every telephone pole until she almost walks into one.
Bobby snickers as she curses and gets her bearings, and she can’t deny it warms her heart to hear him laugh, even just a little, even at her.
“Distracted much?” he teases, his voice rough and gravelly from disuse (among other things).
“Oh, no,” Rose jokes back. “This sign here was just so interesting, I had to get a closer look.”
The sign, she can see now, is an advertisement for a garage sale a few neighborhoods over. She scans the flyer, looking for a date. “Oh, look, it’s today. Do you want to go check it out? You need some new things anyway.”
Bobby grunts, clearly unimpressed at the idea of replacing the possessions he abandoned at his parents’ house with some stranger’s hand-me-downs. But he comes over to look at the flyer anyway.
Almost immediately, his face drains of color entirely.
“Bobby?” Rose grabs his shoulder to steady him, worried he’s gonna faint. “Niño, what’s wrong?”
Bobby swallows hard. When he speaks, his voice comes out croaky and wet: “That’s Alex’s house.”
Rose’s breath catches. She looks desperately at the flyer as if she could find something on it to prove him wrong, but how could she? He’d know the address better than her, and sure enough, the flyer specifically advertises “teen clothes, books, musical instruments—gently used!”
“They’re—they’re selling Alex’s stuff,” Bobby chokes, trembling under Rose’s hand. “They—I’m gonna kill them, I—they didn’t even want him—he’s—he’s dead, how can they—”
He’s growing more distressed by the minute, his breathing fast and erratic, his eyes welling up with tears. Rose tries to soothe him, guiding him to sit down on the curb before he can faint. She pulls his head onto her shoulder and holds him tight as he gasps out tightly restrained sobs.
“I hate them,” he cries, over and over, occasionally interspersed with, “I miss them so much,” and Rose feels like her heart is literally breaking.
She looks around—thank God, there’s a payphone on the next corner. “Stay right here,” she murmurs, giving Bobby’s back a firm rub before getting to her feet. “I’ll be right back, sweetie, I’m just gonna call Ray. He’s gonna take us home.”
“I want to go home,” Bobby sobs, and Rose hates that they don’t appear to be talking about the same place.
Later that afternoon, once Bobby’s fallen into a fitful sleep in Ray and Rose’s bed, Rose borrows Ray’s van and drives out to the Mercers’ garage sale. She doesn’t recognize any of the stuff laid out on the driveway—everything that really mattered to Alex, she figures, died with him—but she buys it all up anyway, every bit of it. She’ll keep it safe somewhere, until Bobby’s in a place to look through it all. That way, at least, it’ll be in the possession of someone who loved Alex, who really knew him, who never wanted to let him go.