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There’s a comfort that only comes from doing the same things over and over again.
That was how Kurt kept himself sane: every morning he did the five-step skincare routine at 6:05 on the dot, every night he drove the long way home so he could avoid the Baptist church and its graveyard. Recently, he’d made a new tradition – telling his dad that he loved him every Friday night dinner, in case they wouldn’t get another one. He might have only been doing it a month or two, but it had become a part of his muscle memory, older than the hills and twice as haunted. It had become a part of him.
“Kurt?”
He could feel his dad staring again, wondering where he had gone off to this time.
But his dad understood, he always did. It was hard not to drift away at this time of the year, the time when the greeting cards and flowers flooded every store. It wasn’t like Kurt didn’t try. Every year he would tell himself that he wouldn’t be bitter, that he would take the high road. Or whatever road didn’t go past the gift shop with the bright yellow banner that read ‘Happy Mother’s Day!’. But he always ended up breaking that promise. It wasn’t the kind of ritual that brought him comfort, it just hurt.
“Kiddo, you don’t have to do this, not if you don’t want to.”
That was a lie. Finn wanted to move into the attic, so he could be as far away from Kurt as possible while still living in a house with a flat-screen TV. No, that wasn’t fair. Finn had been nicer recently, since the whole Karofksy thing. That didn’t mean he had forgotten everything that had happened last year. He was angry at Finn for overreacting, angry at himself for his bad taste in men. There was nowhere for his anger to go, no way out of the four walls of their shared home, so it stayed with him. But if he tried to think about it logically, it made sense - Finn needed space, and the attic had space.
But the attic also had everything his mom had owned before she had moved to Ohio and met his dad, and everything she had stored away when they were newly married, and Kurt was a baby. It was her life, always just seven steps away. Back when he was just an eight-year-old who didn’t have a clue about religion, when the grown-ups smiled sympathetically and told him his mom was ‘up there now, in the sky’ he used to smile back, thinking they meant the attic he was currently sat in.
Then it was just the Hummels, and there was a golden rule: don’t mess with the attic. For nine years, they had kept it safe, father and son. The only threats were a handful of harmless spiders weaving their silky webs, and the roof leak that sprung after a violent thunderstorm had torn through town in June ’07. Once the storm had passed, it was the attic his dad rushed to check first – not his garage, which was severely water damaged, not Kurt’s middle school, which was shut-up for two weeks for repairs. The attic. Her attic.
But now it was the Hudson-Hummels, and it all had to go.
“If you’re not ready, we can wait. It doesn’t need to be done today, of all days. I just thought it might make it easier, to look through all of this now and remember what she was like.”
Kurt looked up, willing himself to say something, anything. The familiar worry lines between his dad’s eyebrows were deeper than usual, and he saw his own grief reflected back at him in them.
“What was she like?”, Kurt asked, finally caving in.
He had picked the old question, the creature comfort. He’d been asking it for years, ever since they had lost her. It made him feel like a little kid, asking for the same bedtime story every night to keep the monsters away.
His dad’s eyes softened, the way they always did when he asked.
“She was perfect. No one else ever came close”, he said, beginning to smile. “She was smart, and funny, and she wouldn’t let people mess her around. She didn’t rebel for the sake of it, but she cared about people, and she defended them, in the real way. She cared about me. Her family told her they didn’t want her wasting her time with me, that I wouldn’t be good for anything, and she wouldn’t let them in the house until they took it back.”
His dad’s voice cracked, and he watched him wipe away the tears.
“And you. She loved you more than I ever knew anyone love anything.”
Kurt wondered, guiltily, if he could say the same back.
Did he love her? Yes. More than he could ever put into words. But it was a child’s love that he’d carried with him as he had grown; that was what he remembered, so that was the only way he could love her.
Did he miss her? Yes. Every day. But he missed her the way you miss someone whose face you can’t remember without the help of a photograph. Not that he would ever admit that out loud.
“Okay”, he said, swallowing the lump in his throat like it would push that thought away. He touched the top of the box closest to him, covered with dust. “We can go through it. I want to see everything.”
So they started there. The box was full of clothes. They smelled slightly weird, the way thrift store clothes do, or anything that’s been kept in storage a few years too long. But he swore, placebo or not, he could still smell her perfume on them.
His dad laughed, the noise ringing around wooden walls that had heard nothing but silence for nine years, when he found a pale green flannel shirt that she had stolen from him fifteen years ago. Until now, he’d thought he had lost it for good. He told Kurt stories, who sat cross-legged in the dust listening for hours. There was the white sundress she had worn on their honeymoon in the Rockies, the pair of boyfriend jeans she had worn to move in to this house, their first home. When he held them up to his waist, her jeans looked like they might fit Kurt perfectly through some kind of magic, and he would happily break his skinny jeans only policy if it meant he got a chance to wear them.
“Oh, I remember that one”, his dad had said in a knowing voice when Kurt pulled out a beautiful lilac silk camisole. “I think she was wearing that when you were conceived.”
“Ew, dad!”
He instantly dropped the top back into the box. His dad was laughing hard, his head thrown back, probably at the face of judgemental horror that Kurt knew he was making (if only he knew how to stop making it).
Once they had gone through all of the clothes, and decided what to keep somewhere else and what to donate (the ‘keep’ pile was much bigger, but Kurt didn’t think there was anything wrong with being a hoarder), they moved on to the next box. It was full of family photo albums and scrapbooks, complied meticulously. If he thought hard enough, he could remember her making them. The two of them sat together at the kitchen table, while she glued polaroids and movie ticket stubs and post-it notes, even if the memory was fuzzy around the edges.
But there was a lot he could remember too. Like when his dad found a small scrapbook, dated April 1990, at the bottom of the box. There were flash photographs and little notes, but there was also a double page spread of pressed daffodils, kept carefully in the brown paper pages.
“I thought”, his dad said, blinking at them in confusion. “I thought she hated those things. That year I bought her a bunch for her birthday, ‘cause I thought they were fun. She pretended to like them for a whole evening, but I could tell. I could always tell.”
He leaned over to ruffle Kurt’s hair, making it all messy.
“She was picky about things like that, just like you. So after that it was orchids every year.”
Kurt nodded, thinking about the beautiful white orchids they had laid at her grave that morning, and the tangled yellow daffodils he’d seen growing by the roadside on the drive there. He tried to put it all together, to figure out what it meant. Was it that his mom had kept things, not because they were to her taste or even because she liked them, because the memory mattered more? Was that it?
His dad ran his finger tips over the dried petals for a few seconds before he moved the daffodil scrapbook into his ‘keep pile’, which took up half of the room.
“I’ve got a surprise for you”, he said, clearing his throat after a minute of silence. He stood up, sending up a dust cloud, and reached up. Grinning ear-to-ear, he pulled down a sheet that was covering –
“A motorbike?”, Kurt said, stunned.
And it was. He knew the distinctive shape from times he’d helped out at the garage, and he guessed it was a Yamaha XSR900, or maybe the XSR700. Whatever make it was, it was gorgeous. The paint job was pristine, the fuel tank was polished to perfection, and there wasn’t a dent in sight.
“Yeah”, his dad said with a chuckle, taking in the look on his face. “She used to say she was only interested in me because of the free repairs.”
“Can I learn to ride it?” he asked tentatively, watching his dad for a reaction.
“I think Lizzie would kill me if she knew I was putting her baby on… well, she used to call this thing her baby too.” He sounded genuinely scared that she would come back and haunt him, but then his expression changed, and he winked at Kurt. “What about if we take it in to the shop and have a good look at it first? We can do it together.”
Kurt agreed quickly, excited about having something new to look forward to.
By the time they stopped sorting and swapping stories, it was 2AM. Neither of them had noticed – there was no natural light up here, in this time capsule, which made it difficult to remember little things like eating and sleeping. Rationally, he knew he needed to be back in the hellhole that was McKinley high school in seven hours, but it felt worlds away from where he was now.
“Do you think she would want this?”, Kurt asked once they had finally left, climbing down the steps from heaven into the darkness.
“You mean Finn moving in up here?”, his dad replied, pausing to think it over. Kurt nodded, even though he had meant a lot more than just the logistics of it all. “I think she would just be happy that we’re not alone, the way we used to be.”
By that, his dad didn’t just mean Finn and Carole and adding the ‘Hudson’ and the hyphen to the ‘Hummels’. He meant how after she had died, Kurt didn’t speak to a soul for a year. And all the months where his dad had shut himself away, alone, because it was too painful. And Kurt understood. Even if he still resented it, even if some things were lost along the way, she would be less worried about the two of them now than she would’ve been eight years ago.
That night, he made a new ritual. The two of them collapsed onto the couch, too exhausted to make it to their beds. Kurt lay there, his dad’s arm wrapped tight around his shoulders, feeling safer than he had in months. As he drifted of to sleep, the TV played home video VHS tapes from a decade ago. He watched himself spin around the kitchen while she encouraged him from behind the camera, watched his dad throw him high in the air and then catch him. Birthdays and Christmases and Anniversaries and holidays and trips to the zoo in Dayton. He tried to commit it all to memory, his tired eyes focusing hard.
And when his eyes closed, he could hear her singing the folk song she used to sing him to sleep with. He might have forgotten the words, but the bittersweet tune still got stuck in his head on repeat every now and then. He didn’t think he would ever be able to forget it – it was a part of his muscle memory, it was a part of him. He could hear his dad snoring, and it merged with the song. The last thing he could remember thinking, before the thoughts all fell away, was that it was like there were three of them there, not two, so close together that their lives were almost touching.