Page 6 of Cherry Picking

“The older brother, Briggs, is a professional hockey player. Since their father is in a bad spot and Danny’s a friend of the family, he’s stepping up to the plate. He recommended our place to handle the arrangements. Knows we’ll do right by them.”

“Of course we will,” I say.

I vaguely register the name Maxwell.

When you grow up in a town like this, you hear about the local legends—the kids who actually make it out of the valley. Their names end up in newspaper headlines, airport conversations, and the occasional proud Facebook post from someone’s aunt.

Though I’m oblivious to which sport or team he plays for, hearing the name at all means something. I don’t pay attention to sports, except for whatever happens to be playing on a bar TV when I’m sipping a whiskey ginger.

“I’ll need you on-site after the service,” Dad says. “Tomorrow, eleven o’clock.”

“I’ll be there.”

He nods, already retreating back into the folder, and I get up to go. Before I can reach the door, he adds, “Zigmund was twenty-four. Exactly your age. Isn’t that strange?”

“Yeah, it is.” I swallow the lump in my throat, primed to deflect. “Makes me want to go home and touch a crystal or something.”

The joke lands flat, which is fine. It’s just that I try not to think about my own inevitable death while I’m drinking my morning coffee. It’s bad for company morale.

“Fucks you up a little, huh?” he asks, looking up at me with that steady, knowing gaze.

I shake my head, shut the door behind me, and head for the van.

CHAPTER 3

BRIGGS

The service takes forty-seven minutes total.

I know because I checked my watch at the start and at the end, which is something I’ve always done in situations I can’t control. If you mark the time, you can at least give it some sort of boundary.

I sat in the front row and kept my eyes on the middle distance, somewhere over the casket. After it was over, I looked to the ground, receiving condolences from people I half recognized—Ziggy’s friends, guys from the neighborhood, a woman who said she used to babysit us both.

My dad sat beside me in his loaner chair from Danny’s shop, listening rather than engaging. I’m not sure if it’s the grief or the stroke that’s turned him inward, but the quiet is different from how he used to be.

The latter took some things I know for sure. His mobility, some of his strength, the left side of his face, which used to move more when he smiled. Words go missing on him mid-sentence now. He stops, waits for one to come back, and then keeps going.

Ziggy had spent the last eight months managing all of it. Now that he’s gone, I’ll have to find a proper substitute.

As we wait out the last of the chatter, the crowd thins to twenty and then to ten. Danny is doing something with the funeral home staff near the tent, so I squat to my dad’s level and ask, “You wanna go see Mom?”

“Obviously, I do,” he mutters.

I guide the chair across the dead turf toward the marker.

She’s been in this ground for twenty-four years. A lifetime—literally as long as Ziggy lived, a piece of morbid math that makes my stomach drop. The stone is a double; her details are finished on the left, while my father’s wait on the right.

He bought both plots the week we buried her and has been paying on a spot beside his own grave ever since. Growing up, I thought that was the bleakest thing I’d ever heard. Standing here now, ten feet from the fresh dirt where they put my brother, I think I finally get it.

Every person he ever loved is on this lawn.

“I’m getting you some help,” I say quietly. “Someone for the house while I’m in Charlotte.” My dad’s jaw tightens, and I offer the title carefully. “An assistant.”

The physical therapist says he’ll work his way up to using a walker and eventually a cane, but for now, it’s the chair. If everything keeps going the way it has been, he’ll regain most of what he lost. Most.

“Don’t need one of those,” he grumbles.

“It won’t be forever. You could use someone for now.”