CHAPTER VI.
2019
In the weeks and months following I will dream about you. I will dream that I heard noises at the bottom of the stairs, and opened the basement door to see you standing on the plywood landing at their base, looking up. I will dream that I ran down and hugged you. I will dream of you looming around the edges of family events, intangible like a will-o-the-wisp, but present. I will dream of cardinals and see them outside my window when I wake; I will learn to greet them with, "Hello, Tim," for all the years to come.
2020
You will not drink cocktails with your nieces and nephews — far fancier concoctions than the Captain Morgan’s Spiced Rum you got so drunk on in eighth grade that you had to get your stomach pumped. You will never see me when I am eighteen and I adopt two snakes, not unlike the one you caught and hid in your wardrobe to scare your mom.
2021
You will not be there a year later when I come out of the closet, and I will never know how you would have reacted. You will not meet my loves or hold me through my heartbreaks. You will not see your nephew — who cooked with you at three AM so often, who went on those midnight Waffle House and Krystal’s runs with you, who inherited your motorbike — marry that girl whose laughter you so profoundly loved. Your picture will be there; you will be named an honorary best man. But you will not meet the wicked-tempered little girl the newlyweds have a year later, even more fiery and hot-tempered than me. Or the quiet nephew who comes after, with the shy smile and his mother’s lips.
Things you will never get to see, in order:
Your finally-repaired Shovel-head Harley (2024); nephew Taylor Kress' wedding to Jessica Bishop (2022); niece Emma Claire's wedding to Justin Durham (2022); nephew Kurtis Kress' wedding to Shea Campbell (2021); my Master's graduation (2024); your grand-niece, Campbell Grace Kress (2022).
2022
You will not be in the living room on the day after Christmas the year I am twenty, when the basement door slams and your sister yells, in a voice thick with tears, “Living room, everyone, now.” Or your nephew’s voice ringing out after, sure and gentle, the voice no longer of a boy but of a man: “Come on, everyone.”
You will not be there when your brother-in-law, your best friend, my daddy, sits in the rocking chair that was so lovingly handcrafted, and all the children settle in a semicircle around. You will not have the chance to hold your sister’s hand as she perches on the coffee table, sobbing and trembling, her eyes like rose-petals, bright pink and wet. You would have been still but teary amongst us, as we paced and rocked babies and sat as still as we possibly could. As we listened to the sweetest man we’d ever known tell us he had cancer, and was dying.
We would grieve as we had before, alone, together. People would say sorry, so many sorries, and then duck their heads and try not to think about what had happened to us, try not to think about what could happen to them, try not to think about it, and keep their eyes closed until we are forgotten. You will not be there to help us, the only ones, remember.
