Just About Over You by Carrie Aarons

Author:Carrie Aarons [Aarons, Carrie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-01-20T00:00:00+00:00

20

Amelie

Another week in Webton and another week of picking Aunt Cher up off the floor.

Of cleaning up sickness and trying to coax her to eat. Of working with her insurance company and listening to her nurses and doctors.

I’d never say this to her, but I’m miserable. I don’t cope well with all of this heavy medical jargon, and hospitals freak me out. It reminds me of the smell on my parents as they laid in their caskets, an image and memory I will never wipe from my mind.

It’s morbid, but I always think burying our dead is a creepy thing. The fact that we just have millions of dead bodies in the soil of this country is … weird. Objectively, extremely weird.

I’ve told the girls, and Gannon, that I want all of my organs donated and to be cremated. They always tell me it’s fucking weird that I give them those instructions, but I don’t want them to be forgotten.

I know how fleeting life can be.

Except when Aunt Cher came to me two days ago with a big fat legal envelope in hand. She wanted to discuss her affairs, her accounts, and her wishes.

I shut down. Absolutely not, was I talking about that. And I told her as much.

She called me silly, that of course we had to talk about this because I’d be left confused and panicking if something did happen.

But I can’t. I stormed up the stairs of my childhood home and refused to come down for hours, which sucks of me because she was probably uncomfortable or in pain or finally hungry. But there is no reality in which I can plan for the last member of my family’s death. Not even hypothetically.

For the first time since her diagnosis, I was happy to come back to Talcott. I couldn’t be in that house, the one that used to belong to my parents before they died, thinking about my aunt’s last will and testament.

So I was even happier when the public library decided to call me in when they were short-handed.

I’d decided to volunteer in the children’s section of the public library near Talcott last year. Working at the one on campus, I only ever saw panicking, procrastinating, or studious co-eds. Here, I could take a break from organizing anthologies and textbooks. Here, I could admire the bright suns the preschool students painted last week that now hung on the wall. Here, I can listen to the trivial questions of little kids and get lost in the fun.

So, once a week I help do story time for the three-year-olds, and it’s the highlight of my days right now.

“Miss Amewie?” Sarah, a little girl with a missing front tooth, comes up to me.

I kneel down. “What is it, sweetie?”

“I really like Dr. Seuss. But I don’t want to eat green ham.” She sticks out her tongue.

I laugh. “Oh no, you don’t have to eat green ham. I don’t know where we’d even find that! It’s just a funny story.”

She giggles.

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