Part Two: Kelsey
Three years ago, my daughter, Kelsey, died of a brain aneurysm.
She was thirty-one.
It happened on a Tuesday in March. She’d dropped the kids at day care and gone to work at the bank in Shelbyville, Indiana, where she was a loan officer. Around ten o’clock, she told a coworker she had the worst headache of her life.
By noon, she was in an ambulance. By two o’clock, she was gone.
I was on my mail route when Nick called.
I’d been a rural mail carrier for the post office for twenty-six years. Same route the whole time. A hundred and twelve miles of county roads, farmhouses, and trailer parks south of town. I knew every dog, every mailbox, every widow who waited at the end of her driveway just to have someone to say good morning to.
When my phone rang, I was pulled over at the Hendricks farm, sorting their seed catalogs.
I don’t remember driving to the hospital. I only remember Nick standing in the hallway with his hands over his face.
She left three babies.
Lily was seven. Owen was five. Gracie was three and still sleeping with a stuffed lamb named Biscuit.
She left a husband who was drowning.
Nick Brennan was thirty-three then. He was a good man. He worked as a supervisor at a tire distribution warehouse off the interstate. He’d loved Kelsey since they were juniors in high school. He was the kind of father who did bath time and read bedtime stories in silly voices.
But in the weeks after the funeral, he couldn’t get out of bed. He couldn’t eat. He’d stand in the kitchen staring at the coffee maker like he’d forgotten what it was for.
The kids were eating cereal for dinner. Gracie was crying for her mommy every night. Lily had stopped talking at school.
I was fifty-seven years old.
I’d been divorced for twenty years. Kelsey was my only child. I lived alone in a small brick house on the edge of town with a vegetable garden and a cat named Mister.
One night, about a month after the funeral, I sat in Nick’s kitchen after the kids were asleep. He was at the table with his head in his hands.
“I can’t do this, Roxanne,” he said. “I can’t do it alone. I don’t know how.”
“You won’t have to,” I said.
I retired early.
The post office gave me a little party in the break room with a sheet cake from Kroger. The other carriers signed a card. My supervisor said he’d never had anyone cover a route as well as I did.
I sold my little house for ninety thousand dollars. I gave Mister to my neighbor, who’d always loved him.
And I moved into Nick’s spare room, in the house on Maple Ridge Drive where Kelsey had lived for nine years.
