Two Sleeping Bags

Part One: Fridays

Every Friday for two months, I drove my son to his best friend’s house at six o’clock.

It was a routine. The kind of routine you stop thinking about after the third week. Finn would pack his blue duffel bag on Friday afternoon. His pajamas, his toothbrush, his Nintendo Switch, a bag of pretzels I knew he’d share with Owen. His dark-blue camping sleeping bag, rolled tight with the straps.

“You don’t need the sleeping bag,” I told him the first week. “Owen has a guest bed.”

“We like the floor,” Finn said.

I didn’t think anything of it.

My name is April Donnelly. I’m thirty-eight years old.

I’m a pharmacist at a Walgreens on the south side of Springfield, Missouri. I work days, Monday through Friday, seven to three-thirty. I live in a small brick ranch house on Cherry Street with my son, Finn, and an elderly beagle named Biscuit who sleeps twenty-two hours a day.

Finn is nine.

His father died when he was five.

It was a car accident. A drunk driver on Highway 65, on a rainy night in February. My husband, Danny, was coming home from his shift at the hospital where he worked as a respiratory therapist.

He never made it home.

Finn didn’t sleep alone for almost a year afterward.

He’d wake up at two or three in the morning, screaming. He’d come to my room and crawl into my bed and hold on to my arm like he was afraid I’d disappear too.

The counselor said it was normal. Grief in young children often shows up as fear of being alone at night. It would pass, she said, with time and patience.

It did pass. Slowly.

Part of the reason it passed was Owen…