People prefer grief stories where the dead leave behind beautiful final memories.
Rebecca didn’t.
Three nights before the motel fire, she’d called me asking for money.
Again.
She’d spent most of her early twenties bouncing between jobs, apartments, boyfriends, and grand plans that lasted three months at best.
She wasn’t an addict.
She wasn’t reckless in the cinematic sense.
She was simply restless.
Rebecca experienced ordinary life as if it were a sweater two sizes too small.
Our father had died when we were teenagers, and afterward Mom became terrified of losing anyone else. I responded by becoming responsible.
Rebecca responded by running.
At twenty-one she moved to Arizona.
At twenty-two she came home.
At twenty-three she enrolled in culinary school, quit, moved in with a photographer, left him, and announced she was going to work on a cruise ship.
By twenty-four, she was waitressing outside Richmond and calling me every few weeks with another emergency.
That final night, she needed $900.
“For what?”
“A deposit.”
“On what?”
“A room.”
“You said Tyler was letting you stay with him.”
“That changed.”
Of course it had.
I remember standing in the nursery my husband and I were painting, my free hand resting on my stomach.
“Becky, I can’t keep doing this.”
“I’m not asking you to keep doing anything.”
