First & Then(48)

“Oh, Devon.” I passed Cas and Lindsay in the hallway after last class. Lindsay threw her arms around me. “It’s just awful, isn’t it?”

I hugged back—what else could I do?—and said, “Yeah. Terrible.”

“I can’t imagine.” She pulled away. “I just keep thinking about the guys on their team.… What it would be like if we lost our captain…”

Her eyes welled up with tears. Cas closed her in a hug. I averted my gaze.




“We’re supposed to go to the visitation,” Foster said when I picked him up after practice. “Out of respect. That’s what Coach said. It’s Thursday afternoon. Will you take me?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t have a suit.”

“You could wear one of Dad’s, I guess,” I murmured, pulling out onto the street. “I don’t know if it’d fit, but you could always try.”

“I don’t want to wear his clothes,” Foster said.

“Why not?” When I glanced over at Foster, his face was turned to the window.

It was quiet for a moment, and then, “Because they won’t fit,” is all he said.




He settled on a dress shirt and tie for the visitation come Thursday. I didn’t dress nice, but I wasn’t planning on going in. I didn’t have a sufficient enough connection to Sam Wells to make being there feel right.

The parking lot was packed, and the only spot I could get was way down the street. I looked over at Foster after I put the car in park. He was staring at the dashboard.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

He nodded, and after a moment, he got out of the car and headed toward the funeral home.

I had been waiting only a little while when Ezra came barreling down the sidewalk.

He slowed to a stop as he reached the parking lot in the distance, stood for a moment, and then turned swiftly and headed right back down the street in my direction. For one wild second I thought he was coming to my car, to see me, but he didn’t even look up as he walked past.

He was parked farther down the street. In my side mirror I could see him approach his truck. He didn’t get inside, though. He just stood, his hands braced against the doorframe, head down. I leaned closer to the mirror to get a better look; he seemed to be talking to himself.

I don’t know why I did what I did, but I got out of the car and headed down the street.

I don’t think he heard me coming, but I could hear him as I approached. Muffled but still discernible, Ezra was counting.

“Fiftysevenfiftyeightfiftyninesixtysixtyone—”

“Ezra?”

He straightened up fast, almost tripping over the curb behind him. And when he looked at me, it was that thing he did … like it took a moment for him to recognize me. But it was different from the way it usually was. This time he seemed preoccupied, almost as if he wouldn’t recognize anyone who crossed his path.

“What are you doing here?” he said.

I didn’t know if he meant “here” at the visitation or “here” on the sidewalk. “I drove Foster,” I said, a sort of blanket statement.

“Why aren’t you inside?”

“Why aren’t you?”

“I don’t want to hear about him. He was a f*cking idiot.”

“Ezra.”

“He was. And you know it, and I know it, and everybody knows it, and we’d just have to stand there and listen to people talk like it was so f*cking tragic. But it wasn’t tragic. Tragic deaths aren’t avoidable, and Sam’s was.”

I didn’t know what to say, and I wasn’t sure what Jane would say, either. Although romance was definitely a hallmark of her work, her books weren’t without tough truths—sometimes things don’t turn out the way you want them to. Sometimes there’s loss. Sometimes your sister marries a douche bag. So maybe she would simply admit that there was some merit to his statement.

“Sorry.” He looked back toward the funeral home. “I probably sound like a dick.”

“I’m not much of an authority on what dicks sound like,” I said without thinking. “Limited personal experience.”

One corner of Ezra’s mouth lifted, for about half a second.

“What … what were you doing?” I gestured to the car, like somehow that indicated Ezra’s odd behavior. “The … counting?”

He just shook his head, and then it was quiet.

“I’ll go in with you,” I said. “If you want to see him.”

“I don’t. Is that bad?”

I swallowed. “No. No, I don’t think so.”

“It’s too much.” He shook his head again. “I don’t … I can’t…”

Ezra trailed off, and when he looked at me, I thought he might cry. I felt an instant need to stop that from happening. I could make another lame joke, but my mind drew a blank.

I had never lost a friend before. A couple of grandparents when I was a baby. An uncle I hardly knew. But I didn’t know what it was like to lose a friend, even one you weren’t so close with. There were all these people in my life that I wasn’t so close with, and even the loss of one of them—a Rachel Woodson or a Maria Silva—was unimaginable to me.