Rayne & Delilah's Midnite Matinee(99)

“It’s no trouble at all,” Arliss says.

Man, Arliss is acting really strangely. It’s almost like…Oh, come on. I can practically see my own brain with the internal eye roll I’m doing.

But also, every molecule in my body feels like the rush of birds taking flight from a field.

Sometimes you’ve resigned yourself to living your life in the shadow of what might have been. Looking up at happiness from some low place. You’ve finally accepted that your life isn’t on the unbroken upward trajectory it feels like it’ll be when you’re a kid, when you assume every year will be better than the one before. You’ve said to yourself, This is all there is for me, and then something, someone, comes along and says, Hold on, there’s more.

Maybe life isn’t about avoiding pain at all costs. Maybe it’s about having one or two people who have signed up for the messy job of being your salvation, who make your life bigger.

I used to keep a memory in my most sacred heart of my dad holding me in his arms under October stars, the clean smell of autumn night air in my nose. A perfect day.

But now I’ll keep a new one, of my mom holding me in her arms in the dim light and cool, musty-basement smell of TV Six. A perfect day.





Buford let me cuddle him all night last night. He hasn’t let me do that since we were both young. I guess he just kinda outgrew it as he got old and grumpy. I was packing a few last things and he waddled into my room, slowly and painfully, the way he does now. And I kissed the top of his head and said, “Bufie, Mama’s gonna be going away, and they won’t let me have you in the dorms. So you’re going to have to stay here.” And I saw in his mournful, droopy eyes that he understood, and also he understood that maybe he won’t be around anymore the next time I come home. The thought filled me with the deepest, purest sadness—the sort you can’t even begrudge for its inevitability but can only accept. And so when it came time for me to go to bed, he shuffled over and let me help him onto the bed with me, and allowed me to snuggle him once more.

I see him now, in my side-view mirror, Delia kneeling next to him, lifting his paw and making him wave. She waves too and wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. I wave back out my window and wipe my eyes as I slowly pull away.

Behind me, at my back like always, is Lawson, his pickup pulling a U-Haul trailer with a mix of our stuff. He’s going to help me move into my dorm, and then I’m going to help him move into his house.

His phone is full of music I picked out for him to listen to on the drive. My phone is full of music he picked out for me. We made a deal that neither of us is allowed to listen to anything else for the five-hour drive to Knoxville.

I made a big show of pretending like it was going to be some great ordeal, but the truth is that his music reminds me of him now, so it’s fine.

???

We pull up outside Jesmyn’s house in Nashville to have lunch and visit awhile, and there’s a single text on my phone from Delia: Rayne & Delilah 4ever.

It’s hard to see through the tears to text her back, but I manage.

Me: Rayne & Delilah 4ever.

Delia: I miss you already.

Me: I miss you more.

Delia: I love you, JoJoBee.

Me: I love you, DeeDeeBooBoo.





Dear Dad, I’ve written a lot of these emails, but you wouldn’t know that because I never sent them. Maybe I won’t send this one either. I guess I’ll see when I get to the end.

I have two stories for you. Here’s the first. I was sitting in the break room at the grocery store where I work, chatting with a couple of my new friends, when Josie (my friend I told you about, who I used to do my show with) called. She said she heard some girls dying laughing in the hall outside her dorm room, and she went out to see what was up. They were watching a video clip from my show. Mom does it with me now. When Josie left for college, I wanted to quit because it was too hard to do it alone, but Mom stepped up and saved me. Anyway, in this clip, Mom and I were trying to do a sketch with marionettes and we were terrible at it, and Mom kept accidentally making the marionette do this jacking-off motion.

So we both crack up, and we can’t stop. We were having so much fun, we left it in. It’s not the first time this has happened on our show, but this time, somehow, people got ahold of the clip and started sharing it. It’s infectious, I guess, to see two people laughing like that, being silly and enjoying being together. Anyway, it went viral. Millions of people have seen it. Maybe even you have by now. We’ve gotten all these invites to horror cons and talk shows. Thousands and thousands of people have subscribed to our YouTube channel, which we’ve started putting more work into.

All I can think about is how glad I am that Mom was there for me when I needed her the most. How glad I am that she’s kept my life from being too small. And that brings me to my second story.

Ever since I saw you in Florida, I’ve been thinking about a memory I have from a few years ago. This one morning in late September, I woke up a lot earlier than usual. For some reason, I went outside, and it was still dark and chilly.

Then I saw a firefly blink. I couldn’t believe it. I thought I was hallucinating. I’d never seen one that late in the year. You could tell by how slowly it moved that it was close to dying. I thought about it all day. How bummed I was that this lonely firefly was shining its light out into the world when everyone had left it behind. It seemed sad and desperate.