Totally and Completely Fine

Totally and Completely Fine

Chapter 1

Now

“I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!” Lena shouted, before running up the stairs and slamming her door.

Over the years, I’d compiled a lengthy list of reasons why it truly f***ing sucked to be the widowed mother of a teen girl, but at the top of the list was being unable to turn to Spencer right now and ask: “Do you think she means it?”

He would have laughed. It would have been exactly the right response. Because I would have been asking him as a joke but also seriously.

He would have put his arms around me, pulled me close so my head could go right to the crook of his neck where it had always fit. He would have kissed my forehead. And then my butt would get a firm, supportive squeeze that was usually more for him than me.

“We can always send her back,” he would have said. “Do you remember where we put the receipt?”

And if I had cried a little—because even though I knew logically that my teenage daughter was in the throes of the worst hormonal years of her life, and I had done and said far worse to my own mother at that age, it would still f***ing hurt—Spencer would have taken my face in his hands and swiped the tears away with his thumbs.

“Pizza will solve this,” he would have said.

Then he would have dug around in the freezer, humming to himself, probably Blink-182 or some other frat boy nineties song, and eventually exclaimed “aha!”—literally, “aha!”—when he found the ball of dough that he’d hidden there.

We’d have homemade pizza that night.

Now there was one ball of dough left.

More often than not, I’d get the desire to deep clean the whole house, and I’d take everything out of the fridge, tossing old lettuce, frosted ice cream, and sad, forgotten leftovers. The dough stayed. Untouched.

We had the recipe. Even if we didn’t, making pizza wasn’t rocket science.

But there had been a system. One that only Spencer knew. It had been born out of his years working at King Cheese Pizza during high school. He never did the whole tossing it up toward the ceiling and catching it—something he’d always refer to as a cheap trick—but he had a specific way of doing it.

He’d offered to teach me. Multiple times.

“That’s what I have you for,” I’d say.

It had been clever then. It was just tragic now.

I looked up at Lena’s door, forever surprised that there were no cracks in the walls from the force of her repeated slams, and missed my husband so much I wanted to scream.

That was the problem with small towns, though. Nowhere to scream.

I picked up the phone. It wasn’t the same—it wasn’t even close—but I knew that when Lena realized I’d ordered pizza—from King Cheese no less—she’d come down. We wouldn’t say anything about the fight. We’d eat and pretend that what had just happened had occurred in an alternate reality.

Because this was all a dream—a sick, warped, normal-but-not dream—that I knew we were both still expecting to wake from. I didn’t take her temper tantrums seriously because part of me truly, stupidly, dangerously believed that it wasn’t real. That it wouldn’t stick.

Everything was forgotten. Forgiven.

Sometimes, my mother would come over, and I’d see her notice the empty pizza box—or boxes, depending on how bad the week had gone—in the trash. She’d say nothing. She wouldn’t have to. Everything unsaid she pressed down in the thin, tense line between her lips. But I could see it. The disappointment. The worry.

This wasn’t my first time at the grief rodeo.

I knew my therapist would probably have some better suggestions for how to deal with the horrible whirling vortex of a teenager in grief, but I could barely talk about my relationship with my daughter, let alone outline all the various ways I was failing her.

Three years in therapy and I was just now starting to talk enough to fill the entire hour.

My therapist knew how I felt about my mother-in-law (mostly annoyed, sometimes pitying). She knew how I felt about my job (I got to play with yarn and craft supplies every day, what wasn’t to love?). She knew how I felt about getting older (fine, if not for the occasional overheating and the lack of information on perimenopause).

She didn’t know that grief felt like the slowest-moving quicksand (what a ridiculous misnomer that word was), pulling me down inch by inch, rib by rib. She didn’t know the way it hurt—physically hurt—to think about Spencer, to imagine his last moments, to wonder if I’d even said I loved him that night. She didn’t know how there were evenings when I lay down in bed and couldn’t recall a single thing I’d done that day.

She didn’t know that my head, my heart, my body, were still completely disconnected from one another and I couldn’t even remember what it was like to be a whole person.

I imagined Lena’s therapy sessions were even less informative. We Parker women didn’t talk about our feelings. Not the big ones.

Right now, in this moment, all I could manage was pizza.

It would have to be enough.

“Come visit me on set,” Gabe had texted that morning. “We’ll have a good time.”

A good time. I’d forgotten what that was like.