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Night Drives

The memorial was on a numbered street nobody in their right mind ever went to unless they were buying counterfeit sunglasses, trying to find parking court, or making one specific kind of mistake.

Penelope found parking immediately.

That was the first bad sign.

The building itself looked like nothing. Iron door. Wood facade. Early-gentrification bones. The iron door was caught on the latch — not open exactly, just yielded a little when she pushed, enough to let you know you were in the right place if you were the kind of person who had been texted look for the weird metal door, don’t panic by Abby at eleven-thirty the night before.

Jack rolled up beside her, both hands on the wheels, dark shirt, hair neat in that way that always made her think he’d put exactly the right amount of effort into looking like he hadn’t.

“This feels encouraging,” he said.

“It feels like a kidnapping venue.”

“Abby did book it.”

“That’s true.”

Penelope pushed the door all the way open.

And then the whole place shut her up.

The courtyard was all light and green and ruinously beautiful, wisteria hanging in pale unruly drifts overhead, vines gone full fever dream around old brick, wood tables pushed back for rows of chairs facing a projector screen. No steps. Not one. Just this lush hidden garden in the middle of the city like somebody had opened the wrong door and found spring behind it.

Penelope stood there for a beat.

Then, because there was no other honest response, “Fucking Abby.”

Jack looked around, then at her. “Yeah.”

It was perfect. Of course it was. Because Abby could forget to mention key, life-changing logistical facts and still somehow pull off the exact right room for grief. Because she could be a menace and a genius in the same breath. Because all of them, really, had been raised by wolves with excellent taste.

People were already there, drifting through the courtyard with drinks and tissues and the careful bright faces people brought to memorials when they were trying to look less afraid of what the day might do to them. Tom was near the back table, tall and steady and already in practical-husband mode, opening a bottle of sparkling water for somebody’s aunt while keeping half an eye on Abby, who was impossible to miss.

Her hair was long and blond and somehow both brushed and chaotic. She was in a bright pink jumpsuit that would have looked insane on anybody else and on Abby just looked like a refusal to wear funeral black out of spite and conviction. She was carrying a stack of printed speech cards she had absolutely no intention of using and talking with both hands to a caterer, to June, to Geoff, to a woman Penelope had never seen before who had the exhausted look of someone recently hired by Abby and already forever changed by it.

Then Abby saw them.

Her whole face went soft for half a second before she snapped back into motion.

“Oh, good, you’re here,” she said, arriving in a gust of perfume and pink fabric and competence. “Isn’t this place insane?”

“It’s beautiful,” Penelope said.

“I know.”

“You didn’t mention the magic garden hidden behind the murder door.”

“I wanted impact.”

Abby kissed Penelope on the cheek, then bent and kissed Jack’s temple in passing. “Jack, save us from Geoff and the projector.”

Jack glanced toward Geoff, tangled in cords, lit cigarette in one hand. “Aw. He’s doing a great job.”

Abby followed his look, groaned, and said, “Oh, good. Then we’re just waiting on electrical fire.”

Then she whirled off again before anybody could stop her.

The memorial started loose.

There was no clean hush, no solemn choreography. People settled in by degrees. Geoff did an entire lap of the courtyard looking for an extension cord that was literally in his hand while Jack actually got the projector working. June smoked half a cigarette she didn’t really want and then burst into tears because Tom asked whether she’d eaten. Somebody’s friend from somewhere in Joseph’s sprawling social universe hugged Penelope so hard her earring got caught in his jacket and that, weirdly, helped.

Then Abby got up to speak, and all the air in the courtyard changed.

She stood in front of the projector in the bright pink jumpsuit, cards in hand, shoes still on for exactly the first forty seconds.

“I just want to say,” she began, voice already wobbling and amused at itself for wobbling, “Joe would have hated this venue for him because there’s nowhere to smoke badly.”

That got the first real laugh.

Abby nodded once, like: good, we remember how to do this.

“He also would have loved that I’m opening in pink because he always said funerals were too flattering to men who had spent their whole lives being cunts.”

More laughter. Louder now. Tom, by the bar, dropped his head briefly into his hand.

Abby went on.

She told the story of driving Joseph to rehab in the middle of nowhere, she and Penelope in the front seat, him in the back for three straight hours screaming insults with such endurance it became almost athletic. How he had called Abby a fake-tan fascist bitch and, later, sent a letter demanding gifts because they’d lied about the equine therapy. How Penelope, somewhere around hour two, had put on Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab” with the dead eyes of a woman no longer governed by good decisions. There had been one full beat of silence from the backseat before Joseph had started laughing so hard he had to wipe his face on his sleeve.

By that point the courtyard was gone. Everybody was laughing.

Not polite memorial laughter either. Real laughter. Bent shoulders. Open mouths. The kind that made grief look less like a wall and more like weather moving through.

Abby told the story of the year she and Tom had stolen Joseph’s car in high school because he wouldn’t let her borrow it, and how he had chased them down the driveway barefoot, dragged her out by the hair when she stopped at a light two blocks away, and screamed, “You treacherous little pageant twat,” with such conviction that Tom still couldn’t hear the word pageant without laughing.

Tom was actually crying laughing by then, shaking his head at the table like he wanted a public record that he had not expected to be implicated this early.

Then Abby said, “Also, in case any of you somehow didn’t know, Joe and I used to reenact the lift from Dirty Dancing all summer long, except Joe was always Baby and I was obviously Patrick Swayze.”

She kicked off her shoes.

The courtyard made a noise before she even did anything.

“Abby,” Tom said, already laughing.

“No,” she said. “He would want this.”

Geoff shouted, “He absolutely would.”

And before any adult instinct could intervene, Abby grabbed one of Joseph’s old friends from the front of the crowd, barked, “Hands here, don’t make this weird,” and attempted some fully unhinged approximation of the lift in a pink jumpsuit while half the memorial screamed and the other half nearly fell out of their chairs.

It was terrible.

It was perfect.

It was them.

When she finally got her shoes back on, wiping under one eye and breathing hard from laughing, she said, “He was my favorite pain in the ass for forty-four years.”

That landed deeper than anything else she’d said.

Then she looked at June and Penelope, and her face softened just enough to be dangerous.

“He was ours,” she said.

Then the slideshow started.

Someone dimmed the courtyard lights. The projector hummed to life on the sheet strung across the brick. One second of blank white glow, then the opening of the song Joseph had always played on night drives in his convertible, back when everything in the world had seemed capable of being solved by spliffs, windows down, and one more lap around town.

“Fuck,” Penelope said under her breath.

Beside her, June made a sound that was almost a laugh and almost a sob and mostly a warning.

The first photo was Joseph’s bare ass ruining a family photo.

Of course it was.

A full, earnest Christmas picture — everyone lined up in ugly sweaters, Geoff already red from wine, Abby trying to hold the whole frame together with pure eldest-daughter force — and there in the center background was Joseph, pants around his knees, mooning the camera with priestly seriousness.

The courtyard lost its mind.

Next: Joseph, Abby, and a too-young Penelope in their The Craft phase, all smeared eyeliner and black nail polish, sitting cross-legged around an even younger June, who was lying stiff-backed on the living room floor surrounded by tea lights and a Ouija board, her expression saying clearly that she had not consented to being used for necromancy by idiots.

Next: Joseph and Abby cry-laughing at something while Penelope, fifteen and all elbows and rage, screamed at both of them with both arms fully extended as if conducting an orchestra of personal betrayal.

Next: Joseph with June in a headlock, trying to smoochy-kiss her face while she shoved at him and laughed so hard she’d gone red.

Next: Joseph and Penelope cry-laughing while drawing on Geoff’s face with a Sharpie as he slept open-mouthed on a deck chair, one Stella still upright in his hand like the man had passed out mid-toast.

Jack barked out a laugh.

Another slide. Joseph’s ascot phase.

There were at least four photographs documenting that particular disaster. Ascot with leather jacket. Ascot with tinted glasses. Ascot at a barbecue holding a hot dog like a man who had been exiled from normal clothes for crimes against humility.

The whole courtyard was gone again.

That was the thing about memory when it was honest. It didn’t come back sepia and tasteful. It came back with somebody’s ass out and everybody yelling and one year where a man had apparently insisted on dressing like a bisexual duke for no discernible reason.

The slides kept going.

Joseph asleep in the grass.

Joseph shirtless on top of a picnic table to “fix” a lantern.

Joseph and Abby bent double over some joke no one else had gotten.

Joseph at twenty-one, thin as a nail and beautiful in the dangerous, stupid way boys sometimes were before life got a real grip on them.

And then the train photo came up.

Joseph. June. Penelope. Abby.

All four of them on some train somewhere in France or Spain, smiling like total idiots. Sun knifing in through the window. Joseph’s arm slung behind Abby. June leaning in so hard she was half on Penelope. Penelope herself younger and brighter and not guarding anything.

For one second she didn’t see a photo. She saw the actual carriage — the hard blue seat fabric, the hot metal smell, somebody’s orange peel in a paper bag, Joseph talking too loudly in the aisle to a stranger in broken something, Abby sunburned across the nose and refusing to admit it, June asleep for half the ride and then suddenly awake and starving and furious about both. The cheap, stupid joy of all of them being abroad and underfunded and unsupervised and so certain that this counted as a real life.

And there she was in it.

That girl in the corner of the frame with her whole face open. Not braced. Not funny in self-defense. Not already standing one inch outside the moment, taking notes on it. Just there. Sun-warmed and loud and having an absolutely ordinary afternoon she had not known, at the time, she would one day give anything to step back into for thirty seconds.

That was the part that got her.

Not only that Joseph was gone. The whole shape was. Joseph alive and impossible. Abby not yet polished into command. June still leaning her whole body into whoever she loved. Penelope before she’d learned to keep one hand on the door of herself at all times.

On the screen they were all still smiling like they had nowhere else to be for the rest of their lives.

That was the cruelty of it. The photo was genuinely happy. Not bittersweet in hindsight — happy. A cheap train, a good light, everybody still intact enough to be annoying. And now here they were in a courtyard under wisteria, old enough to know what gets taken, staring at proof that they had once lived inside something warm and ordinary and had not known to hold it harder.

She wanted two impossible things at once: to go back, and to stay exactly where she was.

June’s hand found hers with full desperate force, fingers cold and shaking.

Jack moved in at the same moment. She ended up half between them — June’s hand locked in one of hers, the other at the back of Jack’s neck like she needed his actual spine to stay upright.

His hand came around the back of her calf and squeezed once.

Not to calm her down.

Just there.

Just holding the line.

On the screen in front of them, Joseph was still grinning from the train window like summer had never once in its life ended.

June had gone full laugh-cry now, which was somehow more devastating than if she’d just been sobbing. Little broken sounds coming out of her like her body had lost the distinction between pain and delight.

Abby saw them from across the courtyard.

She left Tom’s arm at once and came straight over in the bright pink jumpsuit, face wrecked now, finally, all the bravado burned off.

She didn’t say anything.

Just got to them and pulled Penelope and June in hard against her, folding them into that impossible sibling shape — all elbows and hair and damp cheeks and perfume and grief.

June half-laughing into Abby’s shoulder. Penelope clutching the back of Abby’s jumpsuit in one fist. Abby saying, “I know, I know, I know,” like she could somehow mother all of them through it by force.

Jack stayed right there, one hand still on the back of Penelope’s calf, the other steady on his wheel, close enough to be in it without trying to enter the sacred insanity of sisters mid-collapse.

Somewhere behind them Geoff laughed at something on the screen. Then immediately pressed both hands to his eyes.

That bent-Polaroid feeling settled over everything.

Not sepia. Not sweetness. Just warmth with a bruise in it.

The sense that the whole night had been cut out of older nights and taped crookedly over them. Night drives. Backseat smoke. A train somewhere foreign and cheap and glorious. Amy Winehouse through bad speakers. Geoff passed out in a lawn chair. Abby in pink, still making a room move by sheer force of personality and nerve.

At some point later, when the song had ended and another had taken its place and the projector light was just light again, Penelope looked at Jack.

He looked up at her with that quiet face of his, the one that never performed understanding and so always felt more like the real thing.

“You okay?” he asked softly.

“No,” she said.

He nodded once. “Yeah.”

It was the exact right answer.

She bent, kissed him once — brief and salt-tasting and grateful — then held him there for one second under the wild hanging wisteria while her family went on being loud and wrecked and alive around them.

Behind her, Geoff started laughing again.

June swore at someone lovingly.

Abby, somewhere near the bar, was already retelling one of Joseph’s worst stories as if keeping him in the air by narrative alone.

And Penelope, standing there in the middle of it, felt the old life and the current one touch for one impossible second.

Not cleaner. Not simpler. Just warmer.

Like a Polaroid with the corners bent.

Like all of them, still.