“Let the healing begin,” I said at some point during that long spell of dismal hurt and grieving. “It has to happen. It must happen.”
While those mismatched blur of days occurred after Tuck’s funeral, Miss Kitty boxed up most of his belongings and mailed them back to his family in Cincinnati. She picked a few pieces out of the mass of items for me to keep: a handwritten notebook filled with penciled musical notes and unfinished lyrics to songs that he was in the process of writing, two pairs of Tuck’s running shorts, and a few paperback mysteries. And then the room was blocked off from any kind of life for a long time, locked and uninhabited, for its own period of heartache, months.
I stayed in the attic mostly, writing. That’s all I could do, I realized, unable to function normally in t
