Read Last Day of Love for Free Online Page B

guitar. She’d taught herself a few chords but hadn’t touched the guitar since the spring. She couldn’t imagine the music she’d make now that Diana was dead. The guitar sat gathering dust in the corner of her bedroom under the small painting of Saint Catherine of Siena, which Eureka had lifted from her grandmother Sugar’s house after she died. No one knew where Sugar got the icon. For as long as Eureka could remember, the painting of the patron saint of protection from fire had hung over her grandmother’s mantel.
    Her fingers rapped on the steering wheel. Landry didn’t know what she was talking about. Eureka
felt
things, things like … annoyed that she’d just wasted another hour in another drab therapy room.
    There were other things: Cold fear whenever she droveover even the shortest bridge. Debilitating sadness when she lay sleepless in bed. A heaviness in her bones whose source she had to trace anew each morning when her phone’s alarm sounded. Shame that she’d survived and Diana hadn’t. Fury that something so absurd had taken her mother away.
    Futility at seeking vengeance on a wave.
    Inevitably, when she allowed herself to follow her sad mind’s wanderings, Eureka ended up at futility. Futility annoyed her. So she veered away, focused on things she could control—like getting back to campus and the decision awaiting her.
    Even Cat didn’t know Eureka might show up today. The 12K used to be Eureka’s best event. Her teammates moaned about it, but to Eureka, sinking into the hypnotic zone of a long run was rejuvenating. A sliver of Eureka wanted to race the Manor kids, and a sliver was more of her than had wanted to do anything other than sleep for months.
    She would never give Landry the satisfaction, but Eureka
did
feel utterly misunderstood. People didn’t know what to do with a dead mother, much less her living, suicidal daughter. Their robotic back pats and shoulder squeezes made Eureka squirrelly. She couldn’t fathom the insensitivity required to say to someone, “God must have missed your mother in Heaven” or “This might make you a better person.”
    This clique of girls at school who’d never acknowledged her before drove by her mailbox after Diana died to drop offa cross-stitched friendship bracelet with little crosses on it. At first, when Eureka ran into them in town bare-wristed, she’d avoided their eyes. But after she’d tried to kill herself, that wasn’t a problem anymore. The girls looked away first. Pity had its limits.
    Even Cat had only recently stopped tearing up when she saw Eureka. She’d blow her nose and laugh and say, “I don’t even
like
my mom, and I’d lose it if I lost her.”
    Eureka
had
lost it. But because she didn’t fall apart and cry, didn’t lunge into the arms of anyone who tried to hug her or cover herself with handmade bracelets, did people think she wasn’t grieving?
    She grieved every day, all the time, with every atom of her body.
    You could find your way out of a foxhole in Siberia, girl
. Diana’s voice found her as she passed Hebert’s whitewashed Bait Shack and turned left onto the gravel road lined by tall stalks of sugarcane. The land on either side of this three-mile stretch of road between New Iberia and Lafayette was some of the prettiest in three parishes: huge live oak trees carving out blue sky, high fields dotted with wild periwinkles in the spring, a lone flat-roofed trailer on stilts about a quarter of a mile back from the road. Diana used to love this part of the drive to Lafayette. She called it “the last gasp of country before civilization.”
    Eureka hadn’t been on this road since before Diana died.She’d turned here so casually, not thinking it would hurt, but suddenly she couldn’t breathe. Every day some new pain found her, stabbed her, as if grief were the foxhole she would see no way out of until she died.
    She almost stopped the car to get out and run. When she was running, she didn’t think. Her mind