Things Unexpected

“Mom wants me to wear some kind of mad hat,” Julien says a few nights after it happens. “Like a Mad Hatter kind of hat.”

They’re the last two still sitting up in the hotel lobby, and he knows Elijah hates him, but still, it’s – he likes to annoy him sometimes, just a little. But Eli acts as if he hasn’t heard him at all, so Julien chucks a wadded up napkin at his forehead to force him to pay attention. When Elijah sighs, long-suffering, and looks up from his laptop, Julien clarifies,

“To the funeral.” He raises his eyebrows and mimes the outline of a stovepipe hat with his hands. “Big stupid thing. Like Doug Dimmadome or Abe Lincoln or something.”

Elijah blinks at him. “Do you expect me to do something about that?”

“No.” Julien shrugs, slouching further into his chair. “No, just – trying to make conversation, I guess. Thought you’d get a kick out of me having to wear a dumb hat.”

It happened three days ago – it, that’s how he’s allowed himself to think about it when he’s thought about it at all – the fall that took his grandfather in a sudden blow, loud and violent as a blown tire.

Ah, but he’s old. It wasn’t unexpected.

That’s what he’s told people.

In truth, he hadn’t thought about it at all until it was too late. Yes, his grandfather had been old – nearing ninety if he’d made it to his next birthday – but it wasn’t the sort of thing that had been on Julien’s mind until it happened. His grandparents lived a few states away and he hadn’t seen them in two years, but he had as clear a picture as ever of them in his mind’s eye: his grandfather strong and obstinate, holding court at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee in his hand, his grandmother the image of a Queen ready to receive her subjects with a sly smile and a raunchy joke that would take them by surprise. Julien had always pictured them like that, living in their hand-built house on top of the hill in a sort of perpetual state of waiting for him to come for his next visit. It had somehow never occurred to him that they had their own lives, or that there would come a day when those lives would end, when he would lose his last chance to know them.

“What do you think tomorrow’s going to be like?” he presses when Elijah doesn’t say anything.

Eli sighs. He hesitates, then uses both hands to close his laptop with a soft sound. He stares at his socked toes where they’re propped up on the generic hotel coffee table. “Not sure,” he admits. “I mean, it’ll be a sad day, obviously, but – weird, I guess. Sad and weird. I think Aunt Cris is doing the eulogy.”

Julien makes a face. “Aunt Cris? Really?” She would fill it with preachy Jesus stuff even though Grandpa hadn’t really been all that religious when it really came down to it. Not that he knew of, anyway. He rolls his eyes. “Hallelujah.”

Elijah laughs, quiet, because he gets it. They don’t really talk much these days, but Eli still gets it.