Picture this.
It’s five days after my mom’s death. A warm, sunny summer day. But I feel, like, terrible. How can I feel any other way? When my mom died, our social worker, a nice but frazzled woman named Emma, took over. She handled the cremation and organized a funeral. And now I was walking down the street on my way to that funeral service. Emma said it was the right thing to do for my mom. Not that we ever had anything to do with a church. The people who would be there would not be family or friends. They would be members of that church. The minister there did these services for welfare families when someone died.
I hated the idea. I didn’t want to go. My mom was dead, and this would be a bunch of strangers trying to do a good deed by showing up for me—Josh Haslett, poor teenage boy who lost his mother to drugs and bad health. Screw them.
I had almost decided not to go to the service at all. It would only make me feel worse. I was trying not to think about my options. Well, I really didn’t have much in the way of options. I didn’t want to think about my future. Maybe I had no future outside of being placed in a group home. Screw that.
But then this strange thing happened.
This girl walked up to me out of the blue. “Great day,” she says. “I love this weather.”
Girls don’t usually stop me on the street and strike up a conversation about weather. What was with that? I just stared at her.
“Sorry. Sometimes I freak people out. I was just trying to be friendly.”
I didn’t know what to say. “Yeah, that’s okay. Sorry. I was a little preoccupied.”
“I’m Lindsey.”
“I’m Josh.”
“Short for Joshua?”
“I guess.” Nobody had ever called me Joshua that I could recall, except for my mom when I was really young.
“Lindsey is short for Lindsey. The name has something to do with a tree on an island. Scottish, I think.”
Why was she telling me this? I wondered. Maybe she was a nutcase. I was thinking of walking away. But I suddenly realized that for the first time since my mom died, I wasn’t thinking gloomy thoughts.
“What kind of tree?” I asked, feeling foolish even as I said it.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I should look it up sometime. I just picture this beautiful, big tree on a small island in the ocean.”
She had a big smile now, this cute and friendly nutcase of a girl.
“So?” she asked.
“So what?”
“Where are you going on a beautiful day like this?”
I almost told her, but I held back. “Nowhere in particular.”
“Can I walk nowhere in particular with you?”
“If you want,” I said, realizing how stupid that sounded. But I think I smiled just then.
“That’s good. At first I thought you couldn’t smile. I thought maybe you had something wrong with your mouth.”
“I don’t have anything wrong with my mouth,” I said.
“That’s good,” Lindsey said.
So we walked. And we talked about silly things. And I knew I was going to be late for the funeral, but right then I didn’t care.
If you are with me so far, you are thinking, Hey, this is like some really cheesy Hollywood film about a messed-up kid who meets a beautiful girl on the street who changes his life.
Well, it is and it isn’t.
After some more walking, and her running commentary about birds, clouds, trees, oceans, faraway places and hairstyles, she suddenly stopped. “I gotta go now,” she said. “But I’m hoping we can do this again. Can I give you a hug?”
I smiled but didn’t say a thing.
And she wrapped her arms around me and squeezed. It felt really, really good.
And then she grabbed my hand and said my name once—“Joshua.” Then she turned and walked away with a bouncy kind of walk.
And so I ended up standing there. Smiling like an idiot.
A few seconds more of feeling stunned and then I took a deep breath and remembered where I was going. I took a few more steps before I realized my wallet was missing.