What Happened to the Bennetts

by Lisa Scottoline

“That’s grief, man. It gets in you. Your body carries it. It’s embedded.”

I knew that was what she meant, but it felt unsayable. Marriage was reading each other’s minds, but knowing what had to remain unsaid.

You’ll always have them as long as you love them. And you’ll love them forever. That’s what lasts forever. The love.”

Death was everywhere, in the present, in the past, in the future. I wondered why we bothered with time at all.

‘Whenever you’re taking a portrait of someone, you and your subject are in the present, but if you’re any good, you can see their past, and even their future.’

“So that’s how I feel, like when Allison died, somebody pulled off my arm. Just yanked it off. Now she’s gone, and today, somebody pulled off my other arm, because I can’t have my mother anymore, and it’s not about her, or Allison, it’s about me.” Lucinda shifted in bed. “I’m spraying blood all over the place.”

That’s the way marriage was, I realized in that moment. There was a thing you always worried about, barely a crack, running down the middle between the two of you, and you hope it will go away, but it can widen like a tectonic plate, break open beneath your feet, and swallow you whole.

Tomorrow, everything changed.

“The fight don’t stop until the casket drop.” —Kaboni Savage, quoted in U.S. v. Savage, 970 F.3d 217, 291 (3d. Cir. 2020)