"Are you going to be okay?" Sam asks his wife.
"Drive," Jo answers stubbornly.
"I'm at a red light, honey," he responds , trying to be gentle.
"Not anymore." She punches the radio buttons, stopping at completely random stations, most of which suck.
Sam sighs again. "Are you sure you're going to be okay?"
"I'm fine. I've never been fucking better," she hisses. He looks at her, but she's staring at her hands, avoiding his glance.
"Honey..." he falters. She's staring out the window now, sniffling slightly. Matt kicks the back of her seat, but she doesn't turn around and snap at him like she usually would. They pull into what used to be her parents' driveway. Used to be. Before they all went and died on her.
"I need to go in alone. Quick. Just to see whose here. If Mark isn't here, or isn't coming, which he should be, but... then we're going home," she murmurs delicately. She saunters into the house, her vision still slightly blurred. She's not going in without her brother, mainly because her sister is a complete bitch.
"Is Mark here?" she asks her cousin Helen. The house is pretty crowded, but not much is going on. It's basically a bunch of dismal-looking people, sitting on the carpet or sofa and moping. The rain starts to trickle down as Helen looks for Mark in the kitchen. He's sitting on the counter, talking to someone Jo doesn't recognize.
"Oh, god," Mark says, sauntering over to her, "how are you?"
"Thank god you're here," Jo murmurs, leaning onto the counter. Rain pummels the window behind her. Mark hugs her tightly and she exhales.
"Are your people okay with it?" he asks, running his hands through his hair.
"They're fine. I'm not. I'm losing it," she mumbles, "or at least on the verge of doing so." She hops up on the counter, kicking the dishwasher with her heels like she used to do when she was little.
Mark sighs, "Grace is here. Charming the dysfunctional Carters in a way that only Grace can." They laugh a little, then stop, like they're not supposed to laugh. It was harder when their mother died, she was more of a mother to them than he was a father to them. He was just there, talking around them and not directly to them, giving them complexes about god-knows- what.
"We're never going to be able to say what we want to him. We're never going to tell him that he was a shitty father, Jo," Mark realizes.
"Maybe he already knows," Grace says from behind them. She places a manicured hand on Mark's shoulder. "Am I interrupting this?"
"No, it's fine. We're hiding from them," Jo whispers. "You're not a them." The wallpaper is orange-flowered, the room is badly lit. It feels so small, so cramped. They sigh collectively, then laugh a little, stopping abruptly like before. It feels wrong to be happy, because that's what's traditional. The only thing the Carters have managed to be traditional about is grieving. When someone dies, you grieve, whether they ruined your childhood or not.