It was a Tuesday, and Tuesdays always meant looking at flowing wedding dresses and fanciful cakes with his mom until Burt stuck his head in the doorway and announced bedtime, leading Elizabeth away with matching smiles on their faces.

On this particular Tuesday, Kurt glances at the digital clock next to his bed and reads the time with a frown. It was approaching 4pm and Kurt could still hear the sounds of his father wandering around upstairs, meaning that Elizabeth hadn’t yet come home to pull him into a hug and lead him to the kitchen for a snack and a kiss (a routine that Kurt had often watched scretly from the top of the stairs, smiling at how wonderfully unlike the other parents his mom and dad were).

Burt often closed the shop around 3pm on most weekdays, right after the school bus dropped Kurt off at home. Kurt would always meet Burt inside the garage, talk for a moment about his day, and then head inside while Burt finished up on whatever car he was working on at the time. For Burt, the time between locking up the garage and welcoming his wife home often felt like a useless expanse of day during which he felt restless and bored. For Kurt, the first couple of hours after arriving home from school were always rough. It was hard going back and forth between the terse dispositions of his classmates to the warm affection his parents have always shown him. It’s dizzying, the extremes that have always existed in Kurt Hummel’s life, even from an early age.

The clock hits 4:15 and Kurt can hear the slamming of a car door, signalling his mother’s arrival, finally. He jumps off the bed, magazines abandoned, and hurries up the stairs and to the living room, watching from the entryway as his father glances towards the front door from his spot on the couch. A football game is playing across the television and Burt turns the volume down, standing up and heading for the door. A loud, resounding knock sounds out and Burt stops in his tracks, confused.

“Dad? Why is mom knocking on the door?” Kurt asks, a curling mass of worry nestled low in his stomach. Burt doesn’t answer, but he sends Kurt a reassuring smile and goes to the door, opening it slowly.

All Kurt can see is that the person in the doorway is definitely not his mother. The stranger, a man in a dark blue uniform, is standing quietly, the expression on his face unreadable.

“Burt Hummel?” the man asks.

Burt nods and steps back to let the man inside. Kurt takes an involuntary step back, hiding on the very top stair.

“Sir, I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.”
___

The funeral is on a Friday, Elizabeth’s favorite day of the week. It had been her idea to start Family Dinner nights every Friday as soon as Kurt was old enough to be out of his highchair, and Kurt stands next to his father at the cemetery in an itchy black suit and doesn’t feel anything. His mind wanders, and he thinks about how he should be helping his mom wash the lettuce for a salad rather than watching her casket as it’s lowered into the ground. He thinks of the man whose car slammed into his mother’s as she left work earlier that week and the unfairness of it all, the fact that a nameless man (drunk in the middle of the day) had the audacity to take Kurt’s mother away.

Burt looks down at his son and clutches at Kurt’s small hand, squeezing too tightly and the sun is shining too brightly for the ache of this moment. There are birds trilling love songs in the trees all around them and children playing in the park down the street, but Kurt’s heart is broken and the tears are falling now. He looks at his father’s face, the devastation outlined across his features, and Kurt knows that nothing could ever hurt more than this.
___

It turns out that Kurt was right, for the most part. Nothing in his life had ever hurt as much as losing his mother until a Thursday during his junior year when Emma Pillsbury interrupted his French class to drag him to her office. He had been expecting another lecture on how the clicking of his new boots were making her more paranoid than usual; the last thing he thought he would see was Will Schuester sitting in the office with a solemn look on his face. A familiar nest of nerves winded around Kurt’s insides, pulling against them and leaving him short of breath.

Mr. Schuester gave Kurt a long, serious look and Mrs. Pillsbury clutched tightly to his arm.

“Kurt, your father had a heart attack.”
___

While his mother’s death had always been a sharp progression of moment’s in his mind, the news about his father flips Kurt’s world upside down in an entirely different way. The rest of the week blurs together in a sluggish slide of interactions that Kurt couldn’t care less about. He’s vaguely aware of his friend’s attempts to comfort him, but he begins to tune them out once their songs of praise to a God he doesn’t believe in start.

Kurt tries to make his glee club understand in the only way he knows how: he sings to them. It’s never really worked before, as there has always been the odd member who refuses to take him seriously while the others blindly follow the leader, always quick to jump on the latest bandwagon.

The song soars around the room as Kurt splits himself wide open (it’s such a feeling that, my love, I can’t hide) and as he watches the faces of his best friends crumple with the onslaught of fresh tears, he thinks that maybe, for once, they understand him.

___

The next day Kurt is sitting with his father, hands locked together. Sitting in the stark hospital room like this Kurt has realized, over the course of his father’s hospital stay, how easy it can be to pour your heart out when no one seems to be listening.

Words are pouring out of his mouth and getting choked up in his tears, falling uselessly from his mouth. He thinks about his friends and their faith, the prayers they have wasted by sending them up into the sky on a hope that someone bigger than they are will latch onto them and send an answer. He’s selfish, and he knows that, he tells his father so.

“I don’t believe in God, dad, but I believe in you and I believe in us. You and me, that’s what’s sacred to me.” Kurt’s words are choppy and uneven as they continue until he’s sniffling wetly into the silence of the room.

There’s a slight movement of fingers, then, and Kurt thinks he’s imagining it for a moment but it’s real, his father squeezing at his son’s fingers and Kurt is catapulted back to that afternoon at his mother’s funeral when they held hands for an entirely different reason. Kurt yells for the nurse and doesn’t bother wiping away the tears.