As she considered my separates, plucked and posed them against my sister’s torso, she talked:
“Your mother’s a wreck, Lindsey. I’ve never seen her like this before.”
“Grandma.”
“Hush, I’m thinking.” She held up my favorite church dress. It was blackwatch wool with a Peter Pan collar. I liked it mostly because the skirt was so big I could sit in the pew cross-legged and flounce the hem down to the ground. “Where did she get this sack?” my grandmother asked. “Your dad, he’s a mess too, but he’s mad about it.”
“Who was that man you asked Mom about?”
She stiffened on the question. “What man?”
“You asked Mom if Dad still was saying that that man did it. What man?”
“Voila!” Grandma Lynn held up a dark blue minidress that my sister had never seen. It was Clarissa’s.
“It’s so short,” Lindsey said.
“I’m shocked at your mother,” Grandma Lynn said. “She let the kid get something stylish!”
My father called up from the hallway that he expected everyone downstairs in ten minutes.
Grandma Lynn went into preparation overdrive. She helped Lindsey get the dark blue dress over her head, and then they ran back to Lindsey’s room for shoes, and then, finally, in the hallway, under the overhead light, she fixed the smudged eyeliner and mascara on my sister’s face. She finished her off with firmly pressed powder, whisking the cotton pad lightly in an upward direction along either side of Lindsey’s face. It wasn’t until my grandmother came downstairs and my mother commented on the shortness of Lindsey’s dress while looking suspiciously at Grandma Lynn that my sister and I realized Grandma Lynn didn’t have a spot of makeup on her own face. Buckley rode between them in the back seat, and as they neared the church he looked at Grandma Lynn and asked what she was doing.
“When you don’t have time for rouge, this puts a little life into them,” she said, and so Buckley copied her and pinched his cheeks.
Samuel Heckler was standing by the stone posts that marked the path to the church door. He was dressed all in black, and beside him his older brother, Hal, stood wearing the beat-up leather jacket Samuel had worn on Christmas Day.
His brother was like a darker print of Samuel. He was tanned, and his face was weathered from riding his motorcycle full-tilt down country roads. As my family approached, Hal turned quickly and walked away.
“This must be Samuel,” my grandmother said. “I’m the evil grandma.”
“Shall we go in?” my father said. “It’s nice to see you, Samuel.”
Lindsey and Samuel led the way, while my grandmother dropped back and walked on the other side of my mother. A united front.
Detective Fenerman was standing by the doorway in an itchy-looking suit. He nodded at my parents and seemed to linger on my mother. “Will you join us?” my father asked.
“Thank you,” he said, “but I just want to be in the vicinity.”
“We appreciate that.”
They walked into the cramped vestibule of our church. I wanted to snake up my father’s back, circle his neck, whisper in his ear. But I was already there in his every pore and crevice.
He had woken up with a hangover and turned over on his side to watch my mother’s shallow breathing against the pillow. His lovely wife, his lovely girl. He wanted to place his hand on her cheek, smooth her hair back from her face, kiss her – but sleeping, she was at peace. He hadn’t woken a day since my death when the day wasn’t something to get through. But the truth was, the memorial service day was not the worst kind. At least it was honest. At least it was a day shaped around what they were so preoccupied by: my absence. Today he would not have to pretend he was getting back to normal – whatever normal was. Today he could walk tall with grief and so could Abigail. But he knew that as soon as she woke up he would not really look at her for the rest of the day, not really look into her and see the woman he had known her to be before the day they had taken in the news of my death. At nearly two months, the idea of it as news was fading away in the hearts of all but my family – and Ruth.
