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Sarah sucks in her breath, but before she can say anything, I ask, “So what did you do with the money, Rose?”
Rose looks up from the cobbler. “Excuse me?”
“The money you got from spilling the fact that Ava Geck was hiding out in my apartment.” I stare at her. “What did you spend it on? It couldn’t have been liposuction for your upper arms, because they’re looking as enormous as ever.”
Rose’s shriek of outrage causes Mom’s china collection to tinkle. I take that as my cue to get up and leave.
“What’s going on back there?” Mom asks me as I drift into the living room, where she and Dad are meeting with Father Jim, who’ll be conducting Gran’s memorial service.
“Nothing,” I say and collapse onto the couch beside her. “Just sister stuff.”
Mom gives Father Jim an apologetic smile and says, “I’m so sorry. Go on, Father.”
I sit and listen to their conversation, barely able to register what they’re saying through the miserable haze into which I’ve sunk. I can’t remember ever feeling quite so horrible. I want to die. I do. Why won’t someone just kill me already? How can everyone just go on talking like nothing is wrong when it’s the end of the world, already?
“Well,” Father Jim says. “I was thinking a mass would be a lovely gesture.”
“Oh, a mass,” Mom says, looking over at Dad. “Yes, that would be lovely.”
Dad looks skeptical. “I don’t know,” he says. “A mass. That’ll make it an hour longer.” I wonder if Father Jim caught the fact that my mom kicked my father under the coffee table. “Ow. What I mean is, my mother wasn’t a particularly religious woman.”
Even through my misery, I’m able to register the fact that Gran wasn’t religious. She’d want a Byron Sully tribute at her memorial, not a tribute to God. Because to her, Byron Sully was God. I feel myself perking up. Just a little. Because I’m starting to feel something besides sadness. And that’s anger.
“That just makes it all the more important,” Father Jim goes on, “to have a mass. Your mother’s attendance at our church was, especially in her later years, sketchy at best. But I know, had she been in full possession of her faculties at the end, this is what she’d have wanted.”
She was in full possession of her faculties, I want to shout. Fuller possession of her faculties than any of you.
“Now,” Father Jim continues. “About the musical selections—”
“Her favorite song was ‘Highway to Hell,’” I surprise myself by saying.
My mom glares at me. Dad bursts out laughing, but stops when my mother transfers her glare to him.
“Er,” Father Jim says. “Yes. Well, be that as it may, I find a more traditional selection tends to please parishioners—”
“But it’s her favorite song,” I interrupt. I don’t blame my mother for glaring. She’s right. Why am I interfering? At the same time, though—“Surely you’d want to play someone’s favorite song at her funeral.”
“Well, maybe not that song,” Mom says, looking flustered. “It’s about… well, going to hell, Lizzie.”
“Maybe we could find an instrumental version,” Dad says thoughtfully.
Mom gives me a “see what you started” look. Then she says, “Lizzie, Mrs. Brand said she’d be stopping by with a Brunswick stew. Could you wait on the porch for her? She twisted her ankle recently and I don’t want her trying to get out of the car while holding a large pot. It would be lovely if you could meet her in the driveway and take the stew from her directly.”
I stare at my mother as if she’s lost her mind. When it becomes clear from the unblinking way in which she stares back, however, that she’s not kidding, I sigh and get up from the couch. I’m almost all the way out of the house when I overhear her say, sotto voce, to Father Jim, “Lizzie and her grandmother were very close. I’m not sure having her here while we plan the service is really the best idea. Lizzie’s always been the most… well, emotional of my children.”
Tears fill my eyes. I stagger out onto the night-darkened porch—no one has thought to flick on the light—and sink down onto the steps, burying my head in my knees. Emotional?
Well, I guess that’s me. Is it emotional to be sad that my grandmother is dead? Is it emotional to wish that the person who was conducting her funeral was someone who actually knew her, who could maybe say a few words about her that might actually mean something?
Is it emotional to feel as if I’m a stranger in my own family, as if these people I’ve known my whole life don’t actually know me—or care about me—at all? Gran was the only one—the only one of them—who ever said anything to me that was actually worth a damn.
Not that I ever told her that.
And now she’s gone. And I’ll never have the chance. Never have the chance to talk to her again.
No wonder I’m so emotional.
God. Maybe I should take one of those pills Dr. De
Headlights flash, and I raise my head. Mrs. Brand and her Brunswick stew. I swipe at my cheeks with my wrists. I don’t want Mrs. Brand—whoever she is—to see me looking like such an unholy mess.
But the car doesn’t turn into the driveway. It pulls over and parks down the street. It’s so warm and humid outside, a sort of mist has settled over the street, making it look as if a fog has rolled in. I stare at the red taillights through the fog, breathing in the summer air, so familiar and yet so strange after so many months in the city. The smell of fresh-cut grass, the whine of cicadas, the chirp of crickets… these are summer scents and sounds that are almost foreign to me now, I haven’t experienced them in so long.
Someone gets out of the parked car. Even though it’s pretty dark out, and the mist is pretty thick, I can see it’s not a woman. It’s a man, tall and broad-shouldered. I look away, through the fog, into the dark sea of our yard—the yard where Rose and Sarah forced me to hose off Mom and Dad’s bedspread that time Gran was babysitting us and ended up vomiting cooking sherry all over it.
Yeah, that hadn’t been much fun.
But before that—before the vomiting—Gran had told me the story about working in the munitions factory during World War II, while Gramps had been off fighting the Nazis in France (every single man in his platoon had died when they’d found a bottle of wine in an abandoned farmhouse in Marseille and drank from it, not knowing it had been poisoned by Nazi sympathizers. Gramps, being a teetotaler, was the only one to survive), and how she and the other girls had painted black lines on the backs of their legs to make it look like they were wearing stockings with seams when they went out on Saturday nights, because all the silk had been used up for parachutes.
That’s the kind of thing we should be talking about at her funeral. The happy times. The incredible sacrifices her generation made—without complaint. Not some stupid biblical passages that have nothing to do with Gran and never did.
I notice through the fog that the man is walking toward our house. I also notice he’s the same shape and size as… my fiancé.
My heart seems to freeze inside my chest.
But what would Luke be doing here? I mean, it’s true my grandmother—the family member I cared about most in the world although I might not have realized it until it was too late—is dead. And it’s true I’m really disappointed in him because he’s made no effort during the course of our relationship so far to meet anyone in my family.
But he’s in France. He wouldn’t have flown all the way to A
And then, as the mist swirls and tumbles around the man’s legs as he turns into our driveway, I see something that causes my heart, which a moment ago was frozen, to explode into what feels like a million tiny pieces of flame—like fireworks, only inside my chest, instead of up in the night sky: he’s wearing a baseball cap.