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“You girls have to tell me if I start looking seedy,” Red told his daughters. “I don’t have your mother around anymore to keep me up to par.” But as the week wore on, and his shirts developed food stains and he never got out of those slippers, he shrugged off any suggestion they made. “You know, Dad,” Jea
“But, Dad,” Amanda said, “your wedding was in the sixties.”
“So?”
“Maybe in the sixties people wore these, although I can’t quite … but that was almost half a century ago! All the seams are fraying, just look. There’s a rip under one arm.”
“So we’ll fix it,” Red said. “It’ll be just as good as new.”
Amanda and Jea
De
The girls groaned, but De
“Yes, Dad,” Amanda said.
“At our wedding I wore bell-bottoms,” he said. “Your grandma Dalton had a co
There’d been no photos of their wedding, because Abby had claimed that a photographer would ruin the mood. So Amanda and Jea
“This long sort of flowy, I forget what they call it,” Red said. “A Kaplan?”
“A caftan?”
“That’s it.” His eyes filled with tears. “She looked nice,” he said.
“Yes, I bet she did.”
“I know I can’t ask, ‘Why me?’ ” he said. The tears were ru
“Right, Dad,” Jea
“But sometimes I just have to ask anyhow. You know?”
“Yes, Dad. We know.”
Carla wasn’t happy about letting Susan miss school for the funeral. Everybody heard De
Red wore floppy gray corduroys and his dashiki, which was even more startling off its hanger. The sleeves ballooned extravagantly over elasticized cuffs, giving him a buccaneer air, and the slit at the neck was deep enough to expose a whisk broom of gray chest hair. But Nora said, “Oh, didn’t De
When the doorbell rang and Heidi started barking, they all gathered themselves together. That would be Ree Bascomb’s maid, who had agreed to babysit the three boys. Once she’d been given her instructions, they all filed out the back door — Stem and Nora, Red, De
In Hampden, the rest of the world was enjoying an ordinary Monday morning. Two heavyset women stood talking to each other, one of them trailing a wheeled cart full of laundry. A man pushed a bundled-up baby in a stroller. The weather had started out cool but was rapidly growing warmer, and some people wore sweaters but a girl emerging from a liquor store was in short shorts and rubber flip-flops.
The church turned out to be a small, unassuming white cube topped with more of a cupola than a steeple, squeezed between a ma-and-pa grocery store and a house already decorated to the nines for Halloween. They might have missed it altogether if not for the signboard in front. HAMPDEN FELLOWSHIP was spelled out across the top of the frame, with WELCOME HOME PRIVATE SPRINKLE in movable type below. There wasn’t even a parking lot, or not one that De
Eventually, they climbed the two front steps and entered a low-ceilinged white room lined with dark pews. It had the deep chill of a place that had sat through an autumn night without heat, although a furnace could be heard now rumbling somewhere below. A wooden lectern faced them, with a plain dark cross on the wall behind it, and off to one side a woman with dyed red hair was playing “Sheep May Safely Graze” on an upright piano. (Reverend Alban had already explained that his choir members were working folk and would not be able to sing on a weekday.) The pianist didn’t look in their direction but continued plinking away while they threaded up the aisle and settled in the second row. Possibly they could have chosen the first row, but there was unspoken agreement that that would have felt too show-offy.
A tall vase of white hydrangeas stood in front of the lectern. Where had those come from? The Whitshanks hadn’t ordered flowers, and they had specified in the Sun that they didn’t want any sent — just donations to the House of Ruth, if people were so inclined. Abby had been odd about flowers. She liked them growing outside, unpicked. Jea