He shrugged. “Mom would have wanted me to dress up.”
They arranged chairs and found places for the pictures. People had sent bushels of flowers. There was hardly enough time to read all the cards. Too late, they realized they might have asked for donations, money for cancer research, say, in place of so much floral art. They pushed the fusty drapes aside and opened the blinds and let the spring sunlight warm the place. There was one especially ugly lamp with a base that looked like a soup tureen. They hid it underneath a table.
The service began at noon. At five after, the first visitors arrived. Their father and Uncle Mark’s family were still missing. Grace put a lid on her anger and anxiety, and went to the front of the room to greet people. There wasn’t any point in having any kind of receiving line if it was just the two of them.
“Thank you,” she said, and kept saying. “Thank you for coming.” Michael stood behind her, not saying much, unless someone singled him out. Some people she recognized from her mother’s book club. Her mother’s coworkers from the alumni association. Neighbors. They asked after her father, they wanted to make sure they offered condolences. Grace said he was here just a minute ago, he must have stepped out. Where the hell was he anyway? A bald man with an ostentatious-looking beard wandered in and stopped to look at the video playing on the table in the back. Grace recognized him as someone who worked with her father, though she couldn’t remember if he was a boss or not. It was going to be hard to keep making excuses for him. People asked if there was anything they could do, anything, and Grace said she couldn’t think of a thing, but they were so kind to offer. She didn’t think she could send anyone over to the hotel to do a sweep of the bar.
Aunt Brenda waved to them from the foyer, and Grace went to join her. “Where’s my father, is everything all right?”
“Mark’s talking to him. He’s having a hard time.”
Her cousins, Tracy and Dylan, came in behind Brenda and made a beeline for the last row of chairs. They sat down and both of them took out their phones and bent over them. Grace saw that Michael had taken a seat also, slumping on a sofa against the wall. So much for the family presence. “Is he coming in?” Grace asked.
“Yes, Mark’s getting him cleaned up.”
Grace gaped at her. “He spilled a drink,” Brenda said. “It was an accident, really, not a big deal.” She took out her compact and lifted her chin to assess herself. She was wearing a dark blue spring suit and high-heeled tan pumps. Her legs, in panty hose, shimmered. She looked almost painfully appropriate. Grace, in her droopy cotton dress and sweater, wondered if someone should clean her up as well. Never mind that now.
Grace said, “If you think he should go home instead . . .”
“I think he should pull himself together and show up at his wife’s funeral.” Brenda snapped her compact shut and put it away. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound harsh. Everybody reacts differently, sometimes things hit you when you don’t expect it.” She stopped and gave Grace a measuring look. Assessing her fitness for duty.
“I’m all right,” Grace said.
“You only ever have one mother,” Brenda said, patting Grace on the shoulder and moving into the reception room.
Grace decided not to tell Michael. Whatever might be going on, he could see it for himself. Anyway, it was a bad idea to stir up trouble between the two of them, when so much trouble already existed there.
It was getting crowded. Some of the same women who had come to visit her mother when she was ill were here now, and they had brought with them their husbands, or best friends, or teenage children. They hugged Grace, they stopped to talk to Michael, who always pulled himself together and was polite when required to be. They signed the guest book and peered at the photos. They stood respectfully before the coffin in attitudes of prayer.
Her father and her uncle Mark came in and paused together in the entrance, Mark with his arm around her father’s shoulders, saying something that looked earnest, even from a distance. When Grace crossed the room to reach them, Mark spotted her and shook his head ever so slightly: caution.
“Hi Dad.” Her father’s face looked rubbery, blank. Not good. At least there was no evidence of a spilled drink, although it was possible, now that she regarded him, that the shirt he wore was not his own. “Come on and sit down, there’s people who want to talk to you.”
She and Mark deposited him in an easy chair that was part of a conversational grouping of other chairs. “Here you go. Want some water? How about we get you some ice water.”
Her father looked up at her, his expression darkening. “I’m not some damned baby.”
“Right.”
“Your mother’s gone.” He lifted his gaze to the coffin at the front of the room. “My God, we put people in boxes and then we bury them.”
Grace and her uncle traded looks. “Just sit here a minute, can you do that?” Grace told her father. She and Mark retreated to a corner. “At least he’s here,” she said. “It would be worse if he wasn’t.”
“People understand these things,” Mark said, although he did not seem convinced.
Grace was distracted by the arrival of people she knew, some of her old school friends and a couple of people from the food co-op. She was so grateful to see them, people who were there for her, people who were on her side, that she turned teary. It was such a relief not to feel entirely alone. Alone! Wasn’t this her family, or all she had left of it? Nevertheless, alone.
She hugged her friends and they said all the right things about how sorry they were, how it sucked, how she should hang in there. They’d call her tomorrow, see if she wanted to go out, get food, talk. They went off to sign the guest book, and when Grace looked back at her father, a woman had seated herself next to him.
The woman was holding his hand and leaning over to speak to him, and if it looked odd and overcozy, at least her father was paying attention and nodding along and not doing anything belligerent. Grace remembered her as one of her mother’s visitors, but couldn’t come up with her name. Betty? Beth? Her hair was different now, colored a resolute blonde. Other people were edging in, waiting for their turn to speak to him. As Grace approached, she heard the woman say, “She was the best. She was dynamite. Nobody like her.”
“Damned straight,” Grace’s father said.
“And I know she’d want us to be happy. Even without her. She’d want us to tend to that little green shoot of happiness and make sure it got enough water and sunlight. You know what I mean, Gabe?”
“Water the plants.”
“Oh, aren’t you silly. A big silly Billy.”
“Ha ha.”
Grace realized that neither the blonde woman nor her father was entirely sober. She stepped forward, into the circle of chairs. “Dad? The Klingermans are here.”
The woman stood and people moved in to shake her father’s hand. He got out of his chair to greet them. Maybe he would be all right. Maybe he would at least be all right for the next hour and a half.
The blonde woman’s hand was on her arm. “How are you, honey, I mean, really?”
“I’m sorry, I can’t remember . . .”
“Becca.”
“Yes, of course. Sorry, I couldn’t place . . .”
“I worked with Laura at the alumni association. AA, we used to call it. For fun. Hah.”
Becca’s hand lay on her arm like a small animal you were supposed to pet. Grace said, “We’re all doing our best.”
“You meant the world to her. You and your brother.” A whiff of alcohol breath.
“Thank you.” There was something blurred or out of focus about Becca’s makeup, as if she’d used a stencil that had slipped. The blue lines around her eyes wavered and her lipstick was bleeding through. And, because it seemed she ought to keep talking, Grace said, “My dad won’t know what to do with himself.”
“I only just now met him,” Becca said. “And he’s exactly the way your mom said.”
Grace had no idea what that meant,
and no time to wonder, because now the ladies from her yoga classes, Peggy, Helen, Rita, and Flo, had arrived and were yoo-hooing at her from the back of the room. “You’ll have to excuse me,” she told Becca. “Thanks for talking to my dad.”
Becca sighed. “Men. They never know what they feel until it’s too late.”
Grace was glad to see that some of Michael’s friends were here as well, some not very dressed-up kids who gave the impression of having smoked pot out in the parking lot. They gathered around Michael and draped themselves over the furniture. It was hard to tell if their presence cheered Michael up, since none of them were talking to each other, only glumly slouching. But at least he was not alone either.
Grace went to meet Peggy Helen Rita Flo, her hands outstretched. “It was so very nice of you all to come.”
The event was scheduled to go on until three o’clock, but three came and went, and people still lingered, or rather, had made themselves comfortable and were visiting back and forth. The funeral director kept checking on them, popping in and out like the cuckoo in a clock. Uncle Mark had taken her father home in a cab. Mark said he’d sit with him until Grace and her brother got back. Aunt Brenda and Dylan and Tracy had gone shopping. Grace supposed she would have to go back to the house, although she was looking forward to sleeping in her own apartment that night. Michael had left with some of his friends, saying it was only for a little while. That had been a little while ago.
Grace was weary, and tired of people being dead, and while it was a tribute to her mother that so many people had come, and later she would appreciate this, right now she only wanted everyone to leave so that she could go home. Home home. It had been close to three weeks since she’d slept in her own bed, lived her own life. It was time to move on to whatever came next after your mother died.
The people still here seemed to all know one another, the long-ago friends from her mother’s early days. Some of these Grace had met before, or had pointed out to her, some of them she had not. Maybe they only got together for funerals these days. She sat in one of the upholstered chairs placed midway in the room, and watched the group of sociable mourners milling and chatting around her, and wondered why she was the only one left to maintain any family presence, the only one who was not allowed to abandon her post.
“Now, you must be Grace.”
The woman stood in front of her, and Grace got to her feet. She allowed that yes, she must be.
“I knew your mom and dad before you were born. Back in prehistoric times.”
Grace had nothing to say to this. Her brain was too flaccid to respond to funnies. The woman went on. “Not that we’d kept up over the years. Still, such a shock. Terrible. So sad for you.”
“Thank you.” The woman was perched on a pair of high heels that seemed to be a bad fit. She had red hair and green eyes and her face gave the impression of being dusted with flour. Good Lord, what happened to women at this age, that so many of them got themselves up to look so scary? “I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.”
“Jeanine Franks. Back in the old days, I was Jeanine Darlington. Maybe your mother spoke of me?”
“No, I don’t recall . . .”
“I sent her a prayer card.”
“That was nice of you,” Grace said, although the woman looked as if she expected to hear more.
“Is your father here?” Jeanine swiveled her neck to take in the room. The face powder she used was a bad idea. It settled unkindly into wrinkles. Still, you could see where she might once have been pretty. “I can’t remember the last time we saw Gabe. My husband and I. Oh, I want you to meet him too.” She made a windshield wiper–like wave at a stout man in a polo shirt across the room, who either did not see her or was pretending not to.
“My father wasn’t feeling well, he went on home.”
“What a shame. You make sure you tell him hello from us, and how sorry we are.”
Grace promised, although she had already forgotten the woman’s name. Jeanine Somebody. She was waiting for the woman to leave so she could go find the funeral director and start closing things down.
But she didn’t leave. Instead she scrutinized the program that Grace and her father had put together. “Is there a burial service? I don’t see . . .”
“Mom wanted to be cremated.”
“Won’t you miss having a headstone? Never mind. Just a thought.”
“Mom wanted to be cremated,” Grace repeated, and the two of them stood, trapped on this conversational ledge. How many more awkward encounters was she going to have to have?
“Could I ask you, dear, does your family have a regular church home?”
“Church home? Oh. Well, the Presbyterians, but I guess none of us is very . . . Presbyterian.”
“Then I’d like to invite you to worship with us at Christ the Victim.”
“The what?”
“It’s a Lutheran congregation. Very welcoming.”
“Why is it called Christ the Victim?”
“Victor, dear. I said Victor.”
“I’m sorry, I misheard you. I’m just so tired . . .”
“Of course you are. What a terrible time for you.”
“I guess it gets easier,” Grace said, although she was only saying it to say something.
“Come on, sit down.” Jeanine sat and patted the chair next to her. Grace sat too. “And here you don’t even know me, and I come sailing in and talking your ear off.”
“It’s all right,” Grace said, liking Jeanine a little better. “Mom would have wanted people to come together. Share memories and all.”
“I have plenty of those. We went to high school together, Laura and I. She was such a dear. One of those shy girls.”
“I guess she outgrew that,” Grace said.
“It seems like a whole different lifetime. You’re still young, you haven’t felt the, what do they call it, the march of time yet. One day you’re turning heads, then it’s like, you look in the mirror and . . .”
Jeanine spread her hands, as if to encompass the whole of her. The shoes that made her ankles overflow them like bread dough, her top-heavy figure, the powdery face and lurid red-green of her hair and eyes. Grace made some mild noise meant to disagree, mildly, with Jeanine’s self-criticism. “Oh it’s all right,” Jeanine said. “That’s life. When I think back on those days, all the parties and the bars and the carrying on, I have to shake my head. I don’t think your mother ever enjoyed that scene much, you know? She tended to hang back from things.”
Jeanine waited for Grace to remark on this, but Grace was unsure what she should say. Agree or disagree? How could she possibly know? And there was something Grace didn’t care for in this fond recounting, something disagreeable, although maybe she was imagining it. . . .
When Grace didn’t speak, Jeanine went on. “Anyway, Ian and I are much happier now. We settled down, raised our kids. We found our church home and a whole new, Christ-centered life. Which is why I want to share it with people. So they can find a higher purpose also.”
Grace’s attention had slipped once Jeanine’s talk had turned churchy. She came out of her blankness to see Jeanine looking at her expectantly. What? Grace said, “I wonder if you know, that is, if you could help me figure out something my mother said toward the end of things. Since you went back a ways with her.”
“Well I’ll try, dear. That sounds very mysterious.”
“I don’t know. She was on a lot of morphine. It was about someone, maybe you knew this person? It was, ‘Tell her Bob Malloy said hello.’ ”
Jeanine stared at her. Two red dots appeared in her white cheeks. She pulled herself out of her chair and wobbled away in her badly fitting shoes. She crossed the room to where her husband was talking to two other men. They appeared to be discussing golf swings. Jeanine said something to her husband and headed for the door, the husband walking backward after her, still trying to demonstrate grips.
Well that was . . . Grace looked around her. There was no one there she c
ould have told how peculiar everything had been and was still being.
* * *
Grace gathered the photos, and the laptop, and the iPod that Michael had hooked up to the speakers. She made trips back and forth to load all the flowers. The funeral director said that if a family had extras, the county nursing home was always glad to have them dropped off. Finally the room was restored to its generic, impersonal self, like the display in a furniture store. Nothing intruded except for the coffin, which would soon be returned to its place in the showroom.
She stood at the entrance looking back at it and trying to formulate some kind of farewell. There would be the cremated remains later, but she didn’t want to think about that right now. “Bye, Mom,” she said, the best she could come up with, and then she went out to the parking lot.
Grace had placed the bouquets and their vases into cardboard boxes to keep them upright. When she got behind the wheel, they crowded in on her from behind. Roses and stalky carnations, bunches of daisy mums, baby’s breath, wax flowers, tulips, love in a mist, something she didn’t know, birds-of-paradise, more roses. She rolled down the windows to air out the smell of them, which was close and overwhelming, with a faint undertone of staleness. She was too tired to stop at the nursing home. Everything could sit until tomorrow. She would have plenty of room for her bags, which were already packed.
Her father and her uncle were in the den, watching the golf channel. What was it about men and golf? Was it just something they did to get away from women? They looked up at her when she came in. Her uncle got to his feet. “Hey kiddo, would you mind running me back to the hotel? I have to get the crew to the airport.”
“Sure. Dad, I’m going to take your car. Mine’s full of stuff. OK?”
Her father waved a hand: Whatever. There was a coffee cup on the table next to him, and a plate with a half-eaten sandwich. He’d changed out of the shirt he’d worn at the funeral home and into a sweatshirt. Mark bent over him. “Gabe, you know I’ll be talking to you. Hang in there.”
A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl Page 21