“Maybe. I don’t know,” Papa says in a shallow voice I’ve never heard from him before. “I don’t know. He was old. He was exhausted. Perhaps it was all those things. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
I lean into my papa and put my arm around him, much like he might have done for me. He looks so empty and weak as he stands there staring at Uncle Fred, and it’s as though if I don’t hang on to him, he might disappear like a vapor. My father loved my mother. Deeply. They were modest and quiet about their love for each other in front of other people, but I could see the depth of their affection for each other in so many little ways, even in the way they held hands when grace was said at suppertime. And Uncle Fred had been as kind to Papa as Grandad—his own father—perhaps even more so. And now both of these people had been taken from him.
And from me. My father seems to realize this at the same moment, and his arm comes around my middle like mine is around his. It’s like we are each holding the other up.
We stand silent that way for a moment. I can see in Papa’s dazed expression that it has not yet occurred to him that the funeral business, the house, everything that Uncle Fred owned, is now his. Or maybe the dazed expression is there because this thoughthasoccurred to him, and that now Mama won’t be here to share in the joy and responsibility of that ownership.
“I’ll go get Roland to help me,” Papa finally says. “Close the door.”
Papa leaves me to fetch our neighbor.
After my father is gone, I stand over Uncle Fred’s body, serenely posed in the guise of sleep. “I’m sorry I was short with you last night,” I whisper to him. “I should’ve said so when I had the chance. Please forgive me.”
I begin to cry for him, for Mama, for Charlie, and for every single future moment they should have all been granted.
Death doesn’t ever look atshoulds, though, does it? Death looks at nothing. It just does what it’s meant to do.
