I was grateful. Aunt Lettie was the sort who could never get warm and insisted everyone bake in a house heated several degrees above comfortable, or she’d catch her death. I never knew if she always looked angry because she was, or because she painted her eyebrows that way. Today she wore a black fur coat so large that, with her slim legs sticking out the bottom, she looked like an ostrich.
Uncle Marlowe had adopted the same posture he adopted in thearmchair from which he watched nature documentaries, so that he seemed transported into the pew from his sitting room. Slouched back, hands laced around his belly, and a slight pout to his lip.
“How are you keeping now?” he asked.
“Given the circumstances, dreadful,” I said.
“Hell, join the club.”
“Marlowe!” Aunt Lettie gave his arm a slap for cursing in church. “So you’ve heard about your grandfather.”
“That’s why I’m here.”
“Such a surprise. Oh, he was old, of course, but he seemed well enough. Your mum has been so busy with the funeral arrangements, bless her heart. I don’t know what we’d do without her. In my grief, I was no help, of course. Found him, we did. Collapsed in the house. It would have done her such good if you’d been here. I understand, of course, but would it kill you to visit more?”
Amelia made eye contact as if to say,I told you so.I’d always liked Marlowe and tolerated Lettie, who could make you feel guilty for failing to blow out all the candles on your own birthday cake.
Marlowe interrupted Lettie’s ramble. “Still have that amulet I gave you?”
I flicked the coin hanging from my left ear. “Of course.”
He nodded with gruff satisfaction. “Good.”
The pews filled, and eventually a priest took to the pulpit to start the eulogy.
“We are all here today to say goodbye to Edwin Ashborne, but goodbyes even at his age are bittersweet, so let us remember him, first. Edwin was generous, a pillar of kindness within our community who could never be too put upon to help a stranger—but of course, nothing could quite match his devotion to his family.”
He began to list the names of those surviving family members, and I had the harrowing thought he might not mention me. After all, I’d been gone for nine years. Did I really count as family any longer?
He mentioned how Grandad loved his games of backgammon with Marlowe, and Amelia made Sunday roasts better than he did. Down the line of grandchildren he went, my heart bracing for the absence of my own name.
The priest said, “And lastly, Taliesin Ashborne, to whom Edwin devoted nine years trying to make this place home again; he hoped one day it would be.”
A few people whispered. Some even turned in their seats to search the crowd for the long-estranged grandchild.
I bowed my head and didn’t meet their eyes.
Instead of relief that my name had not been forgotten, I felt a bitter ache. I could never call anyplace home. Not for long. And especially not here.
Once the eulogy ended, a few family members gave their own tearful speeches and goodbyes. It ended with a song—the same one Lunaris played to comfort me. As pallbearers rose to carry the casket out to the graveyard, we filed out in a somber procession after them. A cold drizzle wept through my suit.
At the freshly dug grave, the pallbearers set the casket onto the device that would lower it down. It reminded me of a gurney. The priest said a prayer as the casket slowly sank beneath the earth, and that’s when everyone began to cry. My family and other mourners dropped flowers and mementos into the hole. I hadn’t brought anything, and once again felt the gulf between me and this place, these people, more keenly than I felt any grief.
I wanted to feel sad. I wastheoreticallysad. But none of it felt particularly real, and the more I felt guilty for my inability to shed a single tear, the closer I got to crying out of frustration more than anything. I’d said goodbye a long, long time ago. It had been harder the first time.
While I stood there stiffly, a witch with an osprey familiar came up next to me and laid a heavy hand on my shoulder.
As a general rule, I didn’t like being touched. There were exceptions, but this stranger was not one. He had watery blue eyes and the broad build of a rugby player who’d gotten old.
“He talked about you nonstop. He would have been happy you came,” he said.
“Do I know you?”
The osprey shuffled to the shoulder closest to me, and I didn’t appreciate the proximity to its hooked beak. The man said, “There will be time for introductions later, but I thought I’d give you this to pay your respects.”
From his other hand he extended a single white lily. I took it more to disengage from him than out of gratitude.
The open grave had an awful gravity to it. I stood at its edge and wondered what I should say, if anything. There was simultaneously too much, and nothing at all worth saying. He couldn’t hear me now, nor take the last nine years back.
