“Not all of them, by the looks of it,” Charlie said, and reached out to take several. Indignantly, Ella hit his forearm.
“I thought old Parsley didn’t want kids,” Charlie said. “Isn’t that why you broke up?”
It was my turn to feel surprised, pleasantly so, by someone else’s ability to remember the past. “I guess people change,” I said. I was aware that perhaps I should take Kyle’s mere existence as an insult, and who knew whether Simon had other children? He probably did. But in fact, I felt an almost giddy gratitude that I was married to Charlie instead of Simon. How stiff and unaffectionate Simon had been when we were dating, how tedious, really, and I’d realized it only afterward; Charlie, even with his many flaws, was infinitely preferable. I reached over Ella to rub the back of Charlie’s neck. “What did Zeke Langenbacher have to say?”
Charlie shrugged. “Just shooting the breeze.”
The Brewers won 7–1, and we all were contentedly sun-saturated and tired driving home. As we pulled into the driveway, I glanced in the backseat. “Ladybug, I want you to pick up your toys by dinner-time.”
“In case you’re wondering where Barbie is, she’s buck-naked and spread-eagle on the floor in the den,” Charlie said. “Looks like she had a rough night.”
“Charlie.” I frowned at him.
“What does
mean?” Ella asked.
“I’m just telling the truth,” Charlie said.
To Ella, I said, “It means spread out. Why don’t you put some clothes on her so she doesn’t get cold?”
The phone was ringing as we entered the house, and my first impulse was to let the machine get it, but then I decided to answer because I thought it might be Jadey wanting to go for a walk.
“Hello?” I said. There was no immediate reply, then I heard the sound of a person sniffling, a sniffle I recognized, and my mother said, “Oh, Alice, I hate to have to tell you, but Granny has passed away.”
I HAD NEVER
bought Ella black clothing before. In fact, I’d told her it wasn’t appropriate for little girls, a line she accusingly repeated back to me as I sat on a bench in the dressing room at Miss n’ Master, Maronee’s overpriced children’s clothing boutique, and she wriggled into a gauzy black dress with ruffled sleeves and a sash across the mid-section. She peered at herself in the mirror and said with unexpected pleasure, “I look like the girl from
For Granny’s funeral, will you do my hair in braids?”
“Try this one.” From a hanger, I removed a navy blue dress with a white Peter Pan collar. When Ella had pulled it over her head, she frowned at her reflection, and I said, “That’s adorable. Why don’t you like it?”
“I like the other one.”
It was four o’clock on Thursday, four days since I’d received the call from my mother, and the funeral would be at eleven the next morning. I sighed. “Fine, we’ll get the black one.”
“Can I wear it for Christmas?”
“Christmas is in seven months, sweetheart.”
“Can I wear it at Princeton?”
“We’ll discuss it later. Turn around and let me unzip you.”
At the cash register, Ella announced to the middle-aged woman ringing up the dress, “It’s for my great- grandmother’s funeral because she died of blood in her head.”
The woman looked startled. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said.
IT WAS A
strange thing to be in Riley without my grandmother. In the past, I’d been there when she was in Chicago with Gladys Wycomb, or I’d arrived for a visit when she was napping, but those times I had felt the force of her even in her absence, and now she was nowhere at all. Or who was I to say, what did I really know about the mysteries of the afterlife, and maybe she was right next to me, watching as I turned around to greet the people sitting in the pews behind the front one at Calvary Lutheran Church. A constricting band of sadness, like a belt that was too tight, was ever-present, but I also felt the tug toward social pleasantries that always surprised me at funerals—how the focused, mournful moments were the exception, the moments when you truly thought of the person who had died instead of being dimly aware of yourself in a church, part of a crowd, reciting prayers or talking to others. Perhaps sixty people had shown up for the service, primarily our neighbors as well as Ernie LeClef, who was now manager of Riley’s branch of Wisconsin State Bank & Trust, and this turnout was higher than I’d expected, given that my grandmother had few close friends and had outlasted most of her peers and a fair number of people a generation younger, including, of course, my father.
The pastor was a man I hardly knew, Gordon Kluting, who opened the service by saying, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the source of all mercy and the God of all consolations.” After his greeting, we sang “Jesus, Lead Thou On,” then there was the Litany and the Twenty-third Psalm, my mother reading from the book of Revelation (she was largely inaudible), and then it was my turn to read from the Beatitudes in Matthew 5:
I was glad to have been assigned this reading instead of my mother’s, because of its tone of compassion rather than faith; after all these years, my faith remained decidedly shaky. That the world was miraculous, frequently in inexplicable ways, I would not argue. That these miracles had any relationship to the buildings we called churches, to the sequences of words we called prayers—that I was less sure of. Mostly, I found a place among believers,
