Sometimes Ray seems like a person from a memory or a movie actor I can’t quite place. Looking him hard in the face, I think—yes, I remember—he’s that guy from back when we were kids, and we used to hang out all the time. He looks a little older now, but that’s definitely him. We had this secret club that met in the linen closet. Then something terrible happened and everything changed.
“I can’t go in there,” Ray says. “It’s too close in there.”
I nod.
“I’ll come to the service,” he says. “I promise.”
◆ ◆ ◆
Back at Mom’s house, after the church service, I watch the men pass around photos and talk about their families. One story leads into another, like a thin rope made of strong sinew, a wisp of something deeper than bone. I forget how hard a man can love. How desperate and irrational the heart can be. I look around for Jack, feeling guilty for things that I can’t do anything about now. Too many screaming matches between there and here.
My father, though, had been that quiet type of man whose offer of sincere emotion was a surprise. He was a jokester, a kid at heart, showing us his affection through play. Words often failed him. I had known that he loved us, of course, but hearing the stories told by other fathers around the mourning room brought the truth home to me. How much had my father wanted to reach beyond the restraints of his own malfunctioning body that was stuck in the nursing home to tell me himself? I tried to recall the small handful of times he had found words while he was there.
I see Ray with his close-cut, dark hair and three-day stubble, sitting in a folding chair in the corner by the back door. His ill-fitting, dark gray suit and starched white shirt hang on him like a costume. This is the suit he wore to court to look respectable and repentant, and to cover the tattoo sleeves on his arms. The suit—then and now—makes him look like a book stuck on the wrong shelf.
What if all the restraint he’d had has been exhausted? What if, this time, jail and the pain of a tattoo needle and his general helping of self-loathing and beer can’t keep him from splitting down the middle?
He sees me and presses his lips together. I tilt my head at him, thankful that he’s here. During the funeral, he sat on the back row with some of the people I recognized from the nursing home. He lifted a hand to me, but when I waved him up, he shook his head.
I see Aunt Rose sauntering over to him, and I try to push my way through the crowd. She’s talking loud enough to be heard halfway across the room and I know that she knows this.
“Well, Ray,” Aunt Rose says, her hands on her hips. “I almost didn’t recognize you. What did you think of the service, or were you there?”
I step over some kids coloring, all their little hues spread out around them.
“I sat in the back,” I hear Ray say.
Someone stops me to talk about something, but I’m listening to Ray. I’m so close, but stalled just feet away from him.
“I suppose you’re happy your mother had him cremated,” Rose says.
“Why would that make me happy?” Ray asks, and I can almost see what he wants to say forming in a cartoon thought-bubble over his head. Kiss off. I loved my father.
You don’t have to get along with someone to love them. Love or the lack of it was never the issue between Ray and Dad. Love is easy. Like is more difficult.
“I guess you would have preferred to see him off in a pine box,” Rose says. “I wanted your mother to get one of the nice caskets. The kind with the stylish interior. But she decided to have him burned up like a pile of old leaves that you want off your yard before they kill the grass.”
This is why no one likes Aunt Rose.
“Coffins are tacky,” Ray says and looks beyond Rose to where I’m standing. “They look like my sixth-grade saxophone case.”
I think about the bright blue, plush lining where the instrument fits in—a perfect cutout to keep it snug in place for safe travel.
“How awfully rude,” Aunt Rose says to Ray. “Typical.”
“Kiss off, Rose,” Ray finally says, not even offering her the formality of her family title.
She gasps and huffs away.
I sense an opening in the one-sided conversation I’m trapped in and make my escape. I sit down beside Ray in an empty folding chair. This would have been Jack’s spot, if he were here. It’s like the time-out chair and Ray happens to have been the bad little boy today.
“I’m not in the mood for another lecture, Nina,” Ray says.
“I came to congratulate you for annoying Aunt Rose,” I say in an attempt to lighten the mood.
“What is it you want?” Ray asks, not ready to be lightened up.
“Just checking on you,” I say. “I was a little harsh in the car and I’m sorry.”
He looks at me with a mock expression of shock, and I think, There it is, right there, my Ray. There you are. I want to reach out to him like I’m grabbing onto someone who has fallen off a boat. Don’t go under, Ray, please don’t go under.
“Is that a white flag?” he asks.
“Truce,” I say. “For starters.”
He nods and loosens his tie. “This thing is a noose. This sucks.”
I know he doesn’t mean the shirt and tie.
“Yeah,” I say. “It does.”
We watch the tide of black dresses and dark sports jackets ebb and flow through the room. Faces become solemn and then less so in a strange rhythm of solidarity and stoicism.
After a while, Ray jams his hand in the breast pocket of his suit and pulls out a palm-sized
