Lila

out, four men carrying it, easing it down the stairs. Then the preacher came out after it, his black robe fluttering in the breeze, his Bible in his hands, his big, heavy old head bowed down. She knew it must be some friend of his who was dead. He had so many, one of them was always dying. The men slid the coffin into the hearse, but the preacher glanced up and saw her there and stopped where he was, on the step. The mourners stopped behind him, weeping, and not quite sure what to do, since they seemed to think they shouldn’t step around him. So they wept and hugged each other, and he just stood there, looking at her. The look was startled. It meant, So you’re here, after all! How could you let me think you had left! As if there was something between them that gave him the right to be hurt, the right to be relieved. And she hadn’t even missed church lately. So he was aware of her all the other days, knew somehow that she was close by, or that she was not, and it grieved him that she had been gone from Gilead even a little while. The widow or the mother or whoever she was said a word to him, and he nodded and went on. She saw him standing near the hearse, holding the mourners’ hands, touching their arms, murmuring to them. What do you say to them, she thought, when they stand around you like that, like they just need to hear it, whatever it is? I want to know what you say. She couldn’t walk up to them, stand there with them hearing the words he whispered, waiting for him to touch her hand. She didn’t even have much to cry about. That woman put her head on his shoulder, sobbing, and he put his arm around her and held her there. He pushed her hair away from her face. Lila blushed to think how good it must have felt to her, to rest her head that way.

Well, Lila thought, can’t stand here staring. He ain’t going to look my way again. The hearse had to follow the road up to the cemetery, but the old man and most of the mourners took the path. She wanted to wait for him somewhere so she could speak a word to him, but what would she say? I’m back, I ain’t going nowhere? That probably wasn’t even true. She couldn’t just stay around because she thought it might matter to him. Then the cold weather would come and he’d be thinking about something else entirely. Somebody else to feel sorry for. Her stuck in Gilead with no reason to be there and no place to stay, knowing he would never look at her that way again, if he ever really did even once. Staying on anyway because the thought of him was about the best thing she had. Well, she couldn’t let that happen. Doll said, Men just don’t feel like they sposed to stay by you. They ain’t never your friends. Seems like you could trust ’em, they act like you could trust ’em, but you can’t. Don’t matter what they say. I seen it in my life a hundred times. She said, You got to look after your own self. When it comes down to it, you’re going to be doing that anyway.

Lila had money in her pocket. She went back to the store and bought a pack of Camels. On the way home she stopped and lighted one, cupping her hand around the flame, that old gesture. But it had been a long time, and whatever it is about cigarettes went straight to her head. Like I was a child! she thought. Oh! Well, I just got to do this more often. Here I am walking along the road all alone smoking a cig. They got hard names for women who do that kind of thing. I got to do it more often.

She had a habit of gathering up sticks, firewood, wherever she saw it, and she had a lot of it, so she could make a fire that would be hot enough when it burned down to roast that chicken. It was good of those people to pluck it and gut it before they gave it to her. She could put a stick through it and prop it up somehow, and spend the evening tending it, and eat it in the dark, in the doorway. She might go over to that farm the next morning and do some chores for them, because they gave her too much for the work she’d done. It didn’t set right. That would be Sunday morning.

It wasn’t the only time she’d felt like this, it surely wasn’t. Once, Doll went off by herself for a few days, after things started getting bad. When they were looking anywhere for work they must have wandered into a place Doll knew from before, and she had gone off on some business of her own and left Lila behind with the others. She’d never done that, not once. Lila had never spent an hour out of sight of her, except the time she spent at school, and then she hated to leave her and couldn’t wait to get back to her, just to touch her. Doll was always busy with one hand and hugging her against her apron with the other. That time she left Doane’s camp she didn’t tell any of them where she was going, but she did say she would be back as quick as she could. Lila had never really noticed before that the others didn’t talk to her much. She was always with Doll. Once, Marcelle called them the cow and her calf, and Doane smiled. That was after Tammany, when feelings were sore and even Mellie wouldn’t