I want to speak, but a lump the size of a golf ball is blocking my throat.
“I never agreed with your daddy’s politics,” Bob says haltingly. “But I always respected his guts. For a long time now, I’ve looked at you like you was my own. Now you got to put the past behind you and do whatever you have to do to make up with Drewe and get on with the business of living.” He inhales deeply, as though speaking so many words winded him. “That’s all I’ve got to say.”
Bob sticks out his callused hand. I take it, and for the first time since my father died I feel a surge of filial devotion, an atavistic sense of belonging that blasts all words into the eternal irrelevance they embody. For the few seconds we clasp hands, I am plugged into a world where ambiguity does not exist.
And I feel strong.
Everyone is gone now. In the distance I see the yellow backhoe that will fill Erin’s grave, but no operator. The funeral-home tent gives surprisingly cool shade, or perhaps it’s the opened earth that cools the air here.
Taking my surviving Martin from its case, I realize I forgot to bring a strap. I’ll have to sit to play. Using one foot, I prop the flight case up on its side and sit on the fat end, with my shoes at the foot of the grave. The polished metal casket has a bottomless sheen. A French vanilla sprinkling of Delta soil dropped by the family lies across the lid like the first fingers of the reclaiming earth.
“I hope you can hear this,” I say, my voice sounding too offhand for what should be a solemn moment.
Hitting the strings once to check the tuning, I begin the syncopated chords that lead into “All I Want Is Everything,” a song I wrote in a moment of crystallized indecision, a song Erin asked me to play anytime she saw me with a guitar. With a suspended chord hanging in the air, I begin singing softly.
I play without singing for a bit, remembering how Erin used to laugh at the verse about the gold teeth and Italian shoes, and then suddenly get pensive as the rest of the lyric came around. She knew she would never fit into the middle-class scene painted in the second half of that verse, and perhaps also that she would never be all I needed-just as no one person could keep all her demons at bay. Remembering the farewell kiss in her house on the day she died, I sing the last verse.
As the last chord fades into silence, a voice from close behind me freezes me in place.
“What are you doing?”
Moving slowly, I lay the guitar on the ground, get up, and turn to face Drewe. She stands just inside the shade of the tent, wearing a black dress, black shoes, black hat, and Ray-Ban sunglasses. She seems a pale apparition of rebuke.
“Saying good-bye,” I reply. “This is what she wanted. I had to do it.”
“You told me you wrote that song for me.”
“I did. But she liked it.”
Drewe says nothing. I glance over her shoulder for a car but see only the empty cemetery lane.
“What did my father say to you?”
“He let me know it was okay I was here.”
“That’s not all he said.”
“That’s all I’m going to tell you.”
Her mouth wrinkles in disgust. “More secrets?”
“If you like.”
She sighs, then turns and begins walking away.
“He told me I should do whatever it took to make up with you,” I call out. “That we should get on with living.”
She stops and turns back, squinting her eyes against the sun. “And what did you say to that?”
“Nothing. I don’t think I can make it up to you. I think it comes down to whether you can live with what you know and with me too. Or whether you want to.”
“Do you think anyone could?”
“I don’t know. I think you’re a unique person, Drewe. I think you love me, even if you don’t like me or even respect me right now.”
“And you think that’s something to build a life on?”
“It’s a start. I love you, Drewe. I’ve loved and respected you since we were kids.”
“Then why did you fuck my sister?”
The profanity shocks me, but if anything was ever going to push her to it, this is it. “Because I couldn’t sleep with you.”
“No!” she cries bitterly. “We
