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Show Go Love/165 hands stuffed in pockets, talking in little voices. Occasionally somebody laughs, then looks at the floor. Over there's Jimmy's best friend, a pallbearer I haven't seen since the funeral. They went off as missionaries to build Baptist churches in Alaska-him and Jimbo I've got a picture of them holding this leg-long salmon; Jimmy's got one gill and preacher the other-summer before graduation. He's grown a double chin, preacher, and his wife is pregnant. I picture my brother aged, beholding this room-and it's some fight to wrest that image from my brain. I'd say the walls are bright white, though there's some kind of pink trick in them. And of course the place is windowless, dead center of the funeral home, no sunlight will ever see this space. "Is Mama happy in her casket?" Lara points at it Renee looks petrified, the three of us hold hands Behind my back, an uncle on O.W 's side says, "She'll start coming to you when you dream, you know. That's how it happened to me." "Is she hungry, daddy?" "My own mama lay under for thirty year now. Snap your fingers. I still see her laying in her box, a little girl again." The flowers have a tuned up, high alert odor Cold air blows down from vents above and I remember how a high school buddy whose daddy was principal filched keys to the janitor's room beside the girl's athletic dressing room, how he produced these blurry pictures of skin and hair and hip bones against cinderblock walls. People verge between casual and church clothes. The Uncle wears a brown clip-on tie and a brown suit. "I miss her so her bad," he says. "Not a day I don't want to dig her up just to see her face again." He says it to me straight-faced and pats my back, turns to Bold and Judy begins again. |
