Few Kinds of Wrong (26 page)

He walks toward me and as he gets close Mom steps away, a magnet pulling away from a like magnet.

“You okay?” His eyes are red.

I shrug my answer. “You?”

“I'm going to miss her.”

“Me too.”

Bryce stares at me a long time and then turns to walk away. The sight of his back, the thin rim of hair around the perimeter of his head, they make unexpected things come out of my mouth. “I miss you too.”

He stops. Doesn't turn around. “I've always been around.” He continues to walk away, goes back to the corner he'd been standing in a minute before.

A flurry of whispers starts around the room and I look to see that BJ has just entered, Michelle two steps behind. Michelle wears a black, short dress, while BJ has a perfect skirt suit—navy, sleek. She is turning heads even at a funeral. My Uncle Chuck's eyes start at BJ's heel and stop somewhere around her chin. Henrietta doesn't seem to notice Chuck's assessment. She is too busy getting over to BJ, to show everyone there that she knows a local celeb.

Henrietta hugs BJ. BJ returns it, folds her arms around my aunt in a warm embrace. Except for Nan and Mom, I usually step back from huggers or stand stiffly with my arms halfway up, unsure how to react to their uninvited displays of affection. Still, it doesn't stop some people, the huggers who hold you even if you show no interest in it. I see one such hugger has sighted me and is on her way over.

“Oh my God, Jennifer, I still can't believe it,” Michelle says, enveloping me. My one hand finds its way to Michelle's back for a pat — maybe a bit too hard — before I pull away.

“Remember when she'd make us sugar cookies?” Michelle asks.

“No.”

“Really? That time we went to her house after school and she made them? Maybe grade four?”

“Oh, yeah,” I say, nodding even though I'm no closer to remembering some, one-off sugar cookies from so many years ago.

“She made great sugar cookies,” Michelle repeats.

“Really?” BJ catches up with us. “I didn't get any sugar cookies.”

“Jennifer took me to her Nan's when we were little for sugar cookies. All the time. Didn't you, Jennifer?”

I nod, wondering if there was another time other than the one Michelle just mentioned. She had said “that time.”

“I knew you'd come to the funeral but I'm surprised to see you here.” I look to both of them. “I honestly thought this was just going to be family.”

“We're pallbearers,” they answer in stereo.

“Henrietta asked us yesterday afternoon,”
BJ says. “I was going to tell you last night but—”

“Yeah, okay. I got it.”

Looking around the room I wonder who else is a pallbearer. All these things have been planned and decided with no input from me. Things, just as they always have, have chugged along without me.

“Who else?” I ask.

“You don't know? I figured you picked us out,” Michelle says.

“No, I've been—”

“Drunk,” BJ finishes my sentence with a word I wasn't looking for.

“Preoccupied,” I say. “What's your problem anyway?” I turn to BJ.

“There's another pallbearer now,” Michelle interrupts and places a hand on my shoulder.

He stands in the doorway to Henrietta's living room, framed by the oak door trim and the green with yellow bees wallpaper on the surrounding wall. His eyes are searching for only a few seconds before they land on me, stop and stay focussed, first on my face, then on my dress. He places a hand on his chest, takes in a deep breath and smiles. I wonder how he can still even want to look at me after all I've said and done to him.

His dark navy suit highlights everything about him — his blue-grey eyes, his perfect body, the natural blond highlights in his hair. Unlike him, I can't find my breath.

Henrietta intercepts him, stands in front of him, and pulls him into a hug. He moves his head, his eyes still on me.

“And Maisie,” Michelle says.

“What?” I pull my eyes away.

“Maisie is a pallbearer too. And Mrs. Connors and—”

“I think the important ones have been covered,” BJ says. “Let's get a meatball. I see some on the table over there.” BJ pulls on Michelle's sleeve as she walks, physically moving her along, however lightly.

For a moment, I'm standing alone in the room, although I can see that several sets of eyes are on me. Mom, Bryce, BJ, but it's Jamie that my eyes hunt for. As he disentangles himself from Henrietta, he starts to walk towards me. Halfway across the room he stops, his eyes losing their lock on me, moving to my side. I turn to see what he sees.

Another set of eyes meets mine. How long have they been there? How long has he been an arm's length from me?

“How are you?” he asks.

I turn back and Jamie is walking towards the meatballs too.

“Did you get any sleep last night?”

He is wearing a pressed black jacket and pants, making his collar seem whiter. His hair is blown dry and styled. The whole package makes him look more and less attractive.

I nod then turn away, but my mind wants to say something, to erase everything I said the previous night from his memory. I exposed myself and it still feels raw. He stands there looking at me, and without turning my head I know that Jamie is watching us. Probably from the corner of his eye, but he is watching us. I have no doubt.

“About last night,” I start and then stop, not knowing what to say next. “I'm sorry. I think I spoke too much.”

“No, you didn't.” He rubs the back of his ear and I wonder if the habit is the reason his ears stand out so much. “We just chatted.”

“I felt like I opened up a bit too much.”

“Maybe you need to open up even more.”

I glance at Jamie, who is staring at us now, not at all trying to be subtle. I see the jealousy he's always had for me. Can't he see that Carl is only an instrument of something scary? “I think I've opened up enough.” I speak the words and look away. “I'm not sure I can take much more.”

“This is a difficult time. Just know that everything you said to me will be kept in confidence. And you have my number if you need it.”

I nod. “Thank you.”

Carl smiles and touches my hand. “I'm going to say hi to your aunt again. She had some questions for me and I don't think we got through them all.”

He walks away. Jamie's eyes haven't moved from me even though I can see that Michelle hasn't stopped talking to him long enough to take a breath.

I back away until I'm against the wall. I look around and see Jamie, BJ, Bryce, Mom, Michelle, Carl, and Henrietta. All around me is everything I want to avoid. They are milling around and talking and eating meatballs. My time machine is gone and her loss has gathered all my wrongs in one room.

21

A
FTER MOM'S RETURN
to our house when I was a child, my life changed for a time. I came home from work with Dad before five every day and we all sat at the table together to eat. Dad picked up his dishes from the table and insisted I do the same. He didn't sit in his recliner chair in the corner and read the paper. He sat next to Mom on the couch and watched TV with her, his arm looking strange around her shoulders as he fidgeted.

When I went to bed I'd hear them talking, listen to them as they both went to bed at the same time, Mom's voice coming from the bedroom or sounds I didn't understand then coming from them. Roses, delivered to our door by Howse of Flowers, sat in the centre of our table, their vibrant red colour brightening the house and Mom's face every time she passed by them, then bent and smelled them. She changed the water in the vase every day and put some kind of tablet in the water, and a little bleach, and they seemed to last longer than I ever imagined cut flowers could.

But, after a time, the flowers faded and no new ones came to the house. At around the same time, things slowly returned to the way they used to be. A day here and there of Dad and me working a little later, suppers kept warm in the oven until we arrived, Dad stopping to pick up the paper on the way home. Silence filled the house after I'd gone to bed, nothing but the sound of television or the rustling of Dad's paper. The spare bed, Dad's bed sometimes, left unmade in the morning.

I woke up early one morning to a muffled sound. Tracing it to the kitchen, I saw Mom crying over the crinkled crimson flowers in the garbage. No matter how hard she tried, those roses could only last so long. I just watched, didn't let her see me as she wiped her eyes and blew her nose. I couldn't understand how someone could love flowers so much.

Still in my pyjamas, I crept to the front porch, to where my sneakers were. I slipped them on and went outside, barely closing the front door. An early morning fog shrouded the street but I could see sunshine over the horizon, the promise that the fog would lift.

We had no flower garden, but Dad had fallen behind in his mowing and our lawn was covered with dandelions. I knew they were weeds, knew that Dad cursed on them every year when they would arrive and hold fast, with a stubbornness only nature could provide. But I always thought they were pretty flowers. I'd said it once to Mom and Dad.

“Foolishness,” Dad said. “They're weeds and they're ugly.”

“I like them too,” Mom had whispered, her hand touching my face with the gentleness of new snow on the ground, her smile both happy and sad, as her smile so often was.

When I got back in the house, Mom was eating cereal at the kitchen table, the cover of the garbage bucket closed, her red eyes free of tears. At least until she saw the armful of dandelions I held, pulled out of the ground as close as I could get to the root so they would be long enough to fit in the vase that had held the roses.

As she took the dandelions from my arms and put them in the vase that had been washed and laid upside-down in the draining tray in the sink, she tried to speak. But she only mouthed the words “thank you” with lips wet with new tears that flowed down her face and dripped off her chin before she wiped them with her sleeve.

I was
eating my cereal, staring at the yellow plants crammed into a vase too small for their number, before she spoke out loud. “They are the most beautiful flowers I've ever seen. They mean more to me than you will ever know.” Tears glistened at the edges of her eyes again.

Something told me not to ask how that could be when she'd wept over the remains of beautiful red roses this morning. I just smiled and said, “I'm glad.”

This memory comes to me at Nan's graveside where flowers and tears are everywhere. We have just left the church where the family had entered together just before the service started: a dramatic scene where double doors were opened and everyone in the church turned to face us, to see the pained.

It had felt reminiscent of another, smaller scene: me in a dress in church, all eyes turning to look at me. Only my dress had been white instead of black. And Dad had been by my side, Nan in the front row of the church.

Just as on that day, my eyes looked for, found and locked onto Jamie. He was sitting one row behind the pews reserved for family and I suddenly wished I had asked him to stay with me, to sit with me. He is as much family, more so, than some of the people seated in the reserved area — distant cousins who never visited Nan once, who didn't even bother to look at us when we came in the church, whose phones vibrated throughout the service and who typed messages on those phones. Text messaging, the new way to get through a boring family funeral.

When I walked up the aisle to the front of the church, I saw other faces I knew. All the guys from the garage were there. Bryce was there, his eyes not on me but on the woman next to me, holding my arm.

Bryce's hands, just like Jamie's, BJ's, Michelle's, Maisie's and others, were covered by crisp, white gloves, hands folded together in front of them. I had watched Jamie squeeze one hand with the other several times, and it struck me that this was the first time I had seen Jamie unaware of what to do with his soft, skilled hands.

Now Jamie's white-gloved hand holds a red rose, just as my hand does, as we await our turn to toss the flower onto Nan's coffin that has just been lowered in the ground. Henrietta insisted this flower tossing be included in the burial service, the red roses looking dramatic against the white coffin Henrietta picked out. If nothing else, Henrietta has a flair for drama.

Jamie's rose goes on there, the last of the pallbearers'. Now it's Henrietta's turn. She wails as she throws it down, just as she had when the casket was lowered into the ground. Mom had gripped me at that moment and I stepped back, unsure my legs would hold me up if I didn't move them. Seeing her lowered into the ground brought a gasp to my lips then a sob. Mom wrapped her arm around me, took much of my weight as I slumped against her. Bryce and Jamie both stepped forward to catch me but I recovered, Mom's strength bracing me so that I stood up on sturdier legs. Henrietta, her face buried in an old lace handkerchief of Nan's, had missed that drama.

It's my turn to throw the rose on top of the mishmashed pile that already sits on the coffin. Sweat is dripping down my face from the hot sun and I wipe my forehead with the back of my hand. As the flower leaves my hand I hope it pales in comparison to the garden Nan is in now, that somewhere she is laughing at our silly attempt to bring beauty to this moment, that she is shaking her head at Henrietta's orchestration of this event, of her loud sobbing as the rose hits the coffin. I let out a little laugh and smile a smile that resonates through my body. People turn to me, most with questioning looks, some with concern or sadness, but Mom squeezes my hand and when I look at her she is smiling too, tiny creases at the corners of her eyes accentuating their twinkling.

Henrietta wails again then speaks. “That was a beautiful service.” Her voice is loud and it rings around the group. “Just the way I planned it.”