“Thank you,” Reverend Alban said. “And now we’ll hear from Elise Baylor, Mrs. Whitshank’s granddaughter.”
Elise had an index card with her. She teetered up to the lectern on her strappy high heels, gazed out at the congregation with a dazzling smile, and cleared her throat. “When me and my cousins were little,” she said, “Grandma would call us on the phone and say, ‘It’s Saturday! Let’s have Camp Grandma!’ And we’d all go over to her house and she would do handicrafts with us—pressed flowers and pot holders and Popsicle-stick picture frames—or she’d read to us from these storybooks about children from other lands. I mean, some of those books were boring but parts were, like, sort of interesting. I’m going to remember my grandma for as long as I live.”
Deb and Susan glared at her—it must have been the “my grandma” that irked them—while Alexander took on the sullen expression of a boy trying not to cry. Elise gave the congregation a triumphant look and clopped back to her seat.
“Thank you, all,” Reverend Alban said. He nodded to the pianist, who pivoted hastily toward the piano and started on a rendition of “Brother James’s Air.” It seemed a peculiarly lighthearted tune for the occasion. Amanda’s Hugh absentmindedly tapped one foot to the beat, till Amanda leaned forward and sent a meaningful frown down the row to him.
At the end of the piece, Reverend Alban rose and approached the lectern again. He placed his fingertips together. “I didn’t know Mrs. Whitshank,” he said, “and therefore I don’t have the memories that the rest of you have. But it has occurred to me, on occasion, that our memories of our loved ones might not be the point. Maybe the point is their memories—all that they take away with them. What if heaven is just a vast consciousness that the dead return to? And their assignment is to report on the experiences they collected during their time on earth. The hardware store their father owned with the cat asleep on the grass seed, and the friend they used to laugh with till the tears streamed down their cheeks, and the Saturdays when their grandchildren sat next to them gluing Popsicle sticks. The spring mornings they woke up to a million birds singing their hearts out, and the summer afternoons with the swim towels hung over the porch rail, and the October air that smelled like wood smoke and apple cider, and the warm yellow windows of home when they came in on a snowy night. ‘That’s what my experience has been,’ they say, and it gets folded in with the others—one more report on what living felt like. What it was like to be alive.”
Then he raised his arms and said, “Page two thirty-nine in your hymnals: ‘Shall We Gather at the River?,’ ” and everybody stood up.
“I don’t understand,” Red said to Amanda, under cover of the music. “Where did he say she went?”
“To a vast consciousness,” Amanda told him.
“Well, that does sound like something your mother might do,” he said. “But I don’t know; I was hoping for someplace more concrete.”
Amanda patted his hand, and then she pointed to the next line in the hymn book.
Ree Bascomb had warned them earlier that people would surely show up at the house right after the service. Whether or not they were invited, she said, there they’d be, expecting food and drink. So at least the family was prepared when the first caller rang the doorbell. Without so much as a pause to catch their breaths, they were back to murmuring thank-yous and accepting hugs and allowing their hands to be clasped. Ree’s maid offered trays of little sandwiches delivered that morning by the caterer. A trio of Middle Eastern men, more formally dressed than Abby’s own sons, watched in shocked silence as Stem’s three boys chased each other around the legs of the grown-ups, and a tiny old woman whom nobody knew asked several people whether there were any of those biscuits that Abby used to make.