Jack guffawed, spewing Coca-Cola (which I later learned was probably spiked with bourbon) onto the bar.
Rachel was unfazed. “Just dance with the girl, Press. You don’t have to marry her this minute.”
As though it had been planned, Nat King Cole’s Somebody Loves Me dropped with a click onto the turntable in the jukebox and began to play.
Lifting my veil, I surveyed my red-splotched face in the Cadillac’s visor mirror. I hadn’t used mascara that morning, only a bit of powder out of habit and a few indifferent dabs of a muted pink lipstick. Using the lipstick had thrown me into fresh tears. Eva had raided my dressing table for it only the week before to draw lopsided stars on Michael’s cheek.
“Angel kisses,” she’d called them, with a little lisp in her lilting voice. Nonie had scolded her, but I couldn’t help but laugh. She was so much more cheerful, more adventurous than I had been as a child, raised as I was only by the watchful Nonie and my father. Whenever I put on lipstick, it is always Nonie’s voice in my head, telling me that only fast girls wore makeup, and only bounders required it of their wives. Bounders, as though we weren’t living in the 1950s but in some 19th-century novel in which all men are dangerous and all women damsels in distress.
I rolled the car window down halfway to get some air, telling myself I wouldn’t start crying again, wouldn’t make another scene as I had at the cemetery. I had only to get through the next couple of hours. Then I could cry. Then it wouldn’t matter.
The heat from the outside was stifling and quickly dispelled the weak cold generated by the clicking air conditioner.
“Dammit, what now? Charlotte, can you see anything?”
A long line of cars was stopped in the middle of the shady tunnel of trees leading to Bliss House. I could just see the buttery yellow brick of the house and a crisp blue patch of sky at the end of the lane.
Press got out with an agitated sigh, leaving the car idling, his suit jacket lying on the seat.
Was I supposed to follow him?
As he made his way through the line of cars, I strained to see him out the front window. There were mourners in the road, mostly women looking bewildered and upset, and a larger group of people gathered near the trees.
I shut off the car, and the air conditioner ticked to a stop.
Forgetting to pull the veil back over my face, I slipped back into the patent leather heels I had unconsciously taken off during the drive home, and started out the passenger door. Because it had been a wet fall, I checked to make sure I wasn’t getting out into mud, and pulled my foot back immediately when I detected a sudden movement in the grass feathering the edge of the lane. In another second I might have missed the flick of the black snake’s tail as the snake made for the cover of the trees. Is there any woman whose senses don’t sharpen when she sees a snake? And you will bite her heel—she will curse you. When you live in the country, there are injunctions against killing snakes in the wild. Especially black snakes. But I hate them. Pulling the door shut, I slid across the front seat and got out on the other side. Beneath my feet, the lane’s pale mix of crushed seashells and small stones was warm and uneven. In minutes, my shoes would be gloved with a fine, pearly dust.
A few dozen feet away in the grass, a closed carriage—yes, a very few eccentric families drove them with their horses on a Sunday afternoon, or on special occasions, and I suppose a funeral is a special occasion—was overturned in the grass along the right side of the lane. Just beyond the line of oak trees, a horse, detached from the carriage, rose on its rear legs, crying out, its eyes rolling white. Its flank shone with blood, and my heart broke for the poor animal. But it seemed more frightened than injured, and two men were doing their best to calm it and keep hold of the swinging reins.
Press clambered atop the wrecked carriage and was helping another man wrestle a wheel away from where it had collapsed against the carriage door. He normally wasn’t a person given to quick action, or any kind of physical labor, and so the scene felt even more strange to me. With the loud cries of the horse, I couldn’t hear if there were sounds coming from inside. As I got closer, I could see one gray head resting, motionless, in the shoebox-sized rear window of the carriage. Alarmed, I called out Press’s name.
Nearly everyone in the crowd turned to look at me. Press shouted, “Take everyone to the house, Charlotte. Quickly.”