The Audi is in the parking lot when I get out of my parents’ minivan at the funeral home. While I’m staring, the car produces Thomas and Davey from its small bowels. Audi Thomas is black—a notable feature in our lily-white-except-for-Mash-and-Jeanelle town—and built like one of those guys who drinks three too many protein shakes a day. He also has the confident stride of someone who has all his daddy’s credit cards in his wallet. Davey’s lanky and lean beside him. They walk into the funeral home wearing identical suits and ties except for the difference between navy and steel gray.
Even from behind, Davey appears changed. Back straight as a ruler. Hands buried in his pockets like a politician’s son. His shoes are high gloss.
Inside, Hattie pins a white rose to Davey’s suit coat and then pins one to my shirt. I find my place among the other pallbearers. Mom clarified this morning that I was an honorary pallbearer—“Girls do not carry caskets,” she had said. Honorary my ass. I stand with Davey, Thomas, Mash, Fifty, and three other men from church, hoping all these guys ate their Wheaties, because Tyson Vilmer was a Great Pyrenees of a man. When you pick up a casket, you feel the weight of it very differently than you think you will. We carry it. It carries us. The real weight is carrying each other.
Death is a superhuman burden.
When Tyson Vilmer is front and center, where he belongs, all the pallbearers but me sit in a reserved section. I slide in next to Grandy. Her velvet hand with its spidery blue veins lands in mine. I let her cling. I even cling back when Woods and Janie Lee shred the entire funeral home with “A Satisfied Mind” followed by “How Great Thou Art.”
Then Dad shreds it with his eulogy. A good thing because of the conversation I had with Janie Lee this morning:
“You see the paper?” she asked.
I hadn’t.
“There was a full page about Big T and . . .” She drew a banner with her hand. “‘Community Church Aflame,’” followed by a big fat pause.
“‘Community Church Aflame’ and . . .”
“And . . . ‘Local Minister Sleeps Through Blaze.’”
I’m vexed. “That’s not even true.”
Truth hardly played a part in the local news.
Now Dad’s telling a story about the Harvest Festival, and how without Tyson’s support this will likely be its last year. Our spines bend like dying flowers. The congregation responds. Grief knocks into grief. No one can imagine Otters Holt without the Harvest Festival. Without Tyson. Least of all my tear-streaked father.
I look away from him and notice three things. A) Janie Lee has her pinkie on Woods’s knee; B) Davey has his head on Thomas’s big-ass Thor shoulder; and C) there’s a muscular man looking like Davey will in thirty years, who is practically sitting on top of Davey’s mom. She is not sad; she’s furious.
And then I manhandle the casket to the car and the casket to the earth and say my final good-bye. “Thank you, you sweet old coot.” Tyson Vilmer. b. 1938.—d. 2017. Beloved by Otters Holt. (Not the official inscription, but I’m close.)
Dad catches my eye, narrows his expression. I still remember that you blew up the youth room.
No worries, Brother Scott. So do I.
3
Dad in his ratty bathrobe, unshaven at two in the afternoon. Dad alone in his study, Bible open, heart closed, at two in the morning. Dad gazing and blazing at the newspaper article. For one week, I leave him to his heartache, aware that I am a contributing factor.
I was grounded before the fire. For attitude, back-talking, and breaking Dad’s Coolest Minister Ever mug. The weekend of the fire I was interrogated. I explained about the sock, I admitted to the vodka; I bore the weight of responsibility. “It was my idea and my alcohol,” I told Mom and Dad apologetically. Mom yelled herself hoarse. Dad walked away. She was fine in a day. He was . . . well, since then we’ve had a baker’s dozen of passive-aggressive interactions and only one real conversation.
My goal was to apologize, genuinely. Which I did. But the end result was us screaming about my “inability to understand my position in this family.”
Oh, I understand my position quite well. “Brother Scott McCaffrey demands perfection,” I say.
Our words are between a snarl and a growl. I shut him in his home office with a door slam that rattles the frame. Through the wood, he yells, “Not perfection. Effort. Where is your effort?”
He makes me old just listening to him.
Dad has a common problem among ministers: he reproduced.
While our argument is exacerbated by the fire, most of our “discussions” are of the agree-to-disagree variety. Somewhere, buried under all this angst, hardwired in, we have a sturdy core. I am his baby girl and he is my big strong father. I love him even when I hate him. Like . . . if I close my eyes on any given summer day, I feel him lift me into an azure sky—a basketball falls through a hoop, he cheers. There’s the denim of his Wranglers on my bare legs as I drive a pickup on my tenth birthday. The cotton of his T-shirt as we piggyback down Grandy’s steps Christmas morning. The two of us stand at the observation point at Niagara Falls—Mom is sketching in the grass—and he tells me, “Baby, you can be anyone.”
The positive-memory well stops around the time I turned thirteen. We exchanged memories for yells, trust for suspicion, ease for tension. According to him, I’m my mother’s daughter. She was the art major, a Canadian liberal. Back before monogrammed shirts and the Lord, my mom was a real shit-starter.
I think about her. How she handles him. I nudge open his office door and give him another shot. “I meant what I said. We never meant for anything bad to happen.”
“Billie . . . I believe you. But the problem is . . .”
“No one else does.”
His chin drops in defeat.
There’s really nothing more to say. Back in the garage, I let myself get snagged in a project I’ve been working on for months. I call it the Daily Sit—a (someday) fully functional couch made mostly of old newspapers and glue. I’m busy adding another layer of epoxy when Davey pulls into my driveway and wheels his fancy-schmancy Camaro all the way up to where I’m working.
He’s dressed as usual: navy bandanna headband pushing his hair skyward, black skinny-ish jeans, lace-up high-tops, and a white T-shirt he’s cut the sleeves from even though it’s sixty-five degrees. I’m dressed like I’ve been in the garage all day. He assesses both the Daily Sit and me. Seems interested.
“Mom has me out delivering thank-you packages,” he says. I’ve got newsprint and glue up to my elbows, so he tosses something wrapped in craft paper on the workbench.
“For what?” I ask.
He mounts our chest freezer and slaps his high-tops against the side. “Being a pallbearer for Big T. So, was that weird for you?”
I don’t look. One ornery corner of the newsprint is curling up like a cat’s tail. “No,” I say, realizing I’ve glued two fingers to the armrest. I jerk them away and cuss.
Davey’s too busy checking out my workspace to care about my loss of skin. The garage is both oddly organized and incredibly chaotic. There’s Guinevere, a lady knight constructed of aluminum cans, two prototypes of a book television I built for Woods, stacks of newspaper for the Daily Sit, a half dozen semi-constructed metal unicorns near my welding bench, and supplies most people would call trash.
“You do all this?” he asks.
I can’t tell if he’s impressed or trying to work out why I haven’t finished anything. “Yeah,” I admit. “Everyone needs a hobby.”