Maybe one of these days I’ll actually be invited to a funeral. It’s not like I can’t find this one online with a simple search. Edgar Taylor. Fairly straightforward to locate, especially considering the news coverage. Town golden boy dies suddenly, mysteriously. The date and address of the service was at the bottom of every Q13 FOX article, along with a link to donate to Whitman College in lieu of flowers and a tip line for any leads. 

On the steps leading to the funeral home, big pots lay filled with brittle dirt and stems sheared at the root. Maybe they were roses or chrysanthemums. Perhaps tulips, the kind I think Mom liked. Or the purple ones with the inky centers. 

“Can I take that?” A man asks, gesturing to my coat. He looks too placid to be a guest, and I shake my head. 

The air is thick with the stench of a cranky chemical bouquet. It reminds me of the undercurrent of the massage parlor without the eucalyptus and candles to mask the odor. 

I made a point of coming late. The room is as full as I’d hoped, making it easy to hide behind packs of college students and the men who own the shops on Main Street. A woman with a prune mouth squints to place me but abandons the effort when a small boy led by an iPad sprints past. I exhale and resolve to look at people’s knees to avoid eye-contact. 

Mass-printed still-lifes in brushed gold frames, chairs with silver backs, and a dark mahogany reception table to match the pulpit. I run my fingers over the leaf of a fake fern and dust pills beneath my oily fingers and sprinkles onto the milk green carpet. I wonder if funeral homes have green carpets to mimic the return to Earth. 

The sound of the overhead lights makes my teeth ache and I wish I had something with me. I scan the room to see if there’s a bar anywhere, but it’s hard to see beyond the mass of bodies. God, it’s hard to even tell the bodies apart from one another, all dressed in black. I take my glasses off and rub them on the itchy hem of my dress but cleaning the lenses doesn’t sharpen anything. 

 How do you wear black without deodorant clinging to it? I lick my thumb and go at the chalky streaks on my left side to no avail. The dress is a sale bin find that expels sausage fat. My shoes have the opposite problem of being slightly too loose. I shuffle in them slowly to keep my clammy heels in their rubber backing. I’ll return them both when I get home to Yakima. 

“I heard they found him on the side of route twelve just outside Lowden,” a kid says. 

“The fuck was he doing there?” someone replies. 

The wave of people moves me from the side to the front of the room. I don’t know the dead man, but my blood does. The genomic twitch that fused our earlobes to our jaws. The divot in our ring fingers from holding Bic-pens too tightly. The casket is closed from the waist down, hiding the scar on his shin from when he fell chasing me around the yard. 

I work my way toward the back of the room as the echo of my father speaks. His cheeks have deflated, with fine lines carved between his eyebrows from years spent in the police force scrutinizing perps and victims. His mustache has grayed, but his head is still the same shaved yet stubbly texture I remember. His voice booms. 

Games of pick-up basketball ruined by a blown knee. Mariners innings lost and won. A snowy mountain pass and a game of cards. 

He looks at me but doesn’t see me. It wouldn’t occur to him that I’d be here. 

When the other half of our immediate family was still alive, my father took us to Mt. Rainier. We played I Spy in the car, and he pretended to lose after I picked a cow from an acres-long farm. He sang Outkast’s “Hey Ya” with bravado and made Mom laugh. At the mountain, he carried me on his back while snow crunched beneath his boots. Mom and Eddie lagged behind due to a stray shoelace. I commanded my father to stop and wait for them so we could continue our ascent as a family. 

The air in here is damp, which can’t be good for the bodies. The service page suckers up the moisture. Wait, the program, not the service page. That’s the word. Someone reads a prayer. 

There’s no widow to speak as my brother never married. He was only nineteen, and the blonde he posted a photo of a few weeks ago isn’t in attendance. I’d been happy to see that post on one of my late-night internet stalking sessions. I was comforted that the middle schooler I left behind was maturing into a college man. We hadn’t spoken since then, but I knew I was right to leave. 

I imagine Mom’s funeral was brighter. My father kept us at home with our neighbor, Debra. He believed children shouldn’t attend funerals. 

On average, people take four steps to the pulpit. Three large, one small. Chair, aisle, body, pulpit. My grandmother takes six, the weight of her daughter and now grandson pulling at her ankles. You can see the five generations she’s buried in her labored steps. God, I need a drink.

I don’t go up. As the—my—family moves to form a reception line, I busy myself with the wood coffee stirrers at a refreshment cart. The carpet crinkles beneath me, spilled cream from last week’s affair mixed with sugar crystals from ours. 

“When are we getting curly fries, Mama?” I asked. She promised we’d get some the next day once she was released from surgery. I was told her hospital gown and matching hairnet were temporary. Routine, the adults kept telling me. They did this kind of procedure all the time. She assured me that we could go to the Arby’s drive-thru on the way home. 

They never finished the surgery. I was told she was never coming home, and my brother and I were shoved next door to Debra’s while my father handled everything. 

On the outside, Debra’s home looked a bit like ours with the beige slatted siding and shallow front porch. But the light in her home was gray and filled with dust. Her couch was a scratchy floral pattern and her coffee table, littered with cigarette ashes and bottle caps, bruised my knees whenever I tried to slip past it. Debra was a product of the decrepit hovel: her wet cough that never went away, the stained patches on her teeth, the slippers she always wore even though her left big toe poked through, the nail wavy.

She took it upon herself to tell us what happened. My mother had a stroke mid-operation. A rogue blood clot. A sniper in a park on a sunny day. Debra smacked her palms together, BANG. Instant. No pain. How she’d want to go. She let out a witch’s cackle. 

I heaved vicious gorilla sounds. It must not have clicked before, the violence with which she passed. My hopes of her sleeping in a cloud, disrupted by thunder. My mother. Bang. The smack of wet palms. It couldn’t be true. 

I screamed and flung myself to the floor. Debra tried to restrain my flailing, pinning my arms and legs down with her meaty limbs. My banshee wails continued as Debra screamed at me to stop. She slapped me hard across the cheek. The physical pain eclipsed the emotional, and I stopped yelling. She threatened to do it again if I made another peep. 

She got up and handed me a glass, which I mistook for water. It was obvious that the liquid wasn’t water the way it burned coming down my throat, but Debra insisted I finish it. She told me it would make me feel better. After a few small sips, I felt a warmth returning to my chest, like my mother was hugging me from the inside. I asked what it was called, and she said water. By the time Dad came to get us, still in his funeral black, my head had drooped like a drowned noodle. 

I was never sure what Debra told my Dad, but we kept going over there. Debra’s guardianship was most remembered by her big belly laugh at Jerry Springer, her mitt around a glass of Mountain Dew mixed with something sharp. At the slightest sign of distress, she’d give me more “water,” mixed it in with Fanta or Capri Sun to cover her tracks. She didn’t tell me what she was doing, but I never questioned it. We recognized my limp noodle head was calm. I didn’t cry or shriek. I didn’t beg for Arby’s drive-thru. I’d sit in her late-husband’s easy chair and watch my brother play with toy ships on the carpet. He created stories of pirates on the high seas and I believed that the room was swaying along with his adventures. 

The water would make me sleepy, but Debra always gave me a spoonful of peanut butter to mask the smell. My father would carry me home reeking of peanuts, but maybe he still knew. Denial is a hell of a drug. 

The calm cost me my memories of my mother. From photos, I know she was beautiful. From our carpets, I know her hair was curly and red because it impregnated the fibers for years. The spot next to my bed looked pink. I think she sang to us, but maybe I just wished she did. 

One night when Dad picked us up from Debra’s, I puked on the sidewalk between our homes. Or so my brother told me when he brought me a can of chicken noodle soup the next morning. 

They moved Debra to a home after a lit cigarette fell from her drowsy fingers and caused a small fire. Dad made the 911 call, and I wondered if it had been his intervention. After all, the Marlboro box near the ashtray didn’t belong to Debra. She only smoked Winstons because the shop owner sold them to her at a bulk discount. 

She died some years back. Liver failure. The home couldn’t find a next of kin, so she went into the ground alone. No funeral to be had. 

“What a sweet boy he was,” an older woman says to me. Her glassy eyes seem familiar, but if she recognizes me, she doesn’t mention it. “I was his teacher, oh a million years ago.” She lets out a chuckle. I nod and smile. 

“He was perfect,” I reply. 

“His poor father. I hope he finds someone. He must be so lonely.” 

“Maybe,” I smile. She pats me on the arm, her touch firmer than I expect. 

With Debra gone, Dad deemed me old enough to watch my brother, so he could continue to stay late at the police station. I was never sure how a town of our size could keep him so busy, but now I know he was avoiding us. We reminded him too much of Mom. 

I doted on my brother the best I could. He was only five years younger than me but always seemed like a baby. I kissed his full cheeks when I met him at the bus stop and cut his curly mop in the bathtub. I made mac and cheese from the blue box for dinner and added hot dogs when Dad left enough cash on the table to pick up a pack. I helped him with his homework, and we played pirates at night. 

My insides were rotten, and outside of my brother I became a bad kid. Starting in fifth grade, I skipped classes and argued with teachers. In middle school, some of the older boys would pay me for hand jobs. I used the cash to pay for slim bottles of vodka like Debra had; I needed the calm. At the convenience store, I told the teenagers at the checkout counter that they were for my father and they usually just let me go. Cops kids get away with a lot, at least until they’re caught by a persistent authority. 

In my case, that authority was my high school vice principal who caught me giving a blow job in the backseat of a senior’s car during assembly. The boy received a week suspension; I got expelled. The school took the opportunity to get rid of a bad seed, and honestly, I can’t blame them. 

Dad couldn’t figure out what to do with me. He’d take me to the station sometimes and plop me in the empty chairs around the bullpen. He made sure I saw the DUIs come in to dry out overnight and the Craigslist hookers bat their thin eyelashes. 

My brother was old enough by then to understand what I had done. He couldn’t look me in the eye, slightly nodded in acknowledgement when I called his name. One day, he came home with a black eye. Apparently, he got in a fight with a bigger kid who called me a whore. 

The next morning, I hitchhiked to Yakima.

My brother emerged from our childhood unscathed, probably because I left before infecting him. The internet is a great tool to keep tabs on someone from afar. We hadn’t spoken since I left, but I could see photos from his baseball games and read about the team’s winning record. All the birthday wishes, all the congratulations. The high school posted his valedictorian speech on YouTube; he didn’t mention me, but I still know the whole thing by heart. I know none of this would have happened if I stayed. Leaving was the only option. 

The back door opens, letting the tart winter air blow inside. Men pull their suit jackets tighter and women rub their bare arms. Through the clouds, the soft light beckons the crowd outside. On my way out, I swipe a bottle of wine from the edge of a bar and hold it in the lining of my coat. 

On the ground, crunched ice melts into the thin lining of my shoes. The crowd pools to the left, but I head to the right. I shuffle, careful to avoid puddles, until I reach the far end of the cemetery. 

It was twenty-two years and six days ago that Mom died. The red tulips I left her are still here. Every February 3, make the same pilgrimage to the 7-Eleven around the corner to buy flowers before depositing them and turning back around to Yakima. I never thought they lasted more than a day, but here they are. 

My brother died only six days ago. As the sun was rising, a trucker found him on the side of the highway without a scratch on him. Hypothermia. It would have been in the single digits at night, maybe negative with the wind coming down between the mountains. His friends couldn’t figure out what happened. There had been a party the night before at his friend’s place, but he’d gotten so drunk that they sent him home. 

“I’m going home,” he insisted. They watched him stumble out into the night. 

Perhaps he had gotten turned around in the dark. Maybe he wanted to see that blonde girl. But neither his dorm, the girl, or home were along that stretch of highway. Yakima was. 

I thought so many times about driving that same stretch of highway through the mountain pass to see him, ever since I saw the announcement in the news that he won a full-ride scholarship. But it had been so long, and I didn’t want to drag him down with me, not when he had finally gotten out. 

His death would probably be ruled an accident, a result of drunken disorientation. But he knew exactly where he was going. Tears sting my eyes, the valley of regret opening wide. 

Through the tombstones, my father finally sees me. He retrieves his gloves from his pockets. I let the bottle fall to the ground. Stale branches cushion the landing, the bottle rolling in a gurgled thud. His cheeks are a blistered red from the wind. For a moment, he’s looking through me, as if he’s trying to shake me from his imagination. His eyes soften when he understands I’m real. 

I take a step toward him. He smiles. 

——————

Liz Glass is a writer and producer based in Ohio. She holds her BA in History of Art from Johns Hopkins University and her MFA in Producing from the American Film Institute Conservatory. She is represented by Dystel, Goderich & Bourret LLC. Outside of working on her debut novel, Liz enjoys training for triathlons and working in the pottery studio. You can find her on Instagram and TikTok @elizglass.