The Year We Left Home (15 page)

There was a gaggle of Peerson grandkids in the room, among them Bradley Goodell, who was her second cousin or second cousin once removed or something. He saw her and pretended he hadn’t. She was relieved and pretended she didn’t see him right back as she left the room.

Last winter she’d had sex with Bradley in the basement rec room of some kid’s house, a party where the stereo kept playing “How Deep Is Your Love” over and over because it was stuck, and everybody else was passed out upstairs except for one guy who was passed out in a corner. Torrie lay beneath Bradley on the itchy tweed sofa, wondering how long it was supposed to take and if it was supposed to feel good or something. They hadn’t said ten words to each other before, during, or after, and nothing since, and that was just fine with her.

God, a Bee Gees song! Could anything have been worse?

She found Anita and Matthew in the coatroom, where Matthew was running in and out among the coats, hiding and tangling himself in them. Anita looked frazzled. “Tag team,” Torrie said. “I got him.”

“He keeps knocking everything off the hangers, but it makes him happy.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll put them back, go on.”

“Thanks,” Anita said, hurrying off to where the coffin action was.

Torrie told Matthew that she was going to wrap him in a coat and then sit on him, which made him shriek and flail harder. She followed in his wake, picking up coats and stray gloves and hats. She wasn’t sure she got everything back where it belonged, but figured people could get it sorted out at the next funeral.

She looked up. Her Uncle Ray stood at the door, watching them. “Hey,” he said. “That looks like fun, Matthew.”

Matthew, of course, wasn’t expected to answer, but she was. “Hi Uncle Ray. Yeah, he’s a wild man.”

Uncle Ray stood with his arms folded across his chest, smiling. He was the nice uncle. He was the one who dressed up as Santa Claus at
Christmas parties, the one who always had the best Halloween lights and spooky bats and skeletons. “Did you need your coat?” Torrie asked him.

“Naw, hon, I was just thinking, Audrey never lets us forget she had the first grandkid.”

“Oh. Yeah.” Torrie shrugged. It wasn’t a topic she was anxious to discuss. “Yeah, Mom goes ape . . . she’s nuts about him.”

“All things come to he who waits,” Ray said, which she guessed was supposed to mean that sooner or later one of his kids would get it together. The girls, you had to figure. It wasn’t considered polite for people to ask about her cousin Chip anymore; he was assumed to be in murky, faraway circumstances, living a life of unspeakable and thrilling degradation.

The noise from the entryway welled up just then, more people arriving, and Torrie thought it was a good excuse to leave. She hauled Matthew up underneath his arms and walked him forward, his feet on hers. “Beep beep,” she said to Ray, who was still in her way.

He patted her hair and then her shoulder, a clumsy pawing. “When you’re older you’ll understand how great it is, a time like this, to see a young one running around.” He turned and walked away into the milling crowd.

She hated it when people said, When you’re older, blah blah blah. It was like a present held up just out of your reach, one you probably didn’t want anyway.

Ryan got his hair cut for the funeral service. He turned up the next day at lunchtime with the ponytail shorn three inches above his collar. It wasn’t exactly short—was still some bushy stuff over his ears and in the front—but it was the shortest any of them had seen it in years.

“I bet they had a good time with you down at Hookstra’s,” Torrie’s father said. Hookstra’s was where elderly barbers in white smocks attended to men wearing seed-company windbreakers, and the radio was always tuned to the farm station.

“There were a lot of jokes about sending me down to the beauty college,” Ryan said. He seemed pleased with himself, turning his head from side to side as if to catch the breeze on his newly exposed skin.

“Why now?” Torrie asked. “You could have gotten it cut in Chicago.” It irritated her that he’d made himself into a spectacle twice. First when he’d shown up looking like a total dirtbag—like some out-of-it, granola-eating, clueless dirtbag—and now, when everybody would see the difference and talk about it.

“I dunno, I just felt like getting it cut. Sign of respect.” He shrugged. “It’s a funeral, you know?”

“It’s not like Aunt Martha’s going to notice.”

Their mother came in then. She was wearing her church clothes and she smelled powerfully of perfume. “Victoria, I don’t want to hear you say anything that ugly ever again. I think your brother looks very handsome.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“Yeah, so does he.” Torrie was still mad at him for getting on her case, for doing their mother’s bidding. Like he cared in the first place. She’d eaten a whole bag of Doritos last night. She felt fat, soft, totally disgusting.

“What is the matter with you?” Her mother’s made-up eyebrows gave her a menacing look. “Would you please try to remember that today is about honoring a woman who loved you very much and was never anything but kind to you and suffered terribly—”

“Maybe I should get all my hair cut off too.”

Her mother sat down heavily on a kitchen chair. “I can’t stand it. She was my sweetest, sweetest little baby girl. And now she hates me.”

“Come on, Mom. Nobody hates you.” Nobody ever knew what to do when her mother cried. It was the worst feeling, as if you’d killed somebody’s dog with your car.

“All I ever did was love you. All of you.”

“God, Mom.”

“None of that talk,” her father said. “You are way, way out of line, miss.”

Torrie shook her head and tried to catch Ryan’s eye:
See? This is what I was talking about.
But he wouldn’t look at her. He was on their side now.

“Would you like to stay home by yourself?” her father asked. “Because that’s exactly where you’re heading.”

Would she ever. If only they’d let her. If only she wouldn’t have to sit in the backseat with Ryan, holding casseroles for the supper, while her father drove too slow and everybody in the car was mad at her. Instead she muttered No, she wouldn’t, and waited until her father was in the bathroom and her mother and Ryan were busy with something in the den. She grabbed her coat and keys and yelled that she had to go pick up Michelle and she’d see them at the service.

She drove to the Casey’s on the north edge of town, filled the car with gas, ordered a whole sausage pizza and ate it in the parking lot.

Once she was pretty sure enough time had passed, she set out for the funeral, still dawdling. Scouting the highway ahead and behind her, since she didn’t want to encounter her parents’ car on the road. It wasn’t raining but the farm fields were soggy and soaked, the crops disked down for winter, and the sky looked as if it could go either way, clear off or dump more water. There had been a phone conversation she wasn’t meant to overhear, her mother speculating with someone about whether they could get a grave dug in this kind of weather.

When she thought about being buried in mud, it made the pizza in her stomach turn into something hot and crawling.

She considered not going. Just driving around for a while and then heading back home, making some excuse later. Her mother would worry about her the whole time, which would serve her right for all her stupid guilt trips. They might even send somebody out to look for her. Torrie turned west instead of heading straight toward Hardy, trying out the idea. She wanted to make them worry, but it would be a seriously bratty thing to do at a funeral, which after all was about somebody dying, even if they had been really old.

She drove five miles or more into the country, deciding what to do. There was absolutely nowhere to go, and nothing to see except a
treeline off in the distance. Hopeless. But when she tried to jog north again the road veered and curved, and a thick, ugly cloud cover was edging up on her left, and it scared her a little, because her mother’s car sometimes stalled out or acted up, and when she finally got back to the main road she was glad and drove faster to make up time.

Hardy was one of those little towns built up around a grain elevator and a railroad siding. There was a crossroads, and an office and scales for the elevator, and always a few fertilizer trucks parked in a gravel lot, and a tavern that opened at 5:00 a.m. to serve coffee and sweet rolls, and a hardware and feed store containing a post office. Also a garage with a tractor-tire service, a hutch that sold hot dogs and ice cream cones in the summer, and three streets of houses, some of which doubled as beauty parlors or insurance agencies, places you could get knives sharpened, furniture reupholstered. The brick church was the biggest building in town.

She was really late now, the parking lot was full, and she thought that even from outside she could hear organ music. Her mother was going to kill her.

A side door led into the vestibule and she slipped in, hoping she’d be unnoticed. No such luck. One of the ushers, some dressed-up farmer, frowned at her and handed her a program. With his pointing finger, he indicated that there was room in the choir loft.

Torrie found a seat on the end, next to a row of little kids being minded by a couple of mothers. Looking down, she saw her family sitting in two rows in the middle of the sanctuary. Even Jeff was there. He was on one side of Matthew and Anita on the other, Torrie guessed to make sure he behaved, although it was also possible they just didn’t like sitting next to each other. Her parents and Ryan were in front of them, with Blake and the skanky girlfriend on the end of the row. She didn’t think they were going to look up, unless she launched a paper airplane at them.

The coffin was as big as a boat. Peerson coffins usually were. At least they’d closed the lid, and at least she’d missed the part where everybody took their last looks before the service. One more chance
for people to stare at you. When you were dead, you had absolutely no privacy.

The organ reached the wheezy end of whatever dirge it had been playing and struck a new note. The pastor entered and signaled them to rise. Torrie grabbed a hymnal. She was glad for the little kids so she wouldn’t have to share. “How Great Thou Art,” the program said, and she pretended to look it up and sing along. Instead she let her gaze travel around the sanctuary, hoping to find anything that would let her eyes disengage from her brain. The stained-glass windows were the old-fashioned kind, everything done in bright colors and heavy leading. Here was an angel blowing a heavenly horn, Jesus the Good Shepherd, a dove descending, an open book representing The Word.

The hymn ended. They all sat down and composed themselves for the boring parts. “Let us pray,” the pastor instructed them.

“Dear Lord, we gather here today to celebrate a new voice in thy heavenly choir, your faithful servant Martha Ann, who comes to you freed from her earthly labors and sorrows, glorified in thy presence. Even as we mourn her loss, let us not forget that in thy eternal kingdom there is no loss, only the peace that passeth all understanding. So that our tears will be dried and we shall be comforted by the promise of thy eternal mercy and goodness and love, we ask it in Jesus Christ’s name, amen.”

“Amen,” the congregation responded. One of Martha’s grandsons, a nervous-looking boy of twelve, got up to read the Scripture, from Matthew, the part about not knowing the day or the hour when the Son of Man would return, which was meant to remind you that you could keel over at any time and stand before the Throne. Kind of an odd choice for Aunt Martha, who everybody knew was headed that way sooner rather than later.

They stood again to sing “Just as I Am,” and Torrie took this occasion to examine the program she’d been given. There was a picture of Martha and Norm on the front. They probably hadn’t been able to find any picture of Martha all by herself. On the inside of the cover was an inspirational verse:

God hath not promised skies always blue,
Flower-strewn pathways all our lives through.

God hath not promised sun without rain,
Joy without sorrow, peace without pain.

But God hath promised strength for the day,
Rest for the labor, light for the way,

Grace for the trials, help from above,
Unfailing sympathy, undying love.

Now that really sucked. As far as Torrie was concerned, it was telling you to grin and bear it, put up with whatever miserable circumstances life threw at you, and you’d get your reward in heaven. No way.

It was time for the homily. The pastor waited for everybody to get settled. Torrie was pretty sure she heard Matthew pipe up in the middle of the silence. Looking down, she saw Anita drawing him onto her lap. Good luck with that. Once he got squirmy, he stayed that way.

“Dear friends,” said the pastor, using his ordinary, sermon voice, not the exalted one he reserved for prayers. “I don’t have to tell any of you what a good Christian Martha was. There’s probably no one here today who wasn’t touched by her faith, whether that shone forth in the love and care she gave to her family, her tireless work on behalf of the Ladies’ Aid, or her fortitude during her last illness.”

A sudden rattle against the windows and everybody looked up. A squall of rain hit hard, along with a high, dreary wind. It made you think of ghosts.
The wind howls like a hammer, the night blows cold and rainy / My love she’s like some raven at my window with a broken wing.

The pastor had to raise his voice to be heard. “She loved her family, she loved her dear husband, Norm. Can we even begin to imagine the joy of their heavenly reunion? Their two souls, no longer parted by death, reunited in glory. Oh, we do not mourn, we rejoice for them! She loved her church, and she loved her community. But today I’d like
to talk about another community, that of our fellowship in Christ. A community of faith, a fellowship of believers.”