Elena
The church in Savannah was full. People from town, old neighbors, a few of my mother’s friends from the hospital where she had volunteered on Tuesday afternoons for the better part of a decade. There were women from her book club, a contingent from the historic preservation society she had joined after her health started declining, people I recognized and people I had never seen, all of them dressed in dark colors and carrying the particular stillness that congregates around a casket.
My stepfather, Thomas Brooks, stood near the front pew shaking hands with the measured warmth of a man running for office. Composed. Grateful for everyone’s prayers.
He offered the right expressions at the right intervals, brief grief, contained dignity, a hand pressed to the arm of each visitor as they moved through the line. He looked exactly the way a grieving husband was supposed to look, and I had been watching him do that my entire life without once questioning it. That was the strange thing about Thomas.
He never overdid it. He was always calibrated. I had flown in from Fort Liberty the night before on a red-eye with no sleep, gone straight from the airport to the funeral home, and changed into my Army dress uniform in a bathroom that smelled of cut flowers and industrial cleaner.
I hadn’t been back to Savannah in nearly a year. The Army keeps you occupied. That was the polite way to say it.
The honest way was that coming home had started to feel like something I needed to prepare for, and I had not always been willing to examine why. Father Raymond Hail had known my family for decades. Before he was assigned to the parish, he had served as a military chaplain overseas, which was how he had known my biological father.
Or so I had always been told. My father, Daniel Mercer, died in a boating accident on Lake Lanier when I was two years old. I had grown up with that story the way you grow up with a photograph on a shelf, present but untouchable, something you stop really looking at after a while.
The service ended the way these things always do. Organ music fading out. Folded hands.
A receiving line of people saying she was such a strong woman, and me nodding and thanking them while Thomas worked the other side of the room. That was when Father Hail stepped close enough that I could hear him over the ambient murmur of the sanctuary. “Captain Brooks,” he said quietly.
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