The day we buried Grandma Lizzy, the church hall smelled like lilies, rain soaked wool, and the lemon polish she used on every wooden surface in her house. That smell was so particular to her that for a moment, standing beside her framed photograph with her handkerchief balled in my fist, I almost believed she had walked through the room ahead of us and wiped down the pews herself, one last time, because she could not stand the idea of people gathering in her honor in a room that had not been properly tended to. I stood near the front with my back straight and my eyes dry because Grandma had taught me that grief and performance are different things, and the people who need to see you cry are rarely the people who will help you when the crying stops.
The lace of her handkerchief bit into my palm. Around me, mourners whispered soft things they had never found the courage to say when she was alive, the way people do at funerals, complimenting the dead with the urgency of students who have left their essay until the morning it is due. Then I saw my parents.
They stood at the back of the hall in expensive black coats, heads bowed just low enough to look respectful and not low enough to mean it. My father had his hands clasped in front of him with the solemn posture of a man who has watched other people grieve on television and is doing his best to reproduce the stance. My mother stood beside him with her face arranged into an expression of delicate sorrow, the kind that requires a mirror to perfect and a audience to sustain.
The same two people who left me on Grandma’s porch when I was eight years old. The same two people who missed fevers, school assemblies, birthdays, report cards, and every quiet night when I sat at the kitchen table doing homework with two empty chairs across from me and pretended their absence did not have weight. My name is Samantha.
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