The rain started just before they lowered Thomas’s casket, which felt like something he would have found mildly inconvenient and faintly funny. He was that kind of man. If the roof leaked, he put a bucket under it and called it a temporary indoor water feature.
If the car wouldn’t start, he named it Gerald and negotiated with the engine. If five children showed up in his life from five different directions without any of them carrying his blood, he called them his and went looking for a library book about braiding hair. I stood at the graveside with my hands locked together and watched the casket disappear inch by inch into the wet ground.
My shoes were sinking into the cemetery grass. The rain had come in fast and none of us had brought umbrellas because Thomas would have said umbrellas were for people who hadn’t made peace with weather. Beside me, Michael kept clearing his throat in the particular way he does when he is trying to keep something inside that wants very much to come out.
Mara had both arms wrapped around herself, staring at the hole in the ground with an expression I recognized from every hard moment we had all shared since we were old enough to understand that Thomas had chosen us deliberately, each of us, and that deliberate was the most important word. Noah stood to my left looking straight ahead with the compressed stillness of a man who has two young children at home and has spent the last several years learning to hold himself together in front of witnesses. I could see what it was costing him.
I closed my eyes. Thank you, Dad. Thank you for the school lunches with the notes folded into the napkins that I was always slightly embarrassed about until I wasn’t, until the day in sixth grade when a girl asked me why my dad wrote me notes and I said because he does and I felt something in my chest that I would not have been able to name at eleven but know now to call pride.
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