At my husband’s funeral, my best friend cried more than I did. I noticed it the way you notice something that does not fit in a room. Not loud.
Not obvious. Just wrong in a way you cannot name right away. Gloria was sitting in the third row, which was already strange, because I had asked her to sit with me in the front.
I had saved a place for her beside Renee, close enough that I could have reached over and taken her hand if the service got too heavy. She told me, before the ushers began guiding people down the aisle, that she needed space to breathe. I did not question it.
Gloria had always been particular about things like that. After forty years of knowing her, I had learned which of her particularities to question and which ones to let pass. She did not like sitting with her back to a door.
She did not like anyone fussing over her when she was upset. She did not like being seen before she had decided what face she was wearing. Those were Gloria’s rules, and for most of our friendship I had treated them the way you treat the weather in Atlanta—something you plan around, not something you argue with.
But I watched her. Between greeting people and accepting hugs from Raymond’s colleagues, between nodding at things people said that I was not fully hearing, I watched her from the corner of my eye. I watched the way her shoulders shook, not dramatically, not the way some people cry when they want the whole church to know grief has entered the room, but in a small, contained way that made it worse.
She kept pressing one palm flat against her chest, as if she was trying to hold something in place. Her eyes never went directly to the casket. They landed slightly to the left of it, again and again, like looking straight at Raymond was more than she could do.
I filed it somewhere in the back of my mind and kept moving through the day the way you do when everyone is looking at you to see how a widow is supposed to behave. My name is Dorothy May Caldwell. Most people who know me call me Dot.
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