Transportation
The hardest part of my father’s funeral was not the burial. I had braced for the burial. I had spent the sleepless nights before it imagining the coffin lowering into the West Virginia clay, and I had wept myself dry over that image in advance, so that when the moment actually came I stood at the graveside strangely hollow, watching the thing I had already grieved. No, the hardest part was watching my sister Bridget leave before the last folding chair had even been collected from the grass.
She climbed into Mason’s black SUV, that gleaming expensive machine so out of place among the mud-spattered pickups of our father’s mourners, and she never once looked back at me. No hug. No are you okay. Not even the strained, wordless nod that people give each other when grief has made ordinary conversation impossible. She simply got into the passenger seat, and Mason shut her door for her with the soft heavy sound that expensive doors make, and they drove toward the iron gates of the little cemetery and were gone. I stood there in my black dress in the thin autumn sunlight, watching the dust settle back onto the gravel behind them, and I felt the last thread of whatever had once connected me to my only sister quietly snap.
I want to explain something about Bridget and me before I go any further, because it matters for everything that came after. We had not always been strangers. When we were girls, before our mother died, we had been close in the fierce clannish way of sisters, sharing a bedroom and a language of half-sentences and inside jokes that no adult could follow. But somewhere in our twenties, a distance had opened between us, and the strange thing was that it had opened not because of anything I did but because of the way our father seemed, gradually and without explanation, to sort us. Bridget became the daughter he trusted. I became the one he kept at arm’s length. It was never stated, never made explicit, but it was as real as weather. Bridget got invited to dinners I only heard about afterward. Bridget’s husband Mason somehow knew more about our father’s business than I, his own daughter, ever did. When Dad’s health began to fail, it was Bridget the doctors called, Bridget who held the medical power of attorney, Bridget who stood at the center of everything while I hovered at the edges wondering what I had done to be placed there. I had learned, over the years, not to ask why. Asking why only produced that particular pained look on my father’s face, the look of a man who wants to explain something he has decided he cannot, and I had grown tired of putting it there.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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