Chapter 20 Chapter Twenty
It didn’t take very long for the moment to be over.
I could see him trying and failing to say something, maybe an apology or to say “Sorry about your father” but that never happened.
His words only got as far as his jaw before they stopped, and for one second we were just looking at each other at my father's graveside with the wind moving through the grass around us and his arm still solid at my back.
Soon my mother appeared at my elbow to take me away, he passed me over to her carefully, made sure I had my footing, and stepped back.
"Thank you," my mother said to him, her voice rough from crying.
He dipped his head once. Then he was gone, his hands shoved into his pockets as he disappeared through the last of the crowd. I didn’t see him again for the rest of the day.
Funerals suck.
I felt sick for thinking that, but I was starting to get a little tired of it all, and I just wanted to go home. It was the weekend so at least I wouldn’t have to stay at the Dawsons’ mansion, and I was grateful for that.
Many of Dad’s old friends held on to say goodbye to me. Douglas, my father's old foreman, found me near the end. He took both my hands in his and looked at me with his eyes red and his mouth working and nothing coming out, and I could only nod in response.
Raymond stayed till nearly everyone was gone. He and my mother stood together by the grave for a long time, not talking, just standing there side by side, while I sat on a nearby bench and let them have their moment.
Mrs Martinez was last, as she always was at everything, the last to arrive and the last to leave and somehow always exactly where she needed to be.
She sat next to me on the bench without asking, reached into her coat pocket, and pressed a small worn gold cross into my palm.
"Your father," she said. "He was a good man."
She patted my hand, then got up and left.
I held the cross and looked at the grave for one more minute and then I went to find my mother.
Neither of us spoke much on the drive home.
It was just my mom, which was what I'd wanted in the first place.
That our grief be private without any convoy, or any other people really. Only Mom behind the wheel and me in the passenger seat and the city outside going quiet and grey in the late afternoon.
She cried silently for the first part of the drive, just as she'd been crying all day, tears just falling while she kept her eyes on the road, thinking maybe I wouldn’t notice.
But I did, I reached over and put my hand on her shoulder and she covered it with hers for a moment and we left it at that.
The streets got familiar around us as we drove closer to our house. I saw the corner store, the motel with the missing letter on the sign and the long straight road that meant we were nearly home.
"I fell asleep on you last night, Lena. I’m sorry, I was just so…" she said.
"That’s okay mom, I understand. Besides, you needed the rest." I sighed.
"But we were supposed to talk."
"We've got time." I looked out at the passing houses. "We've got all weekend, don’t we?"
She was quiet for a moment. "That speech you gave today. Your father would have stood up in the middle of that church and started applauding." Her voice was hoarse but steady. "You know that, right? He would have absolutely embarrassed you."
I smiled despite myself. "He would have cried and then denied it."
"Cried and denied it and then quoted the whole thing back word for word at Christmas dinner for the next ten years." She shook her head slowly. "He was so proud of you, baby. Every single day."
I looked at my hands in my lap, my heart full of guilt. I wasn’t sure anymore if that was still true.
While I was still trying to come up with a good response, she suddenly asked, "So what's the story with the Dawson boy?"
I looked at her with confusion. "Huh? What do you mean? There is no story."
"Are you sure? His mother says he never goes to events she invites him to, and yet he came for the funeral. Did you ask him to? Does he listen to you? Why does he listen to you?
I started to shrink a little into the car seat as her questions multiplied, “It's no big deal mom, his whole family came."
"And when he caught you like that…" She kept her eyes on the road but I could see the corner of her mouth twitch.
"I'm not blind, Lena, and I'm not trying to make something out of nothing. I just want to know what I'm looking at here. So please tell me the truth."
"You're looking at nothing," I said, grossed out at the thought.
Jace and I? Why would anyone in their right mind ever have feelings for a bully? Yuck.
Besides, he would never go for someone like me, and I felt the same way about him too.
"We don't get along at all. He’s mean and foul-mouthed and he always tries to make fun of me and… he's really not a good person, Mom. Half the time I genuinely can't stand him and the other half I'm just trying to do my job without either of us saying something we can't take back. I hate him, and he hates me.”
I turned back to the window, biting my lip nervously, "That’s all it is, okay? Now please drop it."
"Okay," she said.
"Mom. I’m serious."
"I said okay." She glanced over at me briefly. "I'll say one thing and then I'll leave it alone."
"Please just leave it alone now."
"I want to say something first, because I think it’s important. The Dawson family has a lot going on beneath the surface," she said, her tone soft but firm.
"Mrs Dawson is one of the best women I know and I trust her completely but the situation in that house, the father, the pressure, all of it, it's so dysfunctional. I’ve spent years working for that family, and I can tell you, they don’t get along at all.”
She swerved a little to the right to make way for a faster driver, “And you are in a vulnerable place right now whether you want to admit it or not." She said calmly. "So just be careful where you put your heart. That's all."
I didn't answer because there wasn't anything to say to that. She wasn't wrong. She was also not as right as she thought she was, but explaining the difference would mean having a hard conversation and I wasn’t in my right mind for one of those.
So I looked out the window and let it go.
Soon enough we turned onto our street, but as soon as we did, I immediately noticed that something felt very, very off.
Mom parked on the curbside, and we sat together just a second longer before getting out.
The front door opened onto a hallway that didn't look like ours anymore. Dad's jackets were gone from the hooks, the side table was gone, and the wall of family photographs that had been there for my entire life had been stripped down to bare plaster with the nails still in it.
“Oh God, Mom. I think we’ve been robbed.” I called out to her behind me.
I walked into the living room in horror to find boxes everywhere. The shelves were half emptied, and the mantle had been cleared off.
And sitting in my father's favourite armchair, with his ankle crossed over his knee and his eyes on me the moment I walked through the door, was the strange man from the funeral, giving me an inconvenienced look.
My mother came in behind me and set her bag down on the floor because there was nowhere else to put it, and the sound of it was very loud in the stripped quiet of the room.
"Lena, you remember your uncle Gerald," she said, she announced, "He's going to be staying with us for a while."