44 Alice Kara Sinar Alice had watched the casket lowered into the earth in the mists of Friday morning. It had been a small casket, much too small. Other small things were running around the cemetery, clicking in their black shoes that were almost certainly too fancy for them: the children that Julia would have played with, the children who had no idea why they were here today. She envied them in their youthful ignorance—an innocence that would never be hers again. She lifted her eyes to meet his gaze from across the plot, the wind tugging her hair in front of her eyes to obscure the image of the offending person. Good, she did not want to see him anyway. She was vaguely aware that people were shaking her hand and embracing her; she only assumed they were saying how sorry they were. She was sorry, sorry indeed. She saw their mouths moving, not knowing what the jumbled sounds were that tumbled out past crooked teeth and atrocious lipstick. “Thank you for the pies, Mrs. Partridge.” She had to stay until the end—it was unavoidable. These people didn’t understand—they couldn’t. They had come to St. Matthew’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, wrapped in vestiges of black, looking more ready for a dinner party than a funeral. They had sipped punch and wagged their heads as they examined the glossy photographs. “A shame,” they said, “a tragedy.” They had eaten the grocery store cake with the friendly letters and attempted to look appropriately morose. They would return to their homes and their families, shed their false black scales, and soon this morning would be a memory as distant from their conscience as the tip of Everest. The pastor, Antony Darling, stood stalwartly by her side. His black garments were friendlier than the rest, and his face, rosy from the cold, was effortlessly sincere. He helped her to shake gloved hands and smile stiffly at the mourners. If you had asked her, Alice would have described him as one of only three people that she could call her friend. He offered to drive her home in his appropriately black car. She told him that she would think about it. As they walked back to the parking lot, Alice noted with a measure of disappointment that the frost-tipped grass did not crunch beneath her feet. She wanted things to crunch beneath her feet—or perhaps she just wanted to move them. “It’s all right, I’ll walk.” She had forgotten her gloves, and the pockets of her coat were useless to her, thanks to Mrs. Partridge and the cherry pies she was obliged to carry home. Alice had grown pale and thin in the past weeks; her long black coat hung loosely about her frame and some passersby might wonder if she had
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NzkyNTY=