three
nora
God ignored my prayers.
Sophie’s was the first face I saw when we walked into the First United Methodist Church, Lynchfield. She stood at the end of her pew, half in, half out, as if making sure I would see her for my entire trek down the red-carpeted aisle. Sophie Russell was still the most beautiful woman in the room, damn her. She, Charlie and Logan sat in the pew directly behind the family and, by some freak of coincidence, or spectacular planning on Sophie’s part, she was directly behind me when I sat down.
I heard nothing of the service. There was music, I suppose. “Amazing Grace,” most likely. A eulogy where someone stood up and talked about what a great man my father was. The twenty-third Psalm. “In the Garden.” I’d buried enough friends to know without having to pay attention. I stared at my pop’s closed casket, but my mind’s eye was on Sophie Russell, sitting right behind me. I felt her eyes boring into the back of my head. I even heard her breathing. I smelled her perfume. Remembering Sophie as I’d last seen her eighteen years ago, eyes downcast, cheeks wet from crying, apologizing over and over. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
I tried to square the Sophie of my past with the woman sitting behind me. Try as we might, none of us could stop the march of time and, though everyone in Lynchfield assured me of the contrary, I knew I was no different. Sophie was still striking but, the closer I got to her when walking down the aisle, I saw that the years showed on her more than I expected. Her face had the hollow look of someone who’d lost a lot of weight in a short amount of time. Was she sick at the idea of seeing me, or was her illness genuine? Maybe the headache excuse hadn’t been a ruse, after all.
Someone behind me sniffed. I turned my head to the side and listened. Sophie sniffed again, louder this time. Either Sophie was mourning my father more than any other person in the church or seeing me had been too much for her. I smiled and faced the front. Good.
Bored, I automatically reached for the Bible in the holder on the back of the pew and opened it up to the Book of Ruth, the closest story to a romance you will get in the Bible. The only book that seemed to have a happy ending. I’d read this book dozens of times during boring sermons. Sophie was partial to Esther, because she was a queen.
One particularly boring Sunday she wrote a note on the back of the service’s program: It doesn’t mention God at all.
?
Esther. The book. It doesn’t mention God at all.
I’d shrugged.
What does it say that my favorite book doesn’t mention God?
You’re definitely going to hell.
She rolled her eyes and scrubbed the line out with the little pencil. Then she thought better of it and wrote: I want to go to hell for something a lot more fun that reading Esther.
We’d both started giggling, which had earned us a stern look from the minister. How he could pinpoint us as the culprits when we sat so far back, I never knew. But, he always did. Maybe because we were the only two in the whole sanctuary who were having fun.
With twenty years of hindsight, my choice of Ruth, and Sophie’s choice of Esther, fit our personalities, and our relationship, pretty well: I, the motherless child, wanted to love and be loved; Sophie, the only child, wanted to be worshiped and revered. That sounds crueler to Sophie than I mean it to. Whatever her faults, and I’d chronicled many over the years, Sophie had always been kind and never made fun of anyone, especially not the kids who didn’t necessarily fit in Lynchfield. It was one of the reasons she’d been my best friend.
The service ended, and the family was paraded back up the aisle after the casket like show ponies. I pointedly kept my eyes on old man Mardell, who held the door open for us. His assistant ushered us into idling cars where we waited for the casket to be rolled into the hearse, and for those mourners who were attending the graveside service to scurry to their cars for the procession to the cemetery.
The Suburban windows were too dark to see in, but offered me the opportunity to watch the crowd. A fair few were laughing and backslapping, and no one looked terribly torn up. Sophie, Charlie and Logan were some of the last to emerge. Logan and Charlie, so close they were almost a single unit, with a gap between them and Sophie. After what appeared to be a terse exchange, Charlie and Logan walked off. Sophie watched them go before her eyes settled on my car window. She paused for a long moment and turned in the opposite direction of her family. The Suburban inched forward behind the hearse, and we kept pace with Sophie walking on the sidewalk until she stopped at the corner, and we drove on.
* * *
The good residents of Lynchfield and the surrounding area might not mourn my father’s passing, but that wouldn’t stop them from a good feed, and funeral receptions were nothing if not a chance to tie on the feedbag.
The food that had looked so good the day before held little appeal to me today. I made a round of the mourners, always angled away from the group to discourage deep conversations, until I found Dormer on the front porch with five other men who I should have known the names of but didn’t. I was more concerned with what was inside their red Solo cups than in the niceties of mourning the dead in a small town.
“Beer?” I asked, disappointed.
“Dormer’s just going easy because he’s the host, or so Emmadean says,” one of the men said. “All this gawpin’ gettin’ to ya, Nora?”
“A little. I was hoping this would be just family and close friends.”
“Well, I’ll be honest, you’re the prime attraction to ol’ Ray’s funeral. Nobody’s seen hide nor hair of you for so long, and everyone wants to know why.”
“Digger,” Dormer warned.
How did I not recognize Digger Stokes? I thought. His family had owned the Stokes Feed and Seed for a hundred and twenty years. It was the Saturday morning gathering place for the local farmers, and Digger had been one of Pop’s best sources of information on what was going on in the farm and ranch community for a hundred miles.
“Go getcha a beer,” Dormer said. “It’s in the green cooler in the laundry room.”
“Put it in a cup so as you don’t offend no one,” Digger said.
“I thought you were a deacon?” I asked.
“Precisely,” he said, toasting me with his red cup.
“Be right back.”
I was only stopped by three people on the way to the kitchen, a win any way you looked at it. I found the cooler, and as I bent down to lift the lid, I caught sight of the barn out the laundry room window. It hadn’t changed much, just a few rusty sheets of metal on the roof mixed with shiny new ones. Ray must not have had the scratch to fix it all in one go. A few chickens pecked at the ground, and one strutted into the dark barn. The chickens were new, but I bet nothing else had changed. I snatched a red Solo cup from the cooler, filled it halfway with ice, thumped the lid closed and snuck out the back door.