“Yes, ma’am.”
New Orleans, where her brother died on Tuesday, according to the funeral director. More questions Alice didn’t want to ask. She was too afraid of what the answers would be.
A church usher led the family to the front pew as the organ began “How Great Thou Art,” her brother’s favorite hymn, at least when she knew him.
Sweat glistened on the pastor’s forehead as he approached the podium. The same pastor who her brother had spent so much time imitating to her in church, laughing under their breath until Maura shushed them. The man had been old back then. It should be him in the coffin, Alice thought, before regretting it. She apologized in her head as he began with ten minutes of listing the family’s résumé in the church: Bible groups Maura led, fundraisers she organized, instruction she gave at Vacation Bible School, how “we wouldn’t have expected any less from a pastor’s daughter.” The pastor pronounced Richard a “true servant of God,” mainly because of the checks he signed, Alice imagined.
The pastor launched into a generic speech about “trusting God’s plan.” Alice sighed too loudly, and her mother shot her a look. She’d heard the same speech three times before at other church funerals. It had prompted her to volunteer to give the eulogy in the first place, so that her brother could have something personal. No matter what her words would cost her.
She tuned out and memorized the funeral pamphlet in her lap. Her brother stared at her from the photo as a teenager, holding the acoustic guitar she couldn’t separate from him in her memories. Underneath, July 16, 1968–August 27, 2007 stood out in cursive writing with his full name: Robinson Wesley Tate. He hated being called Robinson. Their mother named both him and Alice after literary classics, but he got the worst of it. Not that anyone would dare tease him in school.
“Now,” the pastor said. “Robinson’s sister, Alice, would like to say a few words. Alice…”
She scooted out of the row past her mother. The preacher placed his hand on Alice’s back and guided her to the podium, as if she might double over in grief, exhaustion, birth pains, or a mixture of all three. She straightened her dress, the largest of her maternity clothes, which had been stored in the deepest entrails of her house where they couldn’t mock her with the inadequacy of her misshapen uterus. The fabric smelled like attic with a hint of squirrel droppings.
“Thank you for that beautiful service, Pastor Perry,” Alice read from her paper. “On behalf of my family, I’d like to thank all of you for coming today and honoring my brother’s life.”
She skipped over the next line, which she’d found in a eulogy template online: Rob was a son, a brother… The list was supposed to go on…a chef or a father or a neighbor or a committed member of his community. “A child of God,” the website suggested, but that, she had no idea.
“Rob was my older brother. I was always the deputy and coconspirator in his adventures. In the summers, we spent a lot of time at our father’s warehouse, building things with all the empty boxes. Rob would start planning at Christmas. He would draw up a blueprint using butcher paper he took from school. Our friends would help, but he always put me in charge of the most important section. One year, we made Atlantis. Another year, the White House. They never looked much like the real thing, but we always had a lot of fun crawling through our creations.”
Alice chuckled awkwardly, remembering the seriousness he’d brought to the project, the tingling in her stomach as he assigned the roles, fearful for a second that he would forget her, and the swelling of pride when he assigned her the biggest part, like always.
Alice’s eyes found Walker watching her carefully from the second row, questioning. Was this the same brother Alice acted like wasn’t worth mentioning? The one she said she wasn’t close to?
A second too late, Meredith joined in with her own laughter to break the room’s silence. Alice looked back at her paper.
“Rob was creative and smart like that. When he was still in elementary school, our mother ordered a set of encyclopedias so that we could look things up for school. Rob would start a volume and read it like a book. One year, he read the entire B volume. It seemed like he knew about everything: how baseballs were made, bullets, Brazil, bees. I was young at the time and didn’t realize the pattern until he had moved on to D.”
She paused and attempted to make eye contact with a few people in the audience, like she’d learned in college in a required public speaking class. A lady from her mother’s tennis group gave her an encouraging smile from the third row. A man near the back snoozed with his head resting on the pew and his mouth wide open.
“I always felt safe with him, no matter how crazy his adventures got. In the house where we grew up, our closets were connected by a crawl space that I was small enough to go through. I got scared at night and would open the door and crawl through to find Rob in his own closet, reading or silently moving his fingers on his guitar with nothing but a flashlight. He let me sleep in his bed, staying with me until I fell asleep.”
She could still summon it, the sense of security she felt as she drifted off in Rob’s bed, her older brother still on the closet floor, quietly turning pages, the dog a few feet away.
She looked at her parents. Her father stared at his shoes. Her mother looked straight at her, not really seeing anything, with her head held a bit too high, probably regretting not pushing harder in her request to edit Alice’s speech. Maybe not letting her mother help had been a mistake, but she knew what would have happened if she had accepted the help. Rob would become Robinson; her real memories would be turned into the version her mother wanted to present to the world, the one that had never existed. Alice looked over the rest of the audience and willed one person to cry, so she wouldn’t have to.
“I had to take a lot of biology classes, and one of the first things you have to do is Punnett squares. A Punnett square determines the traits of offspring. For example, my parents both have brown eyes, but each have a recessive blue eye gene, so Rob got blue and I got brown. Since we learned of my brother’s passing, I’ve thought often about those squares. The truth is, I wouldn’t be who I am today—the ecologist, the mother, the friend—without him. My mother gave me her industriousness. My father gave me his levelheadedness. But I have Rob to thank for my passion, and for just a pinch of his rebellion.”
She laughed again nervously at the reference to how the audience probably perceived Rob—as a teenage troublemaker with uncut hair.
Without trying, her eyes bounced to Walker again. He stared at her, and she could read his face clearly, as she could when he was caught off guard. Their eyes met, and in an instant, he checked his expression, wiped it clear. But, she had seen it—hurt. Betrayal. She could see him realizing: Alice had been close to Rob. And she hadn’t told him any of the stories, any of this chapter of her life. She could see him deciding that the tension between them during the last week was more than pregnancy hormones and bad communication; it was the exposing of a decade-long lie.