Desiring Dylan - Suzanne Jenkins Page 0,8

to be home alone and watch the game in peace that afternoon. Grief would hit soon enough.

“Your mother will probably be offended,” Betty had said, referring to Kenny’s only grandparent. “She was looking forward to coming back to the house for the meal. She wanted to look at old photos.”

“She can watch the game with me, then, if she wants to be here. I’m watching the game.”

Landon had sorted through her closet, looking for an appropriate outfit for the funeral. She had a black two-piece dress with a matching coat. She’d wear flats in the rain. Walking on grass in heels was unappealing.

Looking in the mirror on the way to the shower, her hair was a big problem. The blond had been Kenny’s idea. She did it to tease him, and they ended up liking it. But now, looking at it brought her to tears. It would have to go. Fortunately, she had a box of dark brown dye in the linen closet. She had time to dye her hair.

She’d called for a car for ten, and she grabbed her purse and an umbrella and left the house, waiting on the covered stoop. The car pulled up right on time, and she ran to it without opening her umbrella. The cold rain felt good. Thinking maybe she was coming down with something, chills went through her body. The physical response to grief was beginning.

The funeral would be held at a church in the Art Museum area. Kenny had loved the old stone building dating from sixteen hundred. In the clouds and rain, light shone through the stained-glass windows. The car pulled up to the portico, and she told the driver to stay put. She’d get out on her own. Unfamiliar faces waited outside. With her head down, she made her way through the crowd. The change in hair color wasn’t going to be an issue for anyone but the band and their close friends. Few others knew her, and if they did, they wouldn’t recognize her.

Her parents and sisters, Cece and Adelaide, had come in from New Jersey and were sitting in back, waiting for her.

She avoided the reception line, but did give Betty a wave. She nodded, understanding. Rather than sit up front with the family, she wanted to be in back with her mother and father. The pain was unbearable. Anything to enhance it would be avoided, or she’d flee.

The next hour dragged by. The lead guitarist gave the eulogy. It was nice, but incomplete because he only knew the musician Kenny. Landon realized she was in the grouping of people who knew the recent Kenny, as a famous person.

Then Ken’s brother, John, got up and talked about the Kenny that the rest of the mourners knew, introducing the guy who’d bought his friend a tux for their high school choir performances when the friend couldn’t afford it, using money he’d saved from teaching children the piano. The story was full of amusing anecdotes, and the audience laughed more than once.

Finally, it was over, they were going to the cemetery. Her family wasn’t going to the burial, so she kissed and hugged them goodbye.

Kirk and Betty invited her to come with them in the limousine, but she declined, needing more than ever to be alone. If she could have avoided the burial, she would have but couldn’t be that selfish. The cemetery experience was brutal. It was a beautiful wooded place with towering evergreens and lush green grass, truly a place of respite in the city. Beautiful granite monuments, angels and saints and other spiritual icons as lovely as works of art, took her breath away, and the tears came again. She wasn’t sure all the crying was for Kenny alone. The grief made all the beauty and pain she saw that day more intense.

Sitting in the front row with the family as they lowered the casket of her dead lover into the ground wasn’t an option. She wanted to be in back, with the standing crowd, her head bowed, eyes closed, unseeing. During the burial, the rain beat down on the canvas canopy, obscuring the words of the minister, for which Landon would be forever grateful.

The winch creaked something awful as the casket began to descend into the hole, and grimacing, she happened to look to her left and saw Dylan standing with an umbrella at the black wrought-iron fence. He must have come off call; he was still in scrubs. The timing couldn’t have been worse,