The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,110

his face ended my suspense. We were there to discuss Adam.

Bertie sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. Joe poured two more cups and set them in the pool of yellow morning light on the checkered tablecloth. He turned a chair around and straddled its back. Neither of them met my eye.

When Joe took a deep breath to begin, I held up my hand to stop him and both of them looked at me, waiting. I gripped my coffee cup. “I think my family needs a private viewing before the funeral,” I said.

Joe nodded. Bertie lit a cigarette and leaned back, her jaw flexing.

I continued, “No surprises this time.” I shook my head and bit my lip. I thought of that force in Adam, that horrible cry. I knew no way to hold that at bay.

Joe patted my hand. “That would be good, sis.”

I began to cry.

“Damn good.” Bertie sucked on her cigarette and went to the stove to fill her cup again.

I wiped my face. “But I do want us to be able to say good-bye to Momma. All of us.”

Bertie turned at the stove and gave me her hard, quizzical look.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll take care of it. I’ll talk to the funeral home and the preacher. Arrange for us to go to the church early in the morning and view the body. It’ll just be me and the girls at the funeral,” I said.

Joe rubbed my hand. “Don’t worry about it. It’ll be okay, Evelyn.”

Bertie shook her head. “I don’t want Momma’s funeral ruined. I don’t want Adam—”

“Bertie! She’s agreeing!” Joe shushed her.

Silence followed. Bertie stood up and cleared the table, clattering our coffee cups into the sink.

I blew my nose. “One other thing. Something I want.” I waited for Bertie to finish with the dishes. I wanted to make sure I had her attention. “I don’t want to see Frank at the funeral. Just thinking about him . . .” And for a second I saw Frank, his blank animal stare as he looked down at Jennie on the ground.

Joe nodded several times. “Sure, sure.”

Bertie shrugged. “Keeping Frank out of a church will not be a problem.”

“Mary’s never liked him. Says he gives her the willies,” Joe added.

I dreaded telling Adam about my family’s plans to keep him away from the funeral of the only mother he’d ever known. I did so cowardly, in bed, in the darkness.

“That’s a good solution. I can’t guarantee that it won’t happen again,” he responded.

“You don’t have to go at all, if you don’t want to, Adam.”

He lay beside me, taut.

Since Jennie’s death, he’d held himself back in everything, even with me. Days went by without intimacy. Then he would turn silently to me in the dark, not out of love but out of need, and there was a fierceness to his touch that overwhelmed me. We went at each other as if the hounds of hell were after us. Or we were the hounds themselves. The act was not lovemaking, but grief-making, a new beast manifest, without tenderness, raw and exhausting, throwing us into black, dreamless sleep. His sweet tones seemed to have died with Jennie. His climax came with a simple shuddering moan.

But that night, after I told him about the arrangements for Momma’s funeral, I turned him on his back and began to touch him with our former delicacy. He took my hand and moved it off of his chest.

“No,” I said, pinned his wrist to the bed, and began tracing his breastbone with my other hand. I touched every part of him, my hands open against his smoothness. He did not move again to stop me, but lay rigid before me.

I knew him well. And I took him. Eventually, he pressed up to meet me, and his voice rose as sharp and dark as it had been at Jennie’s funeral, though, thankfully, far less intense and much briefer. My breastbone and temples rang painfully. Afterward, we did not sleep but lay next to each other in the sudden cool of our sweat.

We decided that Adam and I would skip the wake and he would have his own private viewing of Momma’s body early on the morning of the funeral.

I woke in the middle of the night before the funeral, Adam alert beside me.

“We could go now. We don’t have to wait for daylight,” I said.

We began to dress. I went to the closet, but Adam reached for his dungarees. “She wouldn’t mind,” he said. “And