of relief that my dad was too broken-down to serve as a pallbearer. Not a father’s job to bury his son.
I knew he felt awful. Elias and Candy always swore I was the favorite, but my parents didn’t run like that. They loved Candy for being their daughter and a good Christian. I was the smart one who was going to break out and make it in the world. But Elias, he was what they’d envisioned when they first got married and tried to picture what their son would be like. Happy to be their kid, happy in New Hampshire, aspiring to do okay in school, and serve his country, and come home to marry some local girl and keep the land in the family. Even after he came back as screwed up as he was, they never imagined for a second that he would deviate from the larger plan. Nobody thought he would except maybe Jill, and that was just because Jill didn’t understand what Elias was supposed to do.
I stepped back from the casket, folded my hands and looked at her across the aisle. Her eyes were dry, and she hoisted TJ to her shoulder with a competent shrug that was so like her. I didn’t know how she could be so goddamn stoic. Once she finally got it through her mind that Elias was really dead, she slipped right back into her cool, quiet, unflappable Jill mode. Normally I admired her for being like that, but now it made me uneasy as hell. I couldn’t shake the feeling that behind it all was a big “I told you so.”
Past her shoulder stood a solid, heavily built man in a dark suit, close enough that he could touch her. I glanced at his face and almost reeled back from pure shock. The guy was my uncle Randy. Right away I looked at my father to see if he had noticed, but my dad only stared at the ground, shrunken inside his dark blue suit. Dodge would be the real measure of whether Randy’s presence would be a problem. But Dodge was standing right next to me, and there was no way I could check his expression without being obvious.
Candy’s minister was conducting the service. Once we got to the sermon part he got all evangelical, which I thought was distasteful. The rest of my family wasn’t like that, and Elias hated that kind of shit. But it brought Candy to tears, big gulping sobs that had her clutching at tissues and her sons and Dodge as if she was slipping on a patch of ice. I knew that her mind divided up the world into two neat categories of “saved” and “damned,” and it had to be crumbling with the effort of figuring out where Elias fit. Cognitive dissonance, my professors would have called it. She had loved Elias with a depth I doubted any of us could quite match. I felt a shiver in my shoulders when I wondered how she would reconcile the brother she loved with something as blasphemous as suicide.
Without being obvious, I looked again at Randy. I hadn’t seen him in ten years, maybe twelve, but he didn’t look any different now than he had when I was a kid. That was crazy, because my father’s brother was younger than him by only eight years, and in the past decade my dad had aged at what seemed like double the speed of ordinary time. But Randy was still fit and dark haired, with the cowboy glower I remembered well. I tried to decide whether it was nice that he had come to pay his respects, or so insulting that somebody ought to shoot him where he stood.
The bugler was playing “Taps.” Two of the soldiers in uniform folded the flag, and one handed it to my mom. The casket was lowered into the grave and the mourners began to throw handfuls of dirt onto it, but by now I felt weary of the whole thing. I wanted to go home and curl up on the sofa with TJ on my chest. Drink a beer. Watch the Patriots play the Steelers.
I breathed a sigh through my teeth and waited it out. As I took my place in the line to thank the mourners, I watched Randy shake hands with the minister, speak to him briefly and then saunter back up the hill without a word to any of us. At that point I figured