Miller's Valley - Anna Quindlen Page 0,14

if anyone in my whole family had a sense of when to shut up.

“We got a whole barn full of cows,” my mother yelled as she pushed past me. “Milk them yourself.”

There was nothing but silence that night through the heating vent. My mother wasn’t talking to my father, and neither of them was talking to Tommy, who went to Donald’s grandmother’s funeral with one of his friends instead of with us. Every once in a while we had to stop the truck so one of us could move something from the middle of the road that had drifted in with the water, and twice we passed cars that were just stopped where they’d been left. But as soon as we got out of the valley it was like nothing had ever happened. There were people cleaning their gutters, little kids running around lawns with balls and bats, one little girl sitting on her front steps blowing bubbles that broke pop pop pop on our car. I waved to her and she waved back.

There’d been trouble over hats: all our dark hats were winter hats, wool or heavy felt, and all our summer hats were hats for a happy day, with ribbons and artificial flowers. “We could not wear hats,” I said. My father got a look like, don’t, and my mother got a look like, dare you to say that again, so I didn’t say anything else.

My mother wore a black straw that she finally found, bent on one side of the brim, and said I could get away with a wide black grosgrain headband, which always gave me a headache. She thought black clothing was unsuitable for young girls, so I had to wear a navy blue dress with red polka dots, which I thought was even more unsuitable. Donald wore a gray suit jacket and tan pants, which didn’t look very good, either. He looked at me when he came past with his grandfather behind the coffin but he didn’t seem like he saw me. He was changed somehow, just by what had happened. He looked older, walking side by side with his grandfather, like they both were men. Donald’s mother walked behind the two of them, holding a handkerchief in her hand.

We were back in First Presbyterian, where we’d been after the flood, and the church smelled like old fried hamburgers and coffee burnt in the urn. Usually after a funeral there was a lunch downstairs in the church hall, but it was still a mess down there, and everyone from the valley was anxious to get back to their homes and clean up. There was another funeral that afternoon, too, but at the Baptist church, a man who had tried to outrun the flooding in his car, and failed. Donald’s grandmother hadn’t wanted to leave her house, but his grandfather had talked her into it. He hadn’t heard or felt anything when she tipped off the back of the boat into the moving water. She’d washed up near her own front steps.

“Did you get to say goodbye?” I asked Donald outside the church. I wasn’t really sure what that meant, but people were always saying it after they went to the funeral home, that they got to say goodbye.

“Not really,” Donald said. “Have you ever seen a dead person?”

“No,” I said.

“They don’t look the same. Plus somebody had to lend her a dress to be buried in. It didn’t look like the kind of dress she would wear.”

“She was a really good grandmother,” I said. I didn’t have any grandmothers myself, but Donald’s grandmother hung his shirts on the clothesline so carefully and was always making pies. When I would go over to the house during the summer she’d bring lemonade out to us at the wooden picnic table in the backyard. “What do you two have planned for the rest of the day?” she’d ask, as though maybe we were going to do something really exciting instead of sitting there smacking horseflies and being bored, talking about our summer book reports. I felt bad because sometimes Donald did his report and then he disappeared again, so it’d turn out that he’d written two pages about White Fang and it wasn’t even going to count for anything unless that was on the summer reading list at his other school, too. He was teaching me to play chess. “You’re getting to be good,” he’d said to me after a couple of weeks. “I know your grandfather