The Secret of You and Me - Melissa Lenhardt Page 0,8
door open for us. His assistant ushered us into idling cars where we waited for the casket to be rolled into the hearse, and for those mourners who were attending the graveside service to scurry to their cars for the procession to the cemetery.
The Suburban windows were too dark to see in, but offered me the opportunity to watch the crowd. A fair few were laughing and backslapping, and no one looked terribly torn up. Sophie, Charlie and Logan were some of the last to emerge. Logan and Charlie, so close they were almost a single unit, with a gap between them and Sophie. After what appeared to be a terse exchange, Charlie and Logan walked off. Sophie watched them go before her eyes settled on my car window. She paused for a long moment and turned in the opposite direction of her family. The Suburban inched forward behind the hearse, and we kept pace with Sophie walking on the sidewalk until she stopped at the corner, and we drove on.
* * *
The good residents of Lynchfield and the surrounding area might not mourn my father’s passing, but that wouldn’t stop them from a good feed, and funeral receptions were nothing if not a chance to tie on the feedbag.
The food that had looked so good the day before held little appeal to me today. I made a round of the mourners, always angled away from the group to discourage deep conversations, until I found Dormer on the front porch with five other men who I should have known the names of but didn’t. I was more concerned with what was inside their red Solo cups than in the niceties of mourning the dead in a small town.
“Beer?” I asked, disappointed.
“Dormer’s just going easy because he’s the host, or so Emmadean says,” one of the men said. “All this gawpin’ gettin’ to ya, Nora?”
“A little. I was hoping this would be just family and close friends.”
“Well, I’ll be honest, you’re the prime attraction to ol’ Ray’s funeral. Nobody’s seen hide nor hair of you for so long, and everyone wants to know why.”
“Digger,” Dormer warned.
How did I not recognize Digger Stokes? I thought. His family had owned the Stokes Feed and Seed for a hundred and twenty years. It was the Saturday morning gathering place for the local farmers, and Digger had been one of Pop’s best sources of information on what was going on in the farm and ranch community for a hundred miles.
“Go getcha a beer,” Dormer said. “It’s in the green cooler in the laundry room.”
“Put it in a cup so as you don’t offend no one,” Digger said.
“I thought you were a deacon?” I asked.
“Precisely,” he said, toasting me with his red cup.
“Be right back.”
I was only stopped by three people on the way to the kitchen, a win any way you looked at it. I found the cooler, and as I bent down to lift the lid, I caught sight of the barn out the laundry room window. It hadn’t changed much, just a few rusty sheets of metal on the roof mixed with shiny new ones. Ray must not have had the scratch to fix it all in one go. A few chickens pecked at the ground, and one strutted into the dark barn. The chickens were new, but I bet nothing else had changed. I snatched a red Solo cup from the cooler, filled it halfway with ice, thumped the lid closed and snuck out the back door.
Cars pulled in and out of the driveway as if by appointment. I wondered if the town had gotten together and scheduled when they would visit, knowing old Ray’s house wasn’t big enough for everyone all at once, and it was too damn hot to stand outside. Now Irma, you go at three forty-five and I’ll come at four fifteen.
Chickens squawked and flapped away as I walked to the barn. The familiar scent of hay and motor oil leveled me like a freight train.
Ray’s old John Deere was parked on one side of the barn, next to the shredder and a few old tires. A jumble of farm equipment that didn’t work, but Ray refused to get rid of, blocked access to the hayloft ladder. Three empty stalls and the tack room lined the opposite wall. I went to the tack room door and stopped. I stared at the latch, jagged wood, worn smooth with age and use. I hadn’t thought of it in years, and