The Uncle Who Chose Her Instead

What my mother said at the graveside

The funeral was on a Saturday, at the little Lutheran church two miles outside of town, the same church that had done Everett’s own parents’ funerals decades before, the pews half full of men in their sixties and seventies who had all, at one point or another, brought him something broken and left with it running.

My father and mother sat in the second row like they had some claim to grief that outranked mine, which I suppose, on paper, they did. He was my father’s uncle by blood. I was only his niece by marriage of a marriage two generations back, a fact my mother had reminded me of more than once over the years, usually right after asking to borrow gas money.

At the graveside, in the wind that never really stops blowing out there in September, my mother hugged me. Her arms went around my shoulders like she had not stood behind my father four days earlier while he gave me two hours to clear out of a house I had lived in my whole life.

“Coleen,” she said, close to my ear, “we should talk about what’s fair.”

I did not answer her. I let her hug hang there a second too long, unreturned, and then I stepped back and went to stand with Mr. Voss, who had run the shop counter for Everett for twenty years and who did not say much of anything that day either, just stood beside me with his hat in both hands and let the silence be its own kind of company.