The Funeral Where My Water Broke
“Sharon,” I said, and my voice cracked in a way I had never heard it crack before. “Please. My water just broke. I need help.”
Sharon turned her head slowly, through the thin veil, and looked at me the way you look at a stain you are deciding whether to bother cleaning.
She stepped back.
It was such a small motion, barely six inches, her black heel sinking slightly into the wet grass as she drew herself away from me, but I have never in my life felt a single gesture say so much. She was protecting the hem of her dress. She was protecting the moment. She was, in that half second, protecting everything about herself except the daughter in law doubled over in front of her holding her own stomach.
“We are grieving, Amanda,” she said, low enough that the mourners a few feet back would not hear it, though the ones closest to us did, and I would learn later exactly how many. “This is Joshua’s day. Do not make a scene. Find your own way.”
I turned to Glen, because some old, foolish part of me still believed Glen would be different.
Glen looked at his watch. A flat gold watch Sharon had given him for their thirtieth anniversary, the kind of watch that catches light even on a gray day.
“I have the accountants coming at two,” he said, not quite meeting my eyes, his voice apologetic in tone but not in substance, the way a man sounds when he has already decided not to help you and is only sorry about how it looks. “You’ll be fine, Amanda. Call someone.”
Another contraction rolled through me so hard my knees buckled, and I grabbed the edge of a folding chair to keep from going down into the mud beside my husband’s grave. Somewhere behind me I heard the soft gasp of other mourners finally understanding what was happening, and the scattering, shuffling sound of people not quite sure whether to step forward or look away. A small stuffed bear, the kind people sometimes leave at gravesides for children who have lost a parent, slid off the folding chair I’d grabbed and landed in the mud at my feet, its price tag still clipped to one ear, and I remember staring at it for a long, strange second, that ridiculous bear lying face down in the wet grass, before a voice cut through everything.
“I’ve got her. Everybody back up and give her air.”
Hank Dolan was seventy one years old and had maintained the grounds at Fairhaven Memorial for over thirty of them, a wiry, sun weathered man who had dug more graves in that cemetery than anyone alive, including, as it turned out, two of Josh’s own grandparents. He had been standing off to the side near his cart the whole service, out of respect, the way groundskeepers do, and he was the only person on that hillside who moved toward me instead of away.