The Funeral Where My Water Broke

I opened the door and stood in the frame, blocking it, one hand still resting on the knob.

“Amanda, darling,” Sharon said, her voice warm in a way I had almost never heard it, a performance pitched for an audience that was not actually there yet but that she was clearly already picturing. “We’ve come to see our grandchild. We brought him a gift.”

“Which grandchild,” I said.

I watched her warm expression hold for one more second before something behind her eyes recalculated. Glen shifted his weight on the porch step, his hands finding his pockets.

“What do you mean by that, Amanda,” Glen said, and for the first time in six years, I heard something in his voice that was not quite steady.

“I mean exactly what I said,” I told them. “You’ve been gone twelve days. You didn’t call. You didn’t ask. You don’t actually know what’s on the other side of this door, do you.”

Sharon’s mouth opened and closed once before she recovered. “We know you had the baby. People are saying all kinds of things, and frankly, Amanda, I think it’s time we put this unpleasantness behind us, for Joshua’s sake. For the family’s sake.”

“For the family’s sake,” I repeated. “Twelve days ago you told me to find my own way while I was standing over my husband’s grave with my water breaking down my legs. Hank Dolan drove me to the hospital. Not you. Not Glen. A groundskeeper.”

Glen flinched at that, a small, visible flinch, and I watched something shift across his face that I had never once seen there before, something that looked, for the first time, like shame he could not look away from.

I did not let them in that day. I told them I would see them at Pastor Shaw’s memorial gathering, the one that had been postponed twice already, once for the funeral itself and once because I had, understandably, been otherwise occupied giving birth to twins in a hospital twelve miles away, and I closed the door gently and stood in my front hall with my hand against the wood until I heard their car pull out of the driveway.