The Woodshop She Sold Before The Funeral

The funeral was Thursday, at eleven, at Larkin Baptist, the church my father had gone to his whole life except the four years he and my mother tried out the Methodist church down the road and came back embarrassed, as he used to tell it, over a disagreement about the right way to can green beans that had nothing to do with doctrine and everything to do with pride. The pews were full. Hollis Coley had sold tractor parts to half the county for three decades and fixed more lawnmowers after hours for free than the dealership ever knew about, and the church was packed to the back doors with men in their one good sport coat and women holding casserole dishes they would carry straight to the fellowship hall the second the service ended, because that is how it is done in a town like Larkin. You bury the man in the morning and you feed the living that same afternoon, in the same building, because grief in a small town does not get its own separate day off from the business of feeding people.

I sat in the front pew between Kim and my sister Patty, with Dana, my daughter, six months along and glowing in the particular way pregnant women glow even at funerals, sitting just past Kim with her husband’s arm around her. Charlene sat on the other end of the pew, in black, dry eyed by then, past the point where she could cry anymore, that hollowed out look people get on the second day. I looked at her twice during the service and both times she was looking straight ahead at the casket, at the spray of yellow mums on top that she had picked because yellow was my father’s favorite color on account of his mother’s kitchen having been painted that color his whole childhood, a detail I only knew because Charlene had asked me the week before, by phone, what his favorite color even was, because in eleven years of marriage he had never once said, and she had wanted to get it right.

I did not say a word to her about the shop. Not during the service, not at the graveside in the cold wind up on Larkin cemetery hill where they lowered him down next to my mother’s empty plot that he had bought forty years before and never filled until that morning, not in the line of cars back to the church. My father was not ten hours in the ground. I was not going to let that day be about a flatbed trailer and eleven hundred dollars. Whatever Charlene had done, she had also sat up three nights in a recliner holding his hand, and I decided somewhere on that cemetery hill that the day belonged to him, not to the argument I was going to have to have eventually. I would have it. Just not that day.