Come Sunday: A Novel

by Isla Morley

  Jostled along the conveyor belt of mourners, Sal is gone. I shake hands and stumble into people’s embraces, and all I can recall is that last stolen moment Sal and I shared—his whisper (“Do I dare hope?”) so faint it might easily have been misheard had it not been offered by his lips in my hair. A thief I was, or worse, because of that moment, stealing what had no business being mine.

  Mrs. Avery approaches me. “We will now move the coffin to the hearse, Mrs. Deighton, if you would like to follow us.” Her companion, a man I do not recognize, directs Greg, Rhiaan, Frank, and Chuck to take their places at the four handles. I look around frantically for Jenny but do not see her, and the overwhelming sense of jet lag assails me. Quickly Mrs. Avery reaches out for my arm and I accept her help with dry gratitude.

  We follow Cleo, riding on the men’s shoulders, down the long aisle and out the back of the church. Cleo always loved to ride on Greg’s shoulders. Sometimes he forgot to bend when walking through doorways, and her sharp cry would make me want to kill him.

  “It’s just not right,” I say, shaking free the tears, watching love walk away.

  “No, dear, it certainly isn’t,” Mrs. Avery quietly replies, tightening her grip on my arm. It is a second loss, seeing Cleo put in the hearse, hearing the doors slam behind her. She goes, and I shall not see her again. As the hearse slips quietly into the crowded lane, I hear my grandmother’s voice just as surely as if she were standing behind me and whispering the words: Hold a button, Abbe.

  GREG AND I SHUFFLE to the church’s fellowship hall, modestly decorated and overcrowded, just as the rain comes down.

  “Who was that?” Greg asks.

  “Who?”

  “The guy wearing a tie.”

  I search Greg’s face as though it might have the answer. Doesn’t he know? Hasn’t he seen a thing?

  SOMETIMES I felt as though I had watched too much of my parents, as though they were a never-ending daytime TV drama bound to give me square eyes. But sometimes I think I was not watching closely enough. I cannot say, for example, how long my mother slaked her thirst with the gin bottle. It might have been my entire fourteenth year or it could have been a month. Nor can I say I know the moment she started smiling again. The little things I noticed did not seem like any big deal, certainly nothing that was about to lead to her branding. She no longer took naps at the kitchen counter beside her untouched dinner plate; she started growing her nails; there was the new hairdo (a permanent for her reed-straight hair) and a new dress. And oh, one other thing: her laugh. That was new. She laughed at things that weren’t even funny—my knock-knock jokes, my grandmother’s backfiring Morris Minor when it drove up our street, the cat’s antics with her feather duster. But I never stopped to think about it until I came home from tennis practice one day and found her spilling that laugh all over the phone.

  For one thing my mother did not spend much time on the phone because my father always clanged on about the bills he had to pay each month. It did not seem to matter when the call was on someone else’s dime. And also, my mother did not have many friends. Any friends, really, except for Auntie Muriel, who only came by when there was no chance of running into my father. But that afternoon my mother giggled like Natalie Chandler did each time she walked up the school stairs while a row of eighth-grade boys lined up below for a view of the valley up her skirt.

  My mother was on the phone when I put my racket away, when I came out of the kitchen with a sandwich, and when I came out of my room after doing my homework, all the while soaking the conversation with that burbling brook of a laugh. She was still on the phone when my father blasted through the front door, plum-faced. We would hear soon enough how he had been trying to call home for two hours to tell her that he had finally gotten the promotion, to cancel dinner because this was a night for Bender’s Grill. But first there was the business of the phone to attend to, and the business of the laugh.

  “Who the hell are you gabbing to?” he yelled, my mother pale as her freshly hung wallpaper.

  She let the receiver slip from her ear to her heart. “It’s no one, a friend,” she answered.

  “Well, which is it?” he spat. My father, apparently, had been watching my mother more closely than I had, because before she could answer he grabbed the phone from her and yelled “Who is this?” in such a manner as to indicate he knew exactly who it was. My mother tried reaching for the cradle to disconnect the line, but he flung her hand aside.

  The No-One-Friend evidently answered because my father’s rage blistered like canker sores.

  “Listen here, you mealymouthed faggot, don’t think I don’t know what’s going on! I told you before, you talk to my wife and I’ll fuck you up. You hear me?” And then, by way of demonstration, he banged the receiver against the telephone table a few times and replaced it at his ear.

  “I am going to say this one more time: You don’t ever, fucking never, talk to my wife again. You stay away from her or, so help me God, she’s going to read about you in the obits. And I’ll be the one laughing then!” The phone, having enjoyed its last moment of function, was ripped from the socket and hurled against the wall.

  There was no trace of a laugh on my mother’s face when my father spun around to meet it.

  “Dad,” I cried. “Dad, please!” If he knew I was standing at my door on the other end of the hallway, a witness, would he not quit? But there was no quitting: Louise Spenser’s face had to be taught a lesson. The blow, fierce and hard, was over quickly, but the one word that had accompanied it lingered long. Whore.

  “ABBE, who was that man?” Greg asks again.

  “No one, a friend,” I mumble, grip tightening around the locket. Cutting my hair, and the million other things I have done to keep from becoming my mother, have not worked, it seems.

  “What did he give you?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing.”

  “What is it?”

  I open my palm and Greg lifts out the locket, pries it open, and peers at his daughter’s face. After a pause he looks at me and, without speaking, returns the locket to my hand. There is no backhander, no name-calling, even though I wish there were. Call me a whore, call me Salomé, call me something! Instead, Greg steps out of my circle to accept a cup of coffee and is instantly pulled into the gravitational field of his parishioners who need consoling, this the day of the Sabbath.

  ORDINARY

  TIME

  SIX

  Sparrows carry the souls of the dead, Beauty used to say. Sitting on the rocking chair, looking out the sliding glass door to my balcony and the bird feeder Greg fills now that the storm has passed, I watch the sparrows haggle and jostle around it like old women at a church rummage sale. Why Beauty, whose toothless face is as clear as the sky from which those fidgety birds have descended, must haunt me I cannot fathom. Why her and not the bouncy-haired sparrow of a girl I once, a long time ago, yesterday, called “my child,” I do not know. Nor why I can picture her hands busy at the task of wringing a chicken’s scrawny neck now that her spells are no longer needed.

  Their wings flutter and they hop about, sometimes over one another, and there seems to be great injustice in the transaction, for the fat ones feast while the forlorn-looking ones are penned out. I hope the souls of the departed are a little more cordial and accommodating. And suddenly the sparrows are joined by a couple of cardinals, the male sending the others scattering, making room for his mate.

  The house is empty, Rhiaan having left before sunrise for his flight back to California. Jenny has returned to her routine of taking care of first-graders and Mr. Finnegan. The roofing contractor (a licensed one this time) and his team have left in their pickup trucks, taking the last of our line of credit with them. Only the smell of decaying bouquets and Greg’s insufferable patience take up space.

  “The mortuary called this morning,” Greg announces, walking into the bedroom. “We can pick up Cleo’s cremains tomorrow.”

  “You go,” I say, watching the sparrows bide their tim
e on the balcony rail, the cardinals’ apparent disinterest.

  “Come with me, Abbe,” he pleads.

  I turn to look at him and his face threatens to collapse on itself. Slowly, deliberately, I shake my head and turn away. His sigh is a flutter of wings.

  “We are going to have to talk about this, you know,” he says, walking to the rocking chair, scaring the birds from their meal.

  I look ahead and blink.

  “About what to do with her. About what to do with her ashes,” he presses.

  “Yes, I expect so.”

  “Well?” he asks.

  “Well, what?”

  “Well, what are we going to do? Where are we going to spread them?”

  “I can’t have this discussion now,” I say, seeing the first bold sparrow return to the feeder.

  “So you want me to just bring them home and prop the box next to the sugar bowl till you are ready to talk about it? Is that what you want?”

  “Greg, please.”

  “No, Abbe, not this time. You don’t get to always have it your way.”

  “Who the hell are you to talk to me about my way?” I shout, facing him. “If I had it my way, she would not be dead. Do you understand? If I had it my way, your church members would not be clogging up my refrigerator with food that’s fit for a Fourth of July picnic. And if I had it my way, you would not be standing here right now provoking me into a conversation I do not want to have.”

  We stare at each other, blinking at the heat of an unearthly fire, until he turns away and walks out of the room. When I look at the feeder, all the sparrows have returned to peck at the cardinals’ leftovers, and I rock again, slowly, for the souls of the deceased.

  . . .

  SHE STEPS into a dark swamp, where the trees are up to their knees in water. The reeds are sharp and the mud smells bad like boiled rot. She doesn’t like the dark, she doesn’t like forests, this is going to scare her, I think. “Cleo,” I call to her, but she cannot hear me. “Cleo!” I call louder over my own terror. She is lost; I can tell because she looks around and then walks a little deeper into the darkness. From behind I try to speed up, to reach her, but even though she is very scared now, taking very few steps at all, I still cannot get closer. I reach out my arms, stretching across the abyss: “Cleo!”

  I wake up and pull at my hair, crying out into the silence of the room. Greg runs up the stairs, turns on the bedside light, and holds out his arms. “Shh, shh,” he whispers. “It’s only a dream. Shh.”

  “I couldn’t help her,” I stammer. “I was trying to get to her, but she couldn’t hear me. She was in some kind of hell, Greg, and I couldn’t save her.”

  “It’s only a dream, babe,” he whispers. “Come downstairs, come have some dinner.”

  It is not the middle of the night but only seven-thirty, and Greg has just settled down for his evening vigil in front of the television.

  “Anything on?” I ask.

  “No,” he says. “I have come to believe that this is one of the things we can rely on in life: that there will be nothing on television.”

  I sit down in his chair and he brings me a tray with a plate of cheese and biscuits and an apple cored, pared, and peeled the way Cleo used to eat hers. We watch sitcom reruns, deadpan through all the one-liners, and Greg answers the phone each time it rings. Patiently, he says the same things over and over again: No thank you, we don’t need anything right now; yes, it was a moving service; thank you for your thoughtfulness; yes, see you Sunday.

  “You’re not honestly going to church on Sunday,” I say, incredulous at the thought.

  “Yes, I am. In fact, I’m going to preach,” he says to the TV.

  I frown, stare at this man I suddenly do not know. “What?”

  “It’s what I know to do, okay? It’s how I process things,” he says.

  “These are not ‘things’; this is mourning—there is no ‘processing.’ ”

  “If you don’t mind, I would really rather not argue about semantics. I am going to church on Sunday, I will be in the pulpit, and I would very much like it if you could come with me,” he says.

  “I am not about to go to church and face all those people and sing praises to God,” I say.

  “That’s what I thought. And I completely understand.”

  I am about to say, Understand? There is nothing about this that anyone can understand, but catch myself. Semantics. I begin to tremble, and realize that it is not Cleo walking into the swamp, losing her way. It is me.

  When the phone rings for the fourth time, I tell him to leave it, but he picks up anyway, and rather than the usual acceptances, I hear him say, “Yes, this is Reverend Deighton, who is this?”

  “I’m sorry,” he says, “I cannot hear you very well; could you speak up?” I look over at him just in time to see his eyes glaze over.

  “Who is it?” I whisper, but he gets up and leaves the room.

  “Yes,” I hear him say over his shoulder. And then, again, “Yes.”

  Fifteen minutes go by but Greg does not return. I put the tray of half-eaten food down, get up, walk through the kitchen to his study, and find him sitting quietly on his chair in the dark.

  “Who was that?”

  He looks over at my quivering face and delivers the answer for which I am quite unprepared.

  “Mr. Nguyen,” he says.

  “Who?”

  “The driver.”

  What I know of the driver is that he owns a white Toyota Corolla, older model, impeccable but for the slight dent on the left-hand side of the bumper and a missing headlight. I know he lives alone in a cinder block house at the cul-de-sac of River Street. That his only family is a son in Los Altos, California. And that he has never been cited for so much as a moving violation.

  Involuntary manslaughter, the police had first said (nothing in the books about childslaughter), and then changed their minds. No evidence, I overheard the officers tell Greg in our hallway, of negligent driving. He had not been drinking, or speeding; it was one of those random, no-fault accidents. Unaware that I was standing at the top of the stairs, they continued their report, although I heard Greg twice invite them to sit in the living room and drink some coffee. “The driver has no priors. Hell, Reverend, the man has not even been ticketed before.” The voice sounded apologetic. There was a pause and I imagined them to be standing around, shaking their heads in amazement. Was it then that Greg offered them coffee a third time? “The skid marks corroborate what the witnesses testified. The strange thing about it,” the officer said, “is that the old man keeps hanging around the station. Every day. I swear he’s disappointed we haven’t arrested him.”

  “What does he do there?” Greg asked.

  “Sometimes he adds something to his statement, but mostly he just keeps giving us the same details. One of us usually has to tell him to leave; otherwise he sits out in the waiting area for hours.”

  What I know about the driver, perhaps better than anyone else except maybe for Mr. Nguyen himself, is that he, like Theresa, like me, is getting away with murder. That there is no such thing as a no-fault accident.

  “WHAT DID HE WANT?” I now ask Greg.

  “I’m not really sure. He offered his condolences,” Greg replies, still stupefied. I put my hand over my mouth to smother the erupting scream. “He said how sorry he is, that he would never be so bold as to ask forgiveness.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I can’t remember. I don’t know if I said anything.” He frowns, trying to recollect.

  I sit down on the floor, lean against the doorpost. Minutes go by.

  “He sounded so . . .” Greg begins, and pauses again, shaking his head. After a while I get up and turn around to head out. “. . . damned,” he says. “He sounded like a damned man.”

  MY MOTHER knew what it was like to be damned, and if on a morning after waking up she temporarily forgot, my father would find a way to remind her. After the day the telephone left skid marks on the wall and Mr
. No-One-Friend stopped calling, my father did not repeat the word that had turned his “wife” into a “whore.” Which is not to say he had changed his mind on the matter. He cut up her purple frock, dumped the hot rollers into the trash can, and replaced the telephone with one that came with a lock and key, while my mother’s fingernails went back to being chipped instead of painted.

  Ever since the earth was formed my father had the same schedule—off to work by seven, home by six for dinner, Wednesday nights ten or eleven depending on when he got kicked out of the pub, weekends mostly fishing in the afternoons and playing darts at the pub in the evenings. But after the incident (which in my mind came to be known as “the last laugh” because of my father’s new best phrase, “Who’s having the last laugh now, hey, Louise?”), you could no more predict his timetable than you could an earthquake’s. It had surely cost him the offer of promotion to foreman, leaving work at two or three in the afternoon without permission or an hour before clock-out time. But my dad had more important things to check on. My mother, for instance.

  She had come to pick me up from school one day, not too long after the telephone incident, and she told me we were making a quick stop on the way home.

  “Where are we going?” I asked. “Can we get an ice cream from Pick ’n’ Pay?”