by Kelly Rimmer
“Maryanne Gallagher, you will not speak to me like that,” Mother said. She was visibly hurt, and her total lack of empathy only enraged me further. Grace had felt empathy. Grace had even taught tiny Beth to feel empathy. But my Mother was too busy popping pills to numb her every emotion to think outside her own experience and to recognize other people’s pain.
“He won’t let you take his children,” I snapped, standing.
“Well, that’s where you’re wrong, and you’ve clearly overestimated him,” Mother snapped. “He wasn’t happy about it first, but even he could see that we were right about this.”
“Come on, Timmy. Ruth. Beth. Jeremy, enough with the vase! It’s time to go,” I said, glaring at my mother and shepherding the children toward the door. She didn’t even follow us out, and so I alternated strapping the children into their seat belts and firing furious glares back at the house.
Once they were all safely buckled in, I sat in the driver’s seat and exhaled, then closed my eyes.
“Mommy,” Beth said.
“Mommy’s in heaven, Bethany,” I said heavily.
“Mommy, hungry,” she said.
I turned back to her, frustrated.
“Mommy can’t get you something to eat. She’s in heaven.”
Beth extended her hand toward me and flapped her fingers impatiently.
“Mommy, hungry,” she said, and her face was starting to redden with frustration. That’s when a terrifying possibility occurred to me.
Was Bethany calling me Mommy?
“I’m Auntie Maryanne,” I choked. “You know that, don’t you, darling? I’m Auntie Maryanne.”
“Hungry!” she cried, completely disinterested in my name. She just wanted something to eat, and she was in no mood to wait. I groaned and started the car.
“Well, we’re not going back in there to get something now,” I muttered, and turned the car toward home.
* * *
“Patrick?” I leaned my forehead against the door to Patrick’s bedroom later that night, took a deep breath, then knocked. I was so weary. I wanted to crawl into my stretcher bed and sob for hours, but the funeral was the next day, and I needed to keep searching for the letters, and I needed to speak to Patrick before I faced my parents again.
For the first time I was starting to feel hopeless about the entire situation. My whole future rested on finding that note Gracie wrote, and I simply had to find it before I could go back to my old life, or Patrick was likely to stumble upon it, and then I’d lose everything. And the situation with Patrick and my parents was making me nervous, too. I’d been with the family for five weeks by that point, and I had to admit, the children had grown on me. I just couldn’t bear the thought of them losing Patrick. And that’s why I was standing in his doorway preparing for battle, even as my muscles ached with exhaustion.
“I don’t want dinner,” Patrick grunted.
I sighed and pushed the door open. He was in bed lying on his side, staring away from me. It felt strange to step into his bedroom that night. I’d searched every cranny of it while he was at work, but this was different. He was in there now, and I felt I was crossing some invisible boundary. But this conversation had to start somewhere, and I couldn’t wait for Patrick to find the energy to get out of bed, because I just didn’t know if he ever would without a push.
“I talked to Mother today.”
He sighed heavily, then adjusted the blankets, pulling them higher toward his chin.
“I don’t feel like talking about this now.”
“Well, you don’t have a choice,” I said impatiently. “Is this really what you want?”
“Does it matter what I want?” he mumbled. I sighed and walked to stand in front of him. His eyes had sunk into his head, and his skin had taken on a gray pallor that frightened me. Patrick hadn’t shaved in days, and the funeral was only twelve hours away. I had intended to interrogate him about his plans for the future but realized that it was going to be challenge enough to get him out of bed.
“Look,” I said quietly. “Get up, take a shower and then come and have some soup.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Well, it’s not about you, Patrick. It’s never been about you, but now more than ever. I know you are hurting, but if you want to keep them—”
“How exactly do I keep them, Maryanne?” he asked, sitting up at last. “Your father told me they’ve already spoken to a lawyer. A single man raising four kids on his own? Even if I figured out the logistics of childcare, if they take this to the courts, no one is going to side with me.”
“That doesn’t mean you don’t try, Patrick!”
“Your father paid the rent last month, but I haven’t worked enough this month for the next payment. Plus, I’m already behind with every other bill. I don’t even know what I’m doing with them! I can’t cook or clean and I don’t know where to start with raising them. The kids will be better off in your parents’ damned house with nice things and good schools.”
“Those children just lost their mother,” I whispered fiercely. “And if you stopped feeling sorry for yourself for more than five seconds and actually listened to me, I’d tell you that you can offer those kids something my parents don’t even have the capacity to understand.” He paused then, and finally met my eyes. I pushed on, emboldened. “My parents have more money than God, but no heart at all. And the past few weeks I’ve had this feeling that you...” I was frustrated by the tears that sprung to my eyes, and I kicked the bed out of sheer impatience. “You miserable, pathetic excuse for a man...despite all evidence to the contrary I just had this feeling you could at least offer them love. But if you’re really going to let my parents take your children without so much as a fight, then I guess I was right about you all along.”
I spun out of the room, and ignoring the sleeping children in the next room, slammed the door behind me. I took a bath and let myself cry for a while, because Grace and I had turned out okay, but my parents had only hardened as the years went on. The more I thought about it, the more determined I was that those four little urchins deserved better. Sometime over the month I’d spent with them, they’d burrowed their way into my heart, and the idea of my mother and father turning them into proper little statues was just too awful to contemplate. I didn’t want Timmy and Jeremy to grow up to think that they were somehow better than the women in their life just by virtue of their gender. I didn’t want Bethany and Ruth to grow up to think that a woman’s only option was to stay at home. I tried to console myself by remembering that I had come out of that very environment and I’d seen the light, but I just kept thinking of Grace, and the life she fell into with Patrick, and how it never seemed to occur to her that she could choose something different for herself.
And I wasn’t at all sure why I had convinced myself that Patrick was a better option for those kids than my parents, given the things I knew about his marriage to my sister. But her words in the car that final day just kept replaying in my mind.
One day he’s going to be a great man.
She had seen something in him, and perhaps I’d seen glimpses of it, too, over those past weeks, when circumstances forced Patrick to be vulnerable. I appreciated that he’d found it within himself to apologize, even though he still believed I’d had an abortion, and no doubt he still judged me for it. It took real humility for him to thank me for my help, even though we’d never gotten along.
Maybe he had the potential to become something better than he had been, but I just couldn’t do this for him. If he didn’t even want to fight to keep his own children, then perhaps Grace had been wrong about him all along.
My heart was heavy when I climbed out of the bath. I pulled my nightgown on, intending to go right to my stretcher. But when I stepped into the hallway and saw the light in the kitchen, I followed it warily, and found Patrick at the table.
He was noisi
ly slurping a bowl of the awful chicken soup I’d made him. Steam rose from the bowl, so I knew he’d even heated it up for himself.
“Well?” he asked me, without turning around to face me. “Are you going to join me?”
I entered the room hesitantly but didn’t sit at the table. Instead, I leaned against the countertop and crossed my arms over my chest.
“I don’t want them to go,” he said, his tone flat. “It’ll kill me if they do. But tell me what options I have here?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted heavily. “But there has to be a way. Grace wouldn’t want you to give up without a fight.”
“Where do I even start?”
“Let’s bury her tomorrow. We’ll send her off and then we’ll sit down and we’ll figure this out.”
“We? I thought you were going back to California any day now. That’s what your father said, and that’s what I figured was about to happen, too.”
I raised my chin stubbornly.
“I know you don’t like me, Patrick. I don’t like you much, either. But we both loved Grace, and I think...” I cleared my throat a few times, then admitted, “I think that maybe we both love those filthy, noisy little monsters of yours.”
Patrick nodded, then exhaled.
“Yeah. Okay.”
“Get some sleep,” I suggested. “Tomorrow’s going to be a long day.”
Beth
1996
Logically, I had expected that losing Dad was going to hurt, but I’m not at all prepared for the intensity of the grief. It crushes me, catching me off guard every time I don’t distract myself for even a second. I stare at the TV for hours over the days that follow, but I don’t absorb a word. I try unsuccessfully to go through the motions, but if Hunter wasn’t off work and there to remind me, I’m not sure I’d eat at all, or bathe, or even feed Noah.
Walsh Homes shuts down on Monday for Dad’s memorial service, and all of Ruth’s staff and many of their family members come. There are people at the service who loved Dad simply because he built their family home—crafting the space that became their nest with such love and care that he earned a place of honor in their lives forever. Almost all of the regulars at St. Louise’s Sunday Mass are there for the service, too, because Dad never missed Mass, and this community was his family almost as much as we were. Three retired priests make the journey back from wherever they’ve landed in old age to pay their respects. And when the time comes for the ceremony, a handful of Dad’s golfing buddies and my brothers act as pall bearers.
Ruth, of course, has planned the service with militant precision. The four of us had lightly discussed it the day after Dad passed, and we agreed it should be a celebration of his life. Maybe that’s what she organized, but I’m not at all sure because now that the time has come, I can’t focus much on the words or the hymns or the prayers. I feel like I’m floating near my body, completely dissociated from the proceedings, a ball of tangled grief and loss and sadness. I don’t even realize I’m sobbing until Chiara shifts along the pew, pushes Hunter out of the way and throws her arms around me.
“Darling,” she chokes against my hair. “He loved you all, of course, but you were the light of his life. He’s gone, but he’s at peace now, and he’s left behind a legacy I know he was so proud of.”
I turn to her then and I press my face into her shoulder. I sink all the way into her embrace, and I feel for the very first time a simple comfort in her presence. I don’t have the energy to wonder about the dynamic in our relationship or to analyze how to feel about her. All I can do is focus on the warmth of her arms around me, and maybe it’s even that embrace that grounds me, because I make it through the rest of the Mass without dissolving into a puddle of pain.
We travel in procession to the cemetery for Rite of Committal. There are more prayers and more ceremony—the funeral Mass, the committal, then the wake. Despite my “lapsed” Catholic status, tradition provides a roadmap, and that roadmap unexpectedly offers me a path through the worst of the grief.
When Father Jenkins invites us to recite the Lord’s Prayer as the graveside service concludes, I do so by rote, and I look around to my family as they pray. Everyone is in tears—Ruth and Tim and Jeremy unashamedly crying, too, now. When the prayer finishes, and Dad’s casket is lowered into the ground, the four of us look to one another.
It’s just us now, our gazes say.
We understand because we’ll miss him, too, their red-rimmed eyes tell me.
We’re going to be okay because we’ve still got one another, our common grief promises me.
And when the service ends, we gravitate to each other. There’s more tears and hugs, but I feel the heaviest part of the grief lift just a little, and I mentally check back into the day.
This, I realize, is why we have ceremonies like funerals—not for the departed but for the living, to remind one another that even in grief, we don’t have to be alone.
* * *
Ruth booked out a local function center for the wake, given the size of the crowd we were expecting. There’s great food on offer and plenty of booze, and over the hours the people who loved him enthusiastically swap stories of Dad’s life.
I find myself laughing at the antics his long-term staff members recount—about when he was first starting out on his own and desperate to save every penny, how he’d recycle even bent nails if he thought he could find a use for them. About the time he was building a house for a family, and right in the middle of the project the mother was diagnosed with cancer, and how Dad finished out the job for them without charging a cent for labor. About the day one young apprentice tried to hang a calendar with half-naked women on it in the workshop, and Dad set the thing on fire and gave the whole staff a lecture about respect for women.
I cry with Janet, who was Dad’s secretary for two decades. I cry with Yuri, one of his best foremen. His golf buddies regale me and my brothers with unlikely tales about holes in one. We laugh about the “wild weekends” they’d plan; nights that would inevitably end with them all in bed early because Dad was nothing like a night owl, but he was also the life of the party. He’d turn in at eight or nine, and everyone else would get bored and soon turn in, too. His neighbors remind me about how until he got sick, Dad always helped them with their yardwork whenever life or health or family got in the way of it. Hunter’s boss reminds me about that commissioned artwork on the wall of his office—and how customers and guests visiting still often remark at the sheer beauty of them.
My dad lived a big life and it was an important life, a life devoted to family and friends and his church and community.
And when all is said and done, that is who he was, and that’s the legacy he left behind. It’s enough for now for me to focus on that, and to put aside my confusion about his early years, and to grieve the man I knew him to be.
SEVENTEEN
Maryanne
1958
My parents seemed to assume there would be a truce among us all for Grace’s sake, because when Patrick and I piled out of the car with the children for the funeral service, they both came to help us take our seats in the cathedral. For once in my life I didn’t have it in me to make a scene.
Her funeral service was excruciatingly long because Father insisted that the priest send her off with the full Requiem Mass. I distracted the children with candy, and I was proud of them for patiently sitting around me, especially Beth. She seemed to understand that something momentous was happening, even if she couldn’t really fathom what it was.
And then we all piled into Patrick’s car, and drove to the cemetery. There wasn’t so much as a breeze that day, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. As we drove in near silence, I thought about how such an awful occasion shouldn’t be allowed to take place on such a beautiful day. But life has no rhyme or reason sometimes, and when it all boils down, we really are at the mercy of fate.
There
was quite a crowd around that gravesite, mostly Mother and Father’s friends and executives from the bank who probably didn’t know Grace well enough to care, but they certainly knew Father well enough to make the trip. Patrick’s aunt Nina was there, and she held herself up against her walker beside the children. Mr. and Mrs. Hills were there, too, and Ewan stood within the circle of a small collection of people I vaguely recognized as Patrick’s colleagues.
It was all dreadfully sad, and as they lowered my sister into the ground, I wondered how on earth I was supposed to carry on with my life knowing the role I’d played in her death. My guilt came and went in waves—some days I’d feel certain that it was all my fault, and if I’d just found some other option for her or refused to help her, things would have been okay. Other days I convinced myself that one way or another, Grace was going to end her pregnancy, and it was hardly my fault there were no safe alternatives. There at her graveside the day of her funeral, I felt for the very first time a balancing in those two extremes.
Grace was gone, and I’d certainly played a role in that. But I was only helping her to do what she felt she so desperately needed to do, and she had seemed quite sure that if she had gone ahead with the pregnancy, we’d have been burying her anyway. This was the start of me making peace with her loss, and when these thoughts struck me, I finally started to cry.
The priest was reading bible verses now and talking about “everlasting peace” and Grace’s new home of heaven. This, the children seemed to understand, and I saw the shift in them. Timmy especially held himself so stiffly, refusing to spill the tears in his eyes. That beautiful boy stood there in one of my mother’s expensive outfits, his hair freshly combed, with the weight of the world on his shoulders. When I looked past him, I saw that Patrick was doing much the same, clenching his jaw in order to keep the tears at bay. I crouched next to Tim, ignoring my mother’s questioning look, and I caught his shoulders in my hands.
