“Bad night,” said Alice. “I think I slept for about an hour. I keep seeing Emmanuel’s face. I keep trying to figure it out, to come up with a reason for this—other than the availability of the weapon.”
“Meaning if the weapon hadn’t been in James’s mother’s spare bedroom . . . What’s her name again?”
“Kelly,” said Alice.
“Meaning, if Kelly hadn’t kept the gun in the closet of her guest room, this wouldn’t have happened?”
“Something like that.”
Joan cocked her head. “You don’t think he would have found another gun? She has about two dozen of them in the house, according to the newspaper.”
Alice took a sip of water from her glass. “Smart people lock up their guns.”
Ellie, who had fast-walked across the spacious dining room, started speaking before she reached the table. “I’m sorry I’m late,” she said. “I had to drop something off at the post office, along with everyone else.” She sat down and looked at Joan and then at Alice. “How are you guys?”
“Exhausted,” said Alice. “I’m so upset by the whole thing. What would possess a single mother of a teenage son to keep a gun where he could find it—and use it?”
“Why does she need a gun at all?” asked Joan. “This is Southwood, not Chicago.”
Alice flipped half her hair over her shoulder with her right hand. “She’s got every right to have a gun,” she said. “That’s not my objection. My objection is that it wasn’t in a secured location.”
“Who cares about the location?” asked Joan, leaning into the table. “The question of why she needs a gun at all still stands.”
Ellie slipped her windbreaker off her shoulders and hung it on the back of her chair. “Well, she’s got a right to have a gun. The Constitution gives us that right.”
Joan crossed her hands in front of her face. “This is not a discussion on the right to bear arms,” she said. “What I don’t understand is the reason so many people think they need a weapon in the first place. To protect them from what—overpriced meat at the Corner Market? We live in an incredibly safe town.”
The server approached the table, refilled the water glasses, and read them the specials. Alice got an arugula salad. Ellie ordered shiitake risotto, and Joan got the quesadilla.
“Not in the summer,” said Alice. “The tourists bring all kinds of trouble with them.”
“Like what?” asked Joan. “So there are some fender benders, some public drunkenness. What, are we going to shoot people for having too many cocktails?”
Ellie scratched her head. “This wasn’t about a drunk tourist, Joan. It was about unrequited love.”
Joan lowered her head for a moment and then raised it. “You’re right, Ellie. And the fact that James had access to a gun turned what could have been a fistfight into a homicide/suicide.”
“People have the right to have guns,” Alice said, evenly.
“Only sane people,” said Joan. “The problem arises when the screwballs have guns.”
Ellie nodded her head. “Kelly Shulz may fit that bill. Do you guys remember her from drama club?”
“Yes,” said Alice. “She was pretty creative with set design. But like her son, she kept to herself. I can’t remember her ever talking, even to say hello or goodbye.”
“Who can blame her?” asked Joan. “Her husband bonks just about every woman in town, producing children with several of them, and then has the gall to sue her for emotional distress while he’s stalking her? I barely know the woman because, as you say, she was so quiet. But she does have my sympathy. She’s got a very bad husband—ex-husband, I guess, now—and a dead child.”
“I occasionally run into her at the dog park,” said Ellie. “She’s got two huge yellow labs who love to play with all the other dogs at the park. But Kelly stands over to the side, never mingling with other dog owners, never saying a word except when she calls her dogs’ names.”
“Why is that, do you think?” asked Alice.
Joan shrugged. “It probably has something to do with the jerk she married. My guess is his list of undesirable qualities is longer than adulterer and baby daddy.”
“Here’s the odd thing, though,” said Ellie. “Her car is covered with bumper stickers. It’s almost as if she lets them do the talking, so she doesn’t have to.”
The food arrived, and the women each took a bite of their meals.
“How do you know her car?” asked Alice. “Just from the dog park?”
Ellie nodded her head and then wiped her mouth with her napkin, which she returned to her lap. “She’s Catholic, it seems, based on her ‘I heart the Pope’ and anti-abortion/birth control stickers.”
“She has an ‘I heart the Pope’ bumper sticker?” asked Joan.
“She does.”
“Well, even though I don’t subscribe to the politics of the Catholic Church, I think that’s kind of sweet.”
“So does my mother,” said Ellie. “She’s the only other person in town who has one that I’ve seen—and hers is the only bumper sticker on her Mercedes.”
“Tastefully placed?” asked Joan, smiling.
“Very.”
Joan ate another bite of her quesadilla, chewed for a half minute, and then said, “I remember you telling me about your mother’s social activism when we were working on the set for My Fair Lady. Is she still picketing the Planned Parenthood across the river?”
“Every chance she gets,” said Ellie. “And she’s eighty-four.”
Joan laughed. “Where’d you and your liberal leanings come from?”
Ellie swallowed a forkful of risotto. “That’s still up for debate,” she said. “My brothers love to tease me about being a Democrat.”
Alice’s phone, on the table next to her bread plate, buzzed, and she looked at it. Ellie and Joan watched as Alice scrolled through the message. “It’s from Linda,” she said, smiling. “She got an A on her history test.”
“That’s nice,” said Joan, wondering if this was the news Alice was waiting for, if this was the reason she had her phone on their communal lunch table. Joan understood the rationale for a handy cell phone for those expecting a call from someone with an urgent matter to discuss. But she thought people who put their cell phones on restaurant or meeting room tables were sending the clear message that whoever was trying to reach them through their slim, rectangular devices was more important than those present. Alice texted a response. “Did you talk to her about the shooting?”
“We talked last night,” said Alice, still texting. “She’s devastated.”
Joan looked at Ellie. “Did you talk to Tim?”
“Not yet,” she said. “He was in rehearsal last night. I’ll call him this afternoon. And Liz?”
“We spoke briefly yesterday,” said Joan. “I’m planning on calling her again later, after she gets out of her classes. Perhaps by then we’ll have some news about the funeral. Though I’m sure she’ll hear about it another way first; I’m sure the shooting is all over social media by now.”
Alice nodded her head as she put her phone back down on the table. “Linda sent me a link to the Facebook page set up by the family. The funeral has not been scheduled, but it will probably be in the next day or so. Linda is already pretty sure she’s not going to come. She’s got a paper due and another test early next week.”
“I don’t know what Liz will do,” said Joan. “She liked Emmanuel—everyone did—but she didn’t know James very well.”
“No one knew James,” said Ellie. “Remember how he’d keep to himself during the drama department events? Whenever we’d do a fundraiser—even at preproduction dinners—James was always by himself. Tim approached him a few times, but he was always silently rebuffed. James, Tim said, had no interest in small talk.”
“Yes,” said Alice. “I had a hard time even remembering him at first.” Her phone buzzed again, and Alice immediately attended to it. “It’s Linda again,” she said, reading the message on her phone.
“The funeral for Emmanuel is on Monday. James’s funeral is private.”
“Do you want to go?” Joan asked, as spontaneously as she had asked Ellie and Alice to lunch. “I can drive.”
CHAPTER 6
The pews in the nave of St. Mary’s church in Southwood could hold almost a thousand people, which they sometimes did on Christmas Eve or Easter morning. On a typical Sunday, the parishioners numbered closer to two hundred at the ten o’clock mass, many hurrying in just a few minutes before the service began and sitting in the middle pews. A select few chose the first couple rows as their personal worship space, and the pews at the very back were typically populated by latecomers sliding in during the homily. On Monday, at nine thirty, a half hour before the start of Emmanuel Sanchez’s funeral mass, the church was full.
Joan, Alice, and Ellie stood in the narthex with forty or so others, waiting for instruction. The word was they would be ushered into the adjoining parish hall, where the mass would be simulcast onto a large screen. True enough, a minute later, they were taken through a narrow passageway and into the capacious hall. The screen was already set up at the far end of the room, as were dozens of metal folding chairs facing it. The seating etiquette in church seemed to apply in the hall as well; most of the people, after shedding their dark-colored coats and jackets to reveal dark-colored clothing underneath, sat in the middle of the room, eschewing the front seats, looking to blend in with the other mourners. The parish hall, while built and routinely used for chatty coffee hours and other social functions, did not that morning have its regular anything goes atmosphere, produced by children, freed from the decorum of a church service, running in circles, or by enthusiastic parishioners at an Advent potluck dinner. The mourners, while a good distance from the nave where the formal funeral service would take place, were reverent, those choosing to talk doing so in lowered voices.
The three women draped their fall coats on the backs of their chairs and sat, purses on the floor underneath their seats and hands on their laps. They faced forward. It didn’t seem right, somehow, to turn in one’s seat and scan the room, as if looking for friends at a high school football game or in a movie theater. Alice took her phone out of the pocket of her coat, checked the time, silenced the ringer, and then set it down on her lap. Ellie briefly turned her head toward the back of the room and then leaned in and whispered to Alice and Joan, “They’re still coming in.”
“Incredible,” said Joan.
“He was well liked,” whispered Alice. “Linda said he was one of the nicest kids in the school—not at all conceited about his good looks or his abilities on the football field.”
Minutes later, the mass began, and everyone in the room, like those in the church, rose from his or her seat. Once they were all standing, they were still, like military cadets at attention. Every pair of eyes found its way to and focused on the screen, on the image of Emmanuel’s body encased by a shiny wood coffin making its way down the center aisle. “I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in Me shall never die,” said the priest. The tears began shortly thereafter, starting with a girl several rows behind Joan, Alice, and Ellie, and spreading throughout the parish hall like fire through a dry forest. Joan, who always had tissues in her purse, had packed extra and handed them out to Alice and Ellie and to those around her, who in the last-minute rush to get out the door to the funeral, had forgotten the most useful thing. When the coffin reached the front pews, the mourners in the parish hall could see on the screen that the seats were occupied, two rows deep on both sides of the aisle, by football players in their jerseys. Some of the players kept their composure, shoulders back and arms hemmed in at their sides, while others openly wept.
“Oh my God,” said the weeping girl at a volume that eclipsed the happenings on the screen. Everyone’s eyes found her after this exclamation. “I can’t take this.” Those around her, other girls, moved closer to her, wrapped their arms around her, cried with her, but their tears did nothing to console their friend. They could not silence her sobs. And then she shouted, “I love you, Emmanuel!” before she collapsed, her kneecaps landing on the waxed linoleum floor. Two gray-suited ushers approached the group and, whispering words of encouragement, escorted the girl through the doors at the back of the hall to the sidewalk outside. Some of her friends followed, feeling noble perhaps in their mission, oblivious, as teenagers are, to the distraction their elevated voices had caused for the others. Ellie watched them go, and then turned her attention back to the mass.
Ninety minutes later, after several emotional tributes by family members and friends and an unexpectedly moving eulogy by Michael Hanes, the laconic, burly football coach, Alice, Ellie, and Joan filed out of the hall and into the sunlight. They moved off the wide front sidewalk and onto a grassy area, making room for the hundreds of people pouring out of the church. Many of the mourners appeared to be in shock, their collective countenance looking like that of someone who had just watched a disturbing movie. Others, who looked as though they had already recalibrated their thought processes away from the funeral inside the church and back to their own lives outside the church, jogged to their cars, now thinking about work or whatever their phone calendars dictated for the rest of the day. Those standing near Alice, Ellie, and Joan either talked quietly about the service or the weather. The morning clouds had lifted during the mass, a sign (those who discussed such things agreed) that Emmanuel was at peace in heaven.
Joan turned to Ellie and Alice. “Are you ready?”
“Yes,” said Ellie.
They walked around the church to the back parking lot, which was busy with people standing and talking next to their cars, as well as others in their cars pulling out of their spaces and into the building line of vehicles waiting to get out onto the main road.
Joan led Alice and Ellie back through a gate at the far end of the lot and along the sidewalk that ended at a side street. They walked the length of the street and then turned onto another street, where Joan’s car was waiting for them. They had already agreed that they would not go to the cemetery, even though the burial was open to the general public, and that Joan would instead drive Ellie and Alice home afterward. No one said anything until they were in the car and on Route 1 heading to Alice’s house.
“That was a beautiful mass,” said Ellie from the back seat. “I know that sounds cliché and stupid, but it really was an exceptional ceremony.”
Alice turned in the front passenger seat, so she could face both Joan and Ellie. “From what Linda says, he was an exceptional boy.”
“It’s hard to believe he moved here just three years ago,” Joan said. “His parents were both born in Mexico, immigrated to Texas, educated themselves, moved to Florida to be near relatives, and then moved here to further their careers.”
“That’s outstanding,” said Ellie.
“Where did you learn all this?” asked Alice. “Linda never told me those things.”
“Liz told me,” Joan said. “I think she had a bit of a crush on Emmanuel last year.”
“He was a very handsome young man,” said Alice, turning in her seat to again face the windshield. “What seventeen-year-old girl wouldn’t want him texting her in math class?”
Following Alice’s directions, Joan pulled her car onto Alice’s street, drove into the driveway of her expanded Cape Cod, and put the car in park. She turned in her seat to face the others. “I’m glad we went to the funeral. Thanks for going with me.”
“I’m glad, too,” said Alice, still buckled into her seat. “It would have been hard to go alone.”
“I agree,” said Ellie.
“What do you think about having lunch again?” asked Joan.
“I’d love to,” said Alice. “Now that all three of my kids are out of the house, I have absolutely nothing on the calendar.”
“I don’t have a lot going on either,” said Ellie. “And my bookkeeping job takes up only so many hours in the week. I spent September cleaning closets.”
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p; Joan smiled. “Yeah, this new phase in life will take some getting used to.”
Alice checked the calendar on her phone. “Can we do it next week? I’m in the middle of a painting project—and if I don’t keep going, it won’t get done.”
“Sure,” said Ellie. “Any day but Monday.”
“Wednesday,” said Joan, who kept her weekly calendar in her head. “Do you want to meet at High Tide again?”
Alice unbuckled her seatbelt. “That’s the best game in town,” she said. “Unless you want to go to the casino.”
“Let’s go to High Tide,” said Ellie. “I want that quesadilla that Joan had last week.”
CHAPTER 7
Alice pushed open the back door just off the driveway and walked down the short hallway into her kitchen. She set her purse and phone on the walnut table where she and her husband, Dave, ate all their meals. She glanced at the telephone answering machine that sat at the end of her granite counter, looking for a blinking light indicating a message; there was none. The only reason she had a landline was for Dave’s parents, who called on the first day of each month to check in. They, like their friends and neighbors in their very small town, still thought cell phones were for jet setters. Alice shed her gray trench coat and walked it to an unoccupied peg in the back hall, the small space she had just walked through to reach the kitchen. She retraced her steps, walking back into the kitchen and then into the front hallway to climb the stairs to the bedroom that she had half-finished painting the week before. She studied the mango colored walls, again questioning the color that she had chosen. Was it too bright? As she walked into the adjoining bathroom and closet, she reached for the back zipper of the black dress she occasionally wore out to dinner but lately mostly to funerals and other somber or official occasions. A self-taught handyman, Dave had created this space a few years ago, after convincing Alice to move out of their twenty-year-old house in a subdivision and into a house built in the late nineteenth century. He was capable of plumbing, electrical, and carpentry work. And he was good at it. But he often ran out of time and typically lost interest in the task at hand when it was ninety-percent completed, meaning Alice had to either finish the job herself or find and pay someone who could. She was a good painter—she had painted just about every room in the house, save this bedroom and Linda’s, in the four years they had lived there—but she knew nothing about pipes and voltage. She looked down at the wide planked floor beneath her feet, which she had yet to paint. She couldn’t decide between forest green and dark gray. She slid off her shoes. Now that Linda was out of the house, Alice had more time to do projects like this. And Dave was so busy with the new store opening in January that she knew she would be doing most of the work by herself.
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