by Maile Meloy
“So I wanted to say that I loved my father dearly,” Margot said, “and I think you’re all here because you saw the faith he had, that there is something of God in man. We’re not always deserving of that conviction. Most of the time we’re not. But he believed it of everyone he met. He believed it of each of you.”
By this point people were crying, throughout the church; Yvette could hear them rummaging for Kleenexes and blowing noses. Yvette wondered if she herself were made of stone, because she had no intention of crying now. She knew everything Margot was saying and didn’t think it needed to be aired here.
Then Margot stopped. “That’s all,” she said, in a small voice. “Thank you.”
She left the lectern carefully, as if unsure of her legs, and headed for the back of the church. Saffron’s uncle, Freddie Tucker, stood from a pew and followed her. People turned in their seats to watch them leave the church, and even the priest seemed distracted.
Finally Jamie stood up and addressed the startled congregation.
“My sister will be fine,” he said. “We’ll all sing St. Francis’s peace prayer now, which is in your programs. It was a song my father liked.”
The organist started up and vamped until people got their programs out, and then everyone began on Jamie’s cue.
85
ABBY STOOD IN HER grandparents’ crowded living room with a glass of wine she’d been handed, watching people talk, trying not to get drawn into conversation. Bennett was talking to the priest, and Owen was talking to Cara Ferris’s mother, and everyone else was talking to someone.
She went to get rid of the wine and saw her mother on the back porch, sitting with Jimmy Vaughan on the deck chairs. He was singing—Abby could hear him through the screen—one of the teenage songs he’d written for her:
And when I go out in the rain
I hear myself calling your name.
Her mother was laughing or crying, or maybe both at once.
Abby put the wine on the kitchen counter. Saffron, in an expensive and low-cut black suit, was in the kitchen directing the caterers like a conductor. Margot came in crying, with a smear of mascara under her eye.
“Will you take me to Santa Barbara?” she asked Abby. “It’s Dominick.”
“You don’t have to take care of him,” Abby said, though she thought her aunt had been right to post bail. “Especially not now.”
Margot shook her head. She looked puffy and strange. “That isn’t the point anymore,” she said. “Can we go in ten minutes?”
Abby went to her grandparents’ room for her coat. Yvette was sitting on the bed in her black dress with the curtains drawn. The room was dim.
“Oh, honey,” Yvette said. “I still can’t believe he isn’t here.”
Abby sat beside her, and Yvette took her hand.
“Do you remember when you came down here to stay, from Santa Rosa, when you had chicken pox?”
“Sure,” Abby said.
“You were so homesick and sad about your parents, and at night you would cry. And I would ask, ‘Do you want to go home?’ And you would say, ‘Grandma, I want to stay here, and I want to go.’ ”
“I don’t remember that.”
“Oh, it used to break my heart,” Yvette said. “But that’s how I feel now. I want to stay here, and I want to go. I can’t believe he left me.”
“We want you to stay,” Abby said. She felt how small Yvette’s hands were, bent and knobby from arthritis.
“Did you see how many people were there today?” Yvette asked.
Abby nodded.
“I want to tell you, honey,” Yvette said. “Life is so fragile. You have to remember that, when you love people. Because you can’t be ready for what this feels like.”
Abby nodded.
“Oh,” Yvette said, her face crumpling again. “He was a part of me, and now it’s gone.”
She cried a little longer, then touched up her lipstick and went to brave the living room. Abby called Peter, who was back in San Diego, from the bedside phone.
“Are you finished yet?” he asked.
“Almost. I’m driving Margot up to Santa Barbara. Something happened to Dominick Jay.”
“Some Christmas you’re having.”
“I hope this is the last thing.”
“Do you think he’s dead?”
She knew when he asked it. “Yes.”
Peter was silent. “I hate that you’re getting on the freeway for a dead guy.”
“It’s for Margot,” she said, and she wondered if they were going to the morgue, and if Margot would then go back to being Owen’s wife in Louisiana. That made her wonder about the rest of them: if Yvette could carry on without Teddy, with her friends and her shut-ins and her God. And if Jimmy and Clarissa would grow old together, or if there would be fights and infidelities and disillusionment, a drawn-out breaking up, and a repeat with someone new. If T.J. would lapse back into his sadness, and if Jamie was up to another dozen years, and more, of good-fatherhood.
“Hello?” Peter said. “Are you there?”
“I’m here.”
“Are you coming home?”
She was surprised by the word. “I have to go to Santa Barbara.”
“I mean after that.”
She turned the word over, but nothing else fit. Not her father’s house, made unrecognizable by the renters. Not her mother’s house, where boyfriends and girlfriends would come and go. Not Jamie’s couch, or Yvette’s bedroom, with a hundred years of pictures on the wall. But Peter’s apartment—was that home? The question wasn’t about the makeshift desk in the living room, or the bedroom window shaded with trees; it was about the place where Peter was.
“Yes,” she said.
“Good,” he said. “Come soon.”
About the Author
Maile Meloy was born and raised in Helena, Montana. She is the author of the story collection Half in Love and the novel Liars and Saints. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker and The Paris Review, and she received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004. She lives in California.
