Who Do I Talk To? (42 page)

Our emotions spent, we finally flicked off lights and crept upstairs to our bedrooms—Celeste to her old room with the double bed that she'd earned as the “eldest” child, Honor and me to our old bedroom with the single beds and matching faded bedspreads. It had been a really, really long day . . . but somehow all the frayed and frazzled ends of my life felt tucked in for the moment, like the loose ends of yarn my mother used to tuck into her knitting.

Aunt Mercy showed up at ten the next morning with a manila folder tucked under her arm. “Hope you girls got a chance to sleep in.” She poured herself a cup of coffee, pulled out a chair at the kitchen table where Honor, Celeste, and I sat in the rumpled T-shirts and shorts we'd slept in, and pushed the folder toward us.

“Your parents' will. Your dad left a copy with me, and I suppose the lawyer has the original. I made an appointment for you girls at his office on Monday at ten.” She looked from one to the other of us. “Hope no one has to leave before then.”

Honor groaned. “My plane leaves from Billings late Tuesday afternoon, and it took us eight hours to drive from the airport—right, Celeste?”

Celeste nodded and picked up the manila envelope. “Yeah, but we can leave early Tuesday. Monday's fine.”

“Oh, brother,” I muttered, rolling my eyes. “It's going to take longer than that to deal with”—I waved my hand in a big circle that took in the whole house—“all this stuff.”

“It's only Saturday, Gabby. That's practically three days.” Celeste frowned. “Where are your city buddies? They could help, you know.”

“They
are
helping! Who do you think made the coffee before we came down? And they've taken Dandy . . . somewhere. Probably to stay out of our way.”

“Girls.” Aunt Mercy eyed us. “You should look at the will. You will have some decisions to make.”

Celeste slid the will out of the folder. “Okay, they named me executor when Mom died—but I understand you've got power of attorney, Gabby?” She frowned at me. “How does that work?”

“Don't worry, Celeste. That was just because of Mom's dementia.” I sighed. “Just read the will. The lawyer can figure it out.”

The will held no surprises. Divide everything equally three ways after paying any outstanding bills and funeral expenses. That sounded hopeful. Maybe my account could get reimbursed for the trip after all. I could sure use that.

Celeste stuffed the simple form back in the envelope. “Mom had . . . what? An annuity she was living on? Maybe some savings . . .” Her eyes roved around the house. “The big thing will be selling the house. Can't do
that
in a day.”

Honor stuck out her lip. “Wish I could buy it. Seems like it oughta stay in the family.”

Celeste and I both stared at her. “You buy it? Would you really move back to Minot?”

Honor shrugged. “Maybe. River and Ryan . . . I dunno. They've been hanging with a pretty fast crowd—River especially. He'll be a junior next year, Ryan a sophomore. Maybe they could finish high school here. But . . .” She shrugged again.

It was hard to imagine my tattooed middle sister, with her green-and-red-streaked hair and feather-and-beads, skinny braids, fitting back into small-town life in North Dakota. But it was a moot point. She couldn't afford the house anyway. Me either. And Celeste wasn't about to trade her log cabin outpost and park ranger husband in Denali National Forest for an old, two-story frame house in sagebrush country.

We spent the rest of the day making an inventory of furniture and household stuff. It felt weird, trying to decide what to leave with the house—we could sell it furnished—and what to divide between us. As long as Mom and Dad were alive, it had been sweet to come home to this house full of childhood memories. But, no, I didn't want to move back to Minot. I'd been gone too long. Besides, we
had
to sell it. Closest thing to an inheritance we three girls had.

I felt a tad guilty wishing we could sell it tomorrow. But, I told Jodi later, as she helped me count the china, glassware, and ironed tablecloths in the dining room hutch, I could sure use my third to help me rent that apartment in Wrigleyville and get back on my feet. My ticket to getting an actual address to prop up my custody petition.

Lucy shut herself into the downstairs bathroom and scrubbed it until floor, sink, tub, and wall tiles sparkled, then repeated the process in the second-floor bathroom—which seemed odd to me, since the Lucy I first met had been living under a bush, and housekeeping wasn't exactly a necessity. But it knocked the chips off my sisters' shoulders, and they started warming up to Lucy in little ways—a smile, a nod, an invitation to “come sit down, we're making some lemonade . . . want some?”

Four o'clock rolled around much too soon, when we were supposed to go to the funeral home for the family viewing. “You go on,” Jodi said, when Aunt Mercy invited her and Lucy to go along. “This is your time.” I wished I could stay home too. I'd been through this once before at the funeral at Manna House. The memory was bittersweet, sad but satisfying, too, and I didn't really want to go through it again. But this was the first time for Celeste and Honor, so I climbed into Aunt Mercy's car.

The viewing room at the funeral home felt like a different planet from the multipurpose room at Manna House. Piped-in organ music instead of SouledOut's electronic keyboard. The funeral home staff talking in discreet, low tones instead of Precious loudly scolding the girls wearing low-cut tops and tight skirts. Tomorrow at the funeral, church folks and former patrons of Dad's carpet store would come to pay their respects, their faces pale or sunburned instead of the black, brown, and tan skin tones that populated Manna House. And we'd all speak North Dakota's flat, Midwestern English, instead of the street slang peppering most conversations at the shelter, with bits of Spanish, Italian, Asian, and Jamaican patois thrown in.

Still, standing with Aunt Mercy and my sisters beside the open casket, looking at the still, peaceful form that was our mother, we melded, sharing tissues and hugs. The tears came, fresh and cleansing. I was glad I came for this sacred moment . . . just us. Celeste and Honor and I had been apart too long—not just in distance and lifestyles, but letting our everyday lives and thoughts and care for one another drift further and further apart, like flotsam at sea.

I wanted my sisters back. I needed all the family I could get. I didn't know how to tell them, but I reached out my arms and slid one around each sister's waist as I made a silent vow.
Mom, I'm going to do whatever I can to keep our family together, I promise—

“What is
that
?” Honor suddenly spluttered, pulling away from my embrace. She reached into the casket under the folds of my mother's pastel flower-print Sunday dress and pulled out a wadded-up purple knit hat with a crocheted flower bobbing on the brim.

Lucy's hat.

Her final gift to her friend.

I collapsed in a chair and laughed. And then I cried. And then I made my sisters put the hat back in the casket again, tucked beneath the folds of Mom's dress.

chapter 43

We picked up some Chinese takeout on the way back to the house, only to find out that Jodi had found a package of frozen chicken in Mom's basement freezer and had a pan of honey-baked chicken in the oven. “Told you you'd make a good Jewish mother,” I teased, giving her a hug. I pulled her aside and told her about the purple knit hat, making her promise not to tell Lucy we'd discovered it.

All of us were too beat to do any more sorting or packing up of Mom's things, and we actually ended up playing a ruthless game of Monopoly all evening—well, we three sisters and Jodi, that is. Lucy and Dandy disappeared outside for their evening walk, and Aunt Mercy announced that her Monopoly days were long gone, and she'd see us tomorrow for church.

I looked at my sisters. They looked at me. I cleared my throat. “I think we'll take a pass, Aunt Mercy. The funeral and burial are tomorrow afternoon. I think we need the morning to keep sorting Mom's stuff. We don't have that much time.”

Which turned out to be true. The next morning Jodi packed most of Mom's clothes in large plastic bags to take to Goodwill—none of us sisters could bear to do it—though she asked permission to let Lucy pick out some things as a keepsake. I knew Mom's dresses, skirts, and slacks would never fit Lucy's ample behind, but the old lady almost reverently picked out some silky head scarves and took all of Mom's socks.

The day seemed to pass in a blur. At one point, Lucy asked where she could find a shovel, and I sent her to the garage, too distracted to wonder what she wanted a shovel for. Outside, the sky was clear and the heat index hovered somewhere up in the nineties. “Thought it was s'posed ta be cold up here in the North,” Lucy grumbled as the five of us climbed into Moby Van to meet Aunt Mercy for the two o'clock funeral. None of us answered, willing the AC in the van to hurry up before we all sweated our good clothes. Jodi had ironed Lucy's flower print skirt that she'd worn to Mom's funeral at Manna House and even tried to style her choppy hair a little, but to little avail. The old lady had been wearing the purple knit hat for so long, I hadn't realized what a squirrel's nest had grown underneath.

I could only imagine what the good folks of Minot were thinking when Lucy plonked herself down in a front-row seat at the funeral home.

Aunt Mercy had printed a nice program with a picture of Mom on the front and the obituary I'd written on the inside. Several new flower arrangements from my parents' church and some of Dad's old employees flanked the casket, open once again for a half hour before the service, then closed for the last time.

But the funeral service had almost no meaning for me. It lacked the life and celebration of the service we had at Manna House, though people were kind, said how good it was to see the three Shepherd girls home again, what wonderful people Noble and Martha Shepherd were, the town was going to miss them . . .

The burial, however, was a different story. The white-haired pastor of the little stone church my parents had attended in recent years read the Twenty-third Psalm as we three girls and Aunt Mercy sat in folding chairs by the open graveside, which had been dug right beside my father's grave. A final prayer, and then several people pulled flowers out of the arrangements standing nearby, placed them on top of the casket poised over the open grave, and turned to go.

“Wait a minnit!”

I winced at Lucy's gravelly voice behind me. Heads turned. The old lady pushed her way through the small crowd until she stood right beside the grave. She was carrying the shovel, which she must have put in the van. “We ain't done yet! Look at that—they even got the pile o' dirt all covered up with that fake grassy stuff . . . whatchu call it? That sure ain't how it's done back where I come from.”

Celeste started to rise up out of her seat, but I put out an arm to stop her. “It's all right,” I said, loud enough for the others to hear. “This is Lucy, my mother's friend from Chicago.” I got up and stood beside her. “Do you want to say something, Lucy?”

“Yeah. I ain't got any fancy words, but ever since we brought Miz Martha back home here, it's been eatin' at me. I met this lady here”—she patted the casket—“at a homeless shelter back in Chicago, where we was both stayin' . . .”

Celeste and Honor squirmed, and glances passed between folks in the crowd.

“. . . an' then I come here and see that Miz Martha has a real nice house, just like a picture in a magazine. Not big an' fancy, but comfortable, nice place ta raise a family, nice place ta grow old in.
Lot
better than a homeless shelter, even if Manna House is one o' the better ones 'round Chicago.”

Jodi slipped up and stood on the other side of Lucy, as if owning what Lucy was trying to say. A smile passed between us.

“An' yet she came to Chicago and stayed in a shelter, and ever'body called her Gramma Shep . . .” That got a chuckle from a few folks in the crowd. “An' she loved on the little 'uns 'at didn't have no home, an' read 'em stories, an' let Hannah paint her nails, an' let me take care o' her dog, when I ain't never had no dog of my own . . .”

Now tears were spilling down Lucy's cheeks. I saw a few other tears on the faces around the grave, too, before my own eyes blurred up.

“Just gotta say . . . kinda reminds me of all that Jesus talk I hear at the shelter, 'bout how He left heaven and came down to earth to live with all us riffraff.” She sniffed and wiped her wet face with a big handkerchief she pulled out of somewhere. “That's all I wanna say. 'Cept”—she waved the shovel—“I don't plan on walkin' off till I see this good woman to her final restin' place. Now, you there . . .” She pointed at the funeral home staff. “Get that fake grass stuff off that pile of dirt, put the casket in the ground, and let's finish this up right.”