“No, no, no. Please go back. I’ll be fine.”
“I’ll come and visit this summer,” Paul said, as Alice wiped tears from her face with an index finger. Her blond hair was swept back in a French braid that went down her back. She wore a dark grey dress, low cut in the front, but with a black shawl over her shoulders. Her face was chalky white, more startling because of the bright crimson lipstick she’d put on. Harry tried to remember if he’d ever seen her with lipstick, and decided that the last time had probably been when she had married his father, at a low-key ceremony at a hotel in Ogunquit. It seemed a long time ago, but it was less than four years.
The service was held at the First Parish Unitarian Universalist, a white wooden church with a high steeple that was on the Old Post Road. Harry, Alice, and Paul arrived early, and Harry and Alice spoke to the minister, a grey-haired woman over six feet tall, who went over what she planned on saying. Harry knew most of it already. It was going to be a short service; two hymns, a eulogy, a reading by Carl Ridley, Bill’s cousin from Sanford. Alice had already met with the minister to go over some of the details of Bill’s life, and the minister briefly recounted them now. Harry was glad that there was significant mention of his mother, and how devoted Bill had been to her. It was his only concern, worried that Alice had only seen Bill’s life as beginning when she had come into it. But the words the minister planned on saying comprised all of Bill’s life, including both his marriages, his son, his lifelong affair with books, even his infamous cooking. As Harry, Alice, and the minister talked, a few early-arriving guests filtered slowly into the church. Harry wondered how many there’d be, and how many he would know. The interior of the church was cool, but Harry’s palms were sweating, and he could feel a trickle of sweat along his rib cage. He’d only ever been to two funerals in his life. His mother’s, and now his father’s. He’d never known his grandparents on his father’s side, since they’d both died before Harry was born. His maternal grandparents were both alive, but they hadn’t left their retirement community in Florida in many years.
“And how about you, Harry?” The minister was speaking to him, and he wasn’t sure what she was asking.
“I’m sorry,” he said, aware he was blinking his eyes rapidly.
“Did you want the opportunity to say a few words?”
“Oh . . . Oh, no. Alice already asked me. Thank you, though.”
“Why don’t you two take a seat, up here in front.”
It was a relief to sit, to hear the murmur of people behind him, and know that he didn’t have to acknowledge them, at least not yet. He felt guilty that he wasn’t saying anything at his father’s funeral, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He didn’t trust himself to speak in public, worried that he’d be overtaken by either anger or grief, or a combination of both. He even still worried about his lisp, long eradicated except in his mind, where he often heard the echoes of how he used to speak. There’d be a receiving line after the service, and he’d have to speak then, of course, but just to people one-on-one. Still, the thought of it made his skin feel prickly, and his breathing shallow.
Before the service began, his aunt Anne and her three silent, muscle-bound sons, all in high school now, sat in the pew directly behind Harry. He leaned back to kiss her, and she said: “I still don’t believe it, Harry,” genuine grief in her voice.
“I know,” he said, “I don’t, either.”
“I meant to call you, Harry, but I didn’t have your phone number. I spoke with Alice and she said you’d be coming home soon, but I want you to visit us as soon as you feel able to leave her alone.”
Harry said he would.
She was telling him again how she was still in shock when the service began. Harry turned back as the minister adjusted the microphone at the pulpit. He took a deep breath to prepare himself, but the service was relatively painless. The minister, except for the opening and closing prayers, kept the religion to a minimum, aware that Bill Ackerson was a twice-a-year churchgoer at most (Christmas Eve services and maybe Easter Sunday). For the eulogy she simply recounted his life story, his childhood in Maine, the Peace Corps service in the Pacific Islands, his years as a book scout and then a bookseller in Manhattan, meeting his first wife and having a son, his wife’s brave battle with cancer, then his return to Maine and his second marriage. She talked about his love of the coast of Maine. “Alice spoke to me about Bill’s need to see the ocean every day. How it grounded him. He found his true and spiritual home here in Kennewick, and for that we should all be grateful.”
Alice dipped her head next to Harry, and covered her face with her hands. He slid toward her and put an arm around her narrow shoulders. Behind him he could hear stifled crying.
After the eulogy, Carl Ridley walked gingerly to the pulpit, a trembling sheet of paper in his hand. Tears already streaked Carl’s papery cheeks before he even spread out the sheet of paper in front of him. There was a long pause, Carl smoothing back his thinning hair, but then he was speaking, saying how Bill’s office was decorated by two things: stacks and stacks of books, and one poem, tacked onto the wall. The poem was “If,” by Rudyard Kipling (he pronounced it “Kiplin’”). Harry had heard the poem before, or at least the line that went, “If you can meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same,” but he’d forgotten that the poem was a message from a father to a son. Harry tensed his jaw. His aunt, from behind him, put a hand on his shoulder, making it worse. But then at the end of the recitation—“You’ll be a man, my son!”—Paul leaned close to his ear and said, “Jesus, salt in the wound,” and Harry quietly laughed, feeling better.
When the final hymn was sung and the closing prayer spoken, Harry finally turned around to see a sizable crowd, much larger than he’d thought. In the receiving line, many of the people who shook his hand and muttered their sympathies were strangers, but some were cousins and second cousins whom he barely remembered. No one knew what to say, so everyone said how sorry they were, and Harry nodded and thanked them.
While speaking to a man who referred to himself as Ackerson’s Books’ best customer, Harry noticed a dark-haired woman, probably in her twenties, who had remained seated in her pew, toward the back of the church. Harry thought she was staring at him but couldn’t be sure; maybe she was staring at the reception line in general, wondering whether she should join in. She was vaguely familiar to Harry, and he wondered what her connection was to his father. Was she the daughter of a friend? As though she felt Harry’s eyes on her, she suddenly tilted her head away, revealing a strong jawline and an upturned nose, and Harry remembered where he’d seen her before. She’d been walking along the road near his father’s house on the first night that Harry stayed there. She’d been wearing a headband and had been looking at the house, as though she knew what had happened there.
“Are you also interested in books?” said the man still speaking with Harry.
He was standing too close, his breath sharp with the bitter smell of coffee. Harry willed himself to not lean backward, said: “Not the way my father was, no. But I do like books.”
“Not obsessed, eh?”
“No. Not obsessed.”
The man moved along, and so did the line. When Harry looked for the dark-haired woman again, he couldn’t spot her anywhere.