Chapter 13
Beckett had known his turn would eventually come around, but somehow in the whirlwind of it all, he’d hoped it wouldn’t.
They’d kept the funeral service small. Or at least, that had been the plan.
More people had shown up than had initially been planned for, and by the time Beckett began making his way to the front to give his speech, he realized just how crowded the church had become by the time the service started.
The Théraults weren’t religious, but their mother had insisted on having a church service.
No one had dared to raise an argument. Cynthia stayed busy running around greeting all the attendees and tending to the dozens of flower arrangements that had been delivered.
She didn’t sit down until the priest announced that the service was to begin shortly.
By keeping busy, she’d merely postponed the inevitable surfacing of her emotions.
Now they were surfacing all at once. Beckett wasn’t sure how to meet her gaze without feeling the urge to punch someone for making her sad.
Except in this case, the person responsible for her emotional trauma was dead, which made any kind of punching extremely difficult.
His goddamned shirt and tie were too tight.
Yanking on them a few times to loosen them, he sighed with relief when his top button popped loose from his persistent tugging.
He caught sight of Hayes sitting in the second row behind his parents and siblings, dressed in a new black suit.
They hadn’t packed any of their suits, so Hayes had volunteered to go shopping for the two of them while Beckett was with the family choosing a coffin.
Hayes looked sharp, as always, wearing his suit like a coat of armor, cool and impenetrable.
Beckett, on the other hand, was miserable wearing a suit.
Like he was putting on an act. He forced himself to breathe deeply, fighting the panic he could feel rising inside him, knowing it could quite easily take control if he let it.
In typical Beckett fashion, he hadn’t prepared a speech beforehand.
Hayes had broached the subject on several occasions, asking what he planned to say, but Beckett had brushed him off every time.
In his view, it wasn’t a matter of denial—it was simply that he didn’t have anything that he wanted to say.
He’d figured something would come to him when the time came.
But the more time that passed, the angrier he became about the whole damned thing.
He’d rather be anywhere but standing there in front of several dozen people to make a speech about his dearly departed brother with his hands clutching the sides of the old podium hard enough to crack the lacquered wood.
It made no sense to him. What the hell was he supposed to tell these people, most of whom he didn’t know.
Who the fuck cared? After all, Franklin had two other siblings.
He didn’t need Beckett to talk about jack shit.
Beckett had nothing to offer this crowd.
Nothing they would relate to, in any event.
He wasn’t a poet, or—fuck—even a particularly nice person.
In fact, he was a bonafide asshole. Franklin, if he was still here, could attest to that.
In fact, he’d have probably screamed it to the rafters if he could come back from the dead.
Their relationship had always been an uneasy one, so they tended to stay out of each other’s way most of the time to minimize opportunities for conflict.
He’d loved his brother despite their differences of opinion on just about everything.
Loved him still, but as he met his mother’s tearful gaze, his anger took control.
He had nothing kind to say. That’s what it all boiled down to. And that was the real crux of the matter. He didn’t know how to navigate his way around that little problem.
The service was well attended, but Beckett had his doubts about a lot of the people there.
Had they all known and loved his brother?
His brother was—had always been—as prickly as a cactus.
He’d been quite adept at digging for the truth and known to be relentless, and often ruthless, in how he went about it.
As a result, it was hard for Beckett to imagine that Franklin had made any real friends.
Nonetheless, there were a lot of people who’d shown up for the service.
Honestly, he wasn’t sure what angered him the most about standing here: that he had nothing positive to say about his brother, or that a lot of these people seated in front of him were phony, or that there had been a redeemable side to his brother that he’d missed out on somehow.
Anger and grief—with a healthy dose of guilt—swirled around in his gut, making for a strange cocktail that only made this moment more difficult than it already was.
Goddammit, why did Franklin have to do this to him—to them all?
The crowd was staring at him expectantly, waiting to hear what the youngest Thérault had to say.
His siblings had gone before him. Jackson had spoken of his brother’s unflagging support.
Of how Franklin had always been just a phone call away.
Maggie had talked about growing up with Franklin as an older brother who she had leaned on, depending on his advice.
Beckett hadn’t the faintest fucking idea what to say about Franklin.
He started speaking, hoping for a flash of inspiration along the way.
“For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Beckett, Franklin’s younger brother,” he said, figuring that introducing himself was a good stalling tactic, looking out at the crowd and trying to focus only on the people he knew. A few cousins and some old family friends had shown up.
“Franklin was a great older brother.”
Despite feeling the need to satisfy social norms, Beckett inwardly acknowledged the irony of this bald-faced lie.
In Franklin’s perfect world, there would have been another son between him and Beckett.
One who Franklin could have successfully influenced and guided over the years, taught the differences between right and wrong.
“He was—” What had he been? Sarcastic? Rude?
Challenging? A royal pain in the ass, all day, every day, when they lived under the same roof?
And even in the years after that? There was no question that he’d had a hand in shaping Beckett into the person who stood before them today, but was that something to brag about if, in the course of things, he revealed details about Franklin’s asshat treatment of him?
Probably not. Jesus God, but doing this speech was like crawling across a minefield.
In full battle rattle with a loaded rucksack.
“I mean—Franklin was brilliant.”
That much was true, at least, so Beckett mentally patted himself on the back for coming up with that one on the fly.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t just stop right there and then race out the church’s front door like he so desperately wanted to.
So, taking a deep, cleansing breath, he dived right back into his speech, hoping he could keep it rolling.
“It was like they made one kid with all of the other kids’ brains combined.
” His attempt to toss a joke into his speech fell flat.
Unsmiling, the attendees stared at him blankly.
Panic clawed at Beckett’s throat. Anger too.
Vengeful anger, the kind that usually resolved itself with a cleanly delivered punch, or a perfectly aimed bullet.
Not that this was anything new. That anger had been festering for days.
Dammit, Franklin asked for this. He’d fucking killed himself!
Out of nowhere, without giving anyone a heads up that anything was wrong!
While Beckett knew shit like this happened every fucking day, he still found it difficult to accept Franklin’s final act, especially since he’d given Beckett such a hard time about his mental problems after being discharged from the Marine Corps.
“Being younger, I was always getting compared to him at school. Teachers were usually excited to see me at first, because they figured after Maggie and Franklin—I’d be a smart angel of sorts,” Beckett shook his head, and chuckled.
A few people followed his lead, which lightened the mood somewhat.
“But they’d eventually realise that we were nothing alike, and I’d get the old ‘your brother would never have—' lecture every day. He was always the smartest kid in class. In fact, he was the smartest kid period. Nose always stuck in a book, always trying to outwit everybody all the time. Getting the last word in was virtually impossible with Frank.”
Although those remarks weren’t really very kind, they were sure as hell true.
The last time they’d spoken, they’d nearly come to blows because Franklin couldn’t resist doing a psychoanalysis of his relationship with Hayes, despite Beckett’s protestations.
The irony that Franklin had, once again, gotten in the last word before killing himself was just feeding the fire burning in Beckett’s gut.
“You should know—” Beckett said, his previously tight control on his temper suddenly slipping right off the leash, “Franklin was brilliant, but in the end, he was just as fucking stupid as the rest of us.” Giving in to a combination of extreme emotional and physical exhaustion, he’d lowered his inhibitions far enough to share the truth.
The crowd stirred uneasily and began whispering among themselves.
He looked to Hayes to see how he had reacted.
Hayes remained expressionless, alert to Beckett’s sudden change in mood as well as those who’d listened and reacted to Beckett’s remarks.
His body language was tense and he looked poised to spring into action at any given moment.
Beckett found Hayes to be a source of strength, which he used now to continue his speech.