Dirt
The dress fit exactly the way I expected it to. Forty percent synthetic blend does not negotiate.
I had been awake when the alarm went off, the way I had been awake for most things lately, technically present, functionally absent.
Zane had set it for seven, even though neither of us needed waking.
I think he set it because a day like this needed an official start time, something with a number on it, so it would feel like it began on purpose instead of just arriving.
I put on the dress standing in front of the closet door, not the mirror.
I did not want to see what it did to my face.
I knew the math of it already: black wool, my skin gone the color of paper these last few days, my eyes doing the thing they do when I had not slept in a bed.
I did not need a mirror to confirm the equation.
I just needed the sleeves to go on right.
The shoes were exactly where I had left them, heels toward the door, toes toward the window. Size seven and a half. I put them on sitting on the edge of the bed I still had not slept in, my feet finding the leather like they remembered something my brain did not.
Zane was already dressed when I came downstairs.
Black suit, the one from his cousin’s wedding.
He’d shaved, and missed a small patch near his jaw, and I looked at it for longer than I should have, because it was the only uneven thing in the entire house that morning, and I needed something uneven to look at.
“You ready?” he asked. It was not really a question. It was a sound he made so the silence would not get the last word.
“Yes,” I said, because it was the correct answer regardless of whether it was true.
The drive to Saint Jude’s took four minutes. I counted the turns. Left on Holloway. Right on the avenue with the dead elm the town never replaced. I knew this route the way I knew very few things in my life, completely, instinctively, without having to think about where my body was taking me.
I used to walk it. Not drive it. Walk it, at two in the morning, when the house felt like it was made of teeth and I could not sleep inside it.
Out the back gate, down Holloway, past the dead elm, through the gap in the fence nobody had ever bothered to fix.
It took about eleven minutes on foot, though it had never once felt like a measurable distance back then.
It had felt like the only direction that did not hurt, because at the other end of it was my mother.
She was buried beneath an angel. White marble, taller than I am, wings curved outward like she was built to shelter something.
My dad designed the angel. He spent months getting it perfect.
He never explained why. I think some part of him understood I would need a destination, a marker tall enough to find in the dark from any direction before I ever understood I would need one myself.
I knew that cemetery the way you know a childhood bedroom.
Not from one visit, not from a single funeral, but from years of small, accumulated trespass.
I knew which gravel paths were loud underfoot, and which ones went quiet near the older rows, where the ground had settled enough to swallow sound.
I knew the caretaker’s shed smelled like gasoline and cut grass even at midnight.
I never wandered. I never read the other names.
There was one stone I went there for, and I went straight to her, every time, the way you walk to your own kitchen in the dark without needing the light switch.
I sat at her feet more nights than I could count.
Drunk and not drunk. Crying and not crying.
Talking to a woman who never once talked back and somehow was still the only person who ever let me finish a sentence.
I told her things I never told anyone breathing.
I think that some nights, I told her more than I told Lucy.
She could not disappoint me. She could not leave.
She had already done the worst thing a mother can do, and there was nothing left for her to ruin.
I had never once, in all those nights, thought of it as visiting a grave.
It was just where my mother was. The way some people’s mothers are in the kitchen, or asleep down the hall.
Mine was down the street, past the dead elm, through the gap in the fence, and some part of me had treated that distance as ordinary for so long that I forgot it wasn’t.
Today there was no gap in the fence. There was a gate, wrought iron, painted a gray that had gone slightly green at the hinges, standing open for a line of cars instead of one girl on foot.
The procession moved at the speed grief moves at, which is slower than traffic, slower than patience, slower than anything has the right to be in the morning.
Eleven cars behind the hearse, headlights on in the daylight.
After my dad stopped taking me to visit, I had never come here alone.
I had never come here for anyone but her.
Beyond the gate, past rows I could have walked blind, the angel rose into view exactly where I knew she would be, white against the dark trees, wings curved like she was still protecting something years later.
My mother was not used to an audience before. Neither was I.
And somewhere beside her, in the ground I had walked past a thousand times without once looking down, they were about to dig a second hole.
Zane’s hand found mine before I had asked for it. I let him have it. I did not squeeze back. I did not think either of us expected me to.
“Whenever you’re ready,” he said.
I was never going to be ready. But the car door was open, and the grass was very green and vivid, like the hummingbirds or a warning, and somewhere up ahead, a man I used to know as my father was waiting in a box for me to walk toward him one last time.
I got out of the car. The grass held the shape of every shoe that walked across it, and mine left their own signature before the green sprang back, indifferent.
I counted forty people by the time we reached the canopy.
I stopped counting after that, not because I lost interest, but because counting required a kind of attention I suddenly did not have anymore.
The cemetery had stopped being a place I knew by heart.
It had become a place full of strangers standing on top of it.
No one here was family. Everyone seemed like a stranger.
The only bloodline that remained had sent flowers and withheld her presence.
My only aunt could not risk seeing her sister’s face in mine, even at a time like this.
A man in a navy suit took my hand first. His grip was firm; his face arranged into the false sincerity of someone who had rehearsed this exact expression in a car mirror on the way over.
“Seren. I’m so sorry. Your father was a remarkable man.
Worked with him on the Hendricks acquisition, must be, God, four years ago now.
Sharp as anything. The whole floor is going to feel it.
” He patted my shoulder twice, like he was testing produce.
“He would talk about you, all the time. He was so proud of how smart you are.”
I did not know what to do with that. I had never once heard my father use the word smart about me to my face.
I filed it next to the rest of the things people kept handing me, facts about a man I half recognized, assembled from boardrooms and golf outings and quarterly reviews, a version of Tom Garcia who apparently existed in full color somewhere I’d never been invited.
“He’d been working from home so much this year,” a woman said further down the line, dabbing at her eyes with a folded tissue.
“I kept telling him, Tom, come back to the office, we miss you, and he’d just laugh and say he was finally figuring out work-life balance.
I thought it was sweet. I had no idea.” Her voice cracked on the last word, and someone behind her took her elbow and steered her gently away before she could say anything else.
Zane’s hand stayed locked around mine through all of it, his thumb tracing the same slow circle over and over, the only thing in the entire morning that felt like it belonged to me instead of to the day.
Cassidy found me near the edge of the canopy.
She did not say anything performative. She just wrapped both arms around me, her chin fitting into the curve of my shoulder, and for one second, I let myself lean the smallest amount of weight into her before catching myself and standing back up straight.
Behind her, Blair touched my arm and said nothing too, which was somehow exactly the right amount of something.
“We’re right here,” Cassidy murmured. “The whole way through. Whatever you need.”
I nodded. I did not trust my mouth to produce the correct response.
The casket sat on its frame beneath the canopy, the wood the color of strong tea, brass fittings catching the gray morning light.
Beyond it, the open ground waited, and beside that, close enough that I could have reached to her blind, my mother’s angel stood watch over the whole proceeding, wings spread, face turned slightly toward the sky the way it always had been, completely unbothered by the fact that her audience had finally arrived.
I did not look at the rows beyond her. I never looked at the rows beyond her.
The priest spoke. I heard the shape of his voice more than the words, reciting something he had recited at a hundred other gravesides, his voice worn smooth with use. I caught the word beloved. I caught the word rest. I did not catch most of what came between them.