11. Amazing Grace
Chapter eleven
Amazing Grace
She had been with the family for an hour before the service began.
That was the part nobody saw, the part that happened in the small private room off the main hallway of Pine Hollow Community Church that Pastor Cole kept for exactly this purpose, a room with comfortable chairs and soft light and a box of tissues on every surface and nothing on the walls that would demand anything of the people sitting in it.
Julie had used that room more times than she could count.
She knew its particular quiet and the way it held grief without amplifying it, and she was grateful for it this morning the way she was always grateful for the small dignities that made the hardest things slightly more bearable.
Jake had arrived first with Josiah, the two of them coming through the side door in the early September morning with the particular stillness of men who had been up most of the night and had moved through the early hours on something other than sleep.
Julie had met them at the door and Jake had looked at her and she had looked at him and neither of them had said anything for a moment because there was nothing that needed saying that hadn't already been said.
She had shaken his hand and held it for a moment longer than a handshake and he had nodded and that had been enough.
The children had arrived in stages, Jessica and Caleb together, then Abby and Marcus who were holding hands the way they had been holding hands since the night their mother died and showed no signs of stopping, then Noah and Grace and Sam in a cluster, and finally Hannah Walker coming through the door with Lily on her hip and Wren's hand in hers and Tyler walking close beside her, and behind them Adam with his hand on Tyler's small shoulder.
Julie had moved through the room the way she moved through all rooms in this capacity, quietly and with purpose, making sure everyone had water and tissues and a place to sit and someone to stand near, checking on the little ones, keeping an eye on Jake.
Tyler had pressed himself against Hannah's side and stayed there.
Lily had fallen asleep against Hannah's shoulder with the unconscious grace of a five year old who had been held so much in the last week that sleep had become her default response to being carried.
Wren had sat very still in a chair that was too big for him and looked at his shoes and Julie had crouched down beside him and said his name and he had looked up at her with Kali's eyes.
She had smiled at him and told him his mama would be so proud of him today and he had nodded with the solemn gravity of a five year old boy doing the most serious thing he had ever done.
She had stood up and looked out the window for a moment after that.
Josiah had stayed close to his father the entire time, not hovering, not performing, just present in the way of a nineteen year old who had stepped into something larger than himself and was going to see it through.
At one point Jake had put his hand on the back of his son's neck the way fathers did, brief and certain, and Josiah had straightened slightly.
Julie had looked away because that moment belonged to them.
When it was time she had gathered them, gently and without fuss, and walked them from the private room to the back of the church where Pine Hollow was already seated and waiting.
She had taken them down the center aisle herself, leading them to the front pew with the quiet authority of someone who had done this enough times to make it feel like guidance rather than direction.
She had gotten Jake and the little ones settled, Lily transferred from Hannah's arms to Jake's lap where she belonged, Wren tucked in beside his father, the older children arranged around them, and then she had caught Jake's eye one more time and he had given her the smallest nod and she had stepped back and taken her place at the rear of the church.
She stood at the back and watched and held herself where she needed to be.
Kali Peterson lay in the casket that Julie had chosen with Jake on a quiet Thursday afternoon, simple and right, exactly what Kali had said she wanted, nothing elaborate The wildflowers from Adam's meadow were arranged around it the way Kali had asked, loose and natural and smelling like the end of summer.
The blue scarf was tied exactly as it should be because Lila Monroe had come in that morning and done it herself and had not said a single word the entire time, just worked with the focused precision of a woman doing the most important thing she had ever done with her hands.
Julie had stood in the doorway and watched her and had not said anything either.
She told herself it was the same as it always was. The same work, the same room, the same words that got said over and over in places like this one across decades and generations. That was true. It was all of that.
It was also not the same at all.
Pastor Nathan Cole came to the front of the church and the room went quiet.
Julie had watched Nathan Cole conduct more services than she could count.
He was good at this work in the way that the best ones were good at it, not performing grief but inhabiting it alongside the people who were living it, his voice carrying the words without letting the words become rote, finding the particular human truth in the language that had been used for centuries because it kept being true.
He looked at Jake when he spoke and he looked at the children and he looked at Pine Hollow gathered in its pews and he said the things that Kali had told him to say and he said them as though he meant every one of them, because he did.
They were the words that had been given to him by a dying woman and he was careful with them.
Julie stood at the back and watched and listened and kept her breathing even.
She had done a lot of funerals for people she knew.
That was the nature of spending your whole life in a small town doing this particular work.
She had buried people she had gone to school with and people who had taught her and people who had known her parents and people who had been part of the fabric of her days for as long as she could remember.
She had stood in this room and in this place and held herself steady for all of them because that was what she did and it was what they needed.
Kali had been different.
Kali Peterson had been the person who brought muffins to the funeral home on Tuesday mornings because she said Julie needed someone to make sure she ate breakfast and had appointed herself that person without asking.
She had been the person who called on a random Wednesday afternoon just to talk, not about anything in particular, just to be in conversation, because she said Julie spent too much time with people who couldn't talk back and needed the balance.
She had been the person who knew about Mark, really knew, not just the facts of it but the texture of it, the particular shape of the loss and what it had done to Julie and what it hadn't done and what she was still carrying, and who had never once tried to fix it or minimize it or suggest that time healed things, because Kali Peterson had too much respect for the truth to say things that weren't true.
She had been an ally. She had been a confidant.
She had been the truest kind of friend, the kind that saw you clearly and chose you anyway, and Julie had not fully understood until this moment, standing at the back of Pine Hollow Community Church watching Pine Hollow grieve her, how much she had counted on her.
How much of the ground under her careful, managed, professionally composed life had been Kali Peterson.
Josiah stood up.
The church went very still.
He was nineteen years old and he walked to the front of the church and he turned and faced the people who had known his mother his entire life and he opened his mouth and he sang.
"Amazing grace, how sweet the sound."
His voice was his mother's gift to him, clear and true and carrying the kind of weight that only came from meaning every word.
Pine Hollow received it the way Pine Hollow received the things that mattered, completely and without reservation.
There was not a dry eye in the building within the first four bars and there was no shame in that, none at all.
"That saved a wretch like me."
Julie felt the tears before she was aware of deciding to cry.
They came the way they had come in the preparation room, from somewhere below the place where decisions were made, and this time she did not stop them and did not try to, because Kali had said she wanted people to leave thinking about the good parts and Julie thought that tears for someone you loved were the good parts, were the proof of the good parts, were the only honest response to a voice like Josiah Peterson's singing his mother home in the church where she had worshipped for fifty years.
She stood at the back of Pine Hollow Community Church and she cried quietly and she did not hide it and she did not manage it and she did not put it away.
She was aware of Ethan.
He was standing with the other pallbearers along the side of the church, Adam on one side of him and Luke Hayes on the other.
She was not looking at him but she felt the moment when he looked at her, felt it the way you felt someone's attention when it was particular and specific and meant for you.
She did not look back. She kept her eyes on Josiah and let the tears come and stood in her place and did her job and let herself be a person doing it at the same time, which was something she had never managed before in twenty years of this work.
"I once was lost but now am found."
Pastor Cole was crying too. She could see it from where she stood, the careful way he was holding himself, and she thought that was right, that was exactly right, that the people whose job it was to hold the room together were allowed to be in the room too, were allowed to feel the weight of what they were holding, and that Pine Hollow could see that and would not think less of them for it but would understand that it meant something, that it was its own kind of testimony to the woman in the casket at the front of the church.
"Was blind but now I see."
Josiah finished and the last note hung in the air of the church for a moment before Pine Hollow exhaled.
Jake Peterson bent his head over his daughter in his lap and his shoulders moved once, just once, and then he straightened and put his hand on Wren's small dark suited knee beside him and held it there, steady and present, a father doing the hardest thing a father could do, which was falling apart on the inside while holding his children together on the outside.
Julie wiped her face with the back of her hand.
She looked up and found Ethan looking at her across the church, and his expression was the same one he had worn in the preparation room, open and steady and not asking anything of her.
She held his gaze for a moment and then looked back at Pastor Cole who was beginning the eulogy, and she straightened her shoulders and took a breath and stood in her place.
She was the funeral director. She had a job to do.
But she was also Julie Anderson, who had lost her closest friend, and for the first time in twenty years of doing this work she let both of those things be true at the same time, standing in the back of Pine Hollow Community Church on a September morning while Pine Hollow grieved one of its own.
Funerals had a way of forcing people to stand still long enough to notice the shape of their own lives again.
She had thought that before, had thought it in her office, here in this church, and at gravesides and in the quiet aftermath of services when the last car had pulled away and she was left with the particular silence that followed grief.
She thought it now and did not look away from it the way she usually did.
Maybe that was part of grief too. Not just mourning the people you lost, but mourning the versions of yourself that disappeared alongside them.
She looked at Jake Peterson holding his children together in the front pew and she thought about thirty years of a life built from the inside out, about what it meant to love someone that completely and what it cost and what it gave back, and she thought about her own life and her own careful days and the walls she had built that kept everything manageable and safe and exactly the same from one year to the next.
Sometimes life brought you to painful crossroads where the life you imagined died before the next one fully existed yet.
She was aware of Ethan again without looking at him. The solid fact of him standing along the side wall of the church, present and steady and here, in Pine Hollow, in this room, on this day.
It was, she thought, what Kali would have wanted.
Not just the wildflowers and the blue scarf and the one song done right. But this. Julie Anderson standing in her place and feeling it and not pretending otherwise and maybe, finally, being willing to notice the shape of her own life and what it was missing.
Kali had always had opinions about pretending.