Presentable

I had checked in the car, but the car was a sitting check. You could have everything where it belonged sitting down and then stand up and introduce a completely different set of circumstances.

“Go on,” I told Ruth. “I'll be right there.”

She looked at my hand.

“Please,” she said.

“I'm getting my phone.”

“Your phone's on the dashboard.”

Our daughter was already outside, holding the casserole her mother had insisted on bringing. There was no meal at the funeral home. I'd explained this twice. Ruth said somebody would eat it, which was how she approached most arrangements: somebody, eventually, would do something.

I waited until they were through the doors. Then I stood beside the car, opened my coat and looked.

Closed. Right up to the top. The little metal tab lay flat.

I pressed it once with my thumbnail so I would have a physical sensation to remember. A look could get confused with a previous look. The thumbnail was current.

Inside, my brother told me I was late.

“The service is at eleven.”

“Your mother's been asking.”

He said your mother whenever he wanted to emphasize an obligation. At the hospital she'd been my mother for three consecutive days.

He hugged me. Hard. It pulled my shirt up beneath my waistband.

The men's room had a full-length mirror opposite the sinks. Somebody at Henshaw & Sons understood that a person might need to see himself before appearing in public.

I went into the end stall anyway.

There was no actual problem with these trousers. I'd bought them in March for a regional meeting and stood in front of forty people explaining why their expense claims were being returned. One man wanted to discuss his mileage calculation in front of the whole room, so I let him, including the part where he'd claimed to drive to a hotel that turned out to be next door to his house. Afterward two people asked me to send them the slides. Nobody had had to tell me how to stand.

That was March.

Now I couldn't remember whether I'd used my right thumbnail in the car or my left. It mattered because the left had a torn edge. I should have felt that.

I lowered the zip an inch and raised it again. This was a mistake. I knew it immediately. Until then I'd been verifying a closed zipper. Now I had personally opened it, and the memory of opening it would be available later when I needed the memory of closing it.

I held the tab at the top.

“Closed,” I said quietly.

Somebody at the sinks stopped running the water.

I waited for him to leave.

He waited too.

My father was wearing the tie I'd given him for his seventieth birthday. Ducks flying diagonally across a burgundy background. He'd said it looked like something a substitute teacher would wear and left it in the box for nine years. My mother had put it on him now that he couldn't object.

She sat beside the coffin with her handbag on her knees.

“Where's Ruth?”

“Finding somewhere for the casserole.”

“Oh, good.”

Apparently there was an entire casserole arrangement from which I'd been excluded.

My mother touched my cuff.

“That's a nice suit.”

“Thank you.”

“Stand up. Let me look.”

“I'm standing.”

“Straight, then.”

I straightened. She brushed something off my lapel. I kept my elbows close to my sides so the coat wouldn't open too far.

“You've got your piece?”

“In my pocket.”

“Your father would like that. You speaking.”

He would have preferred my brother. My brother could tell a story without referring to paper, principally because he didn't care whether any of it had happened.

My father looked smaller than he had in the hospital. His mouth had been arranged into an expression of mild satisfaction. I recognized it from the year he got the council to cut down our neighbor's tree.

When I was twelve, he'd announced my open fly at a church picnic by standing up and asking whether anybody had lost a horse.

People hadn't understood. He made sure they did.

“Barn door's open, Philip.”

Then, because I was wearing underwear and there wasn't anything to see: “Don't worry. Nothing's getting out.”

The woman serving beans had bent over the table laughing. She was holding a spoon with a white plastic handle. I remembered that handle better than I remembered her face.

He used the joke at my wedding. My fly was closed that day. He said he'd wanted to be sure.

I leaned toward him now, close enough to see powder caught in the hairs beside his nose.

“Turned out nice,” my mother said.

“Yes.”

I couldn't check with her watching.

Ruth found me in the corridor outside the toilets.

“Not in there again.”

“I've been drinking coffee.”

“You haven't had any coffee.”

“I had some at home.”

“Phil.”

She used to answer properly. At first she would look and say, “Yes, it's done up.” Then it became “Yes.” Recently she'd begun saying, “We've talked about this,” which supplied no information whatsoever.

“Just look,” I said.

“No.”

“It takes half a second.”

“Then do it yourself.”

“I have.”

“I know you have.”

A cousin passed us carrying a framed photograph. Ruth put her hand on my shoulder until he was gone. She could still produce the appearance of a functioning marriage at very short notice.

“I'm doing the reading in twenty minutes.”

“I know.”

“In front of everybody.”

“You don't have to explain the funeral to me.”

I lowered my voice further.

“Why would you choose today to make a point?”

Her hand came off my shoulder.

For a second I thought she might say something loud enough to bring people out of the viewing room. Instead she asked where our daughter was.

“With my mother.”

“She was looking for you.”

“I'm right here.”

“Yes,” Ruth said. “You keep being right here.”

The funeral director's name was Martin. He had a small brown stain on one tooth. I concentrated on it when he showed me where I would stand.

The lectern had a sloping wooden top on a single brass pole.

“Is there another one?”

“Another lectern?”

“One with a front.”

He glanced at it.

“This is the one we generally use.”

“A solid front.”

“For your notes?”

“No.”

I let him work on it.

“We could get you a chair.”

“I can stand.”

“Of course.”

He smiled with the stained tooth. Behind him my brother was laughing at something by the flowers. He had managed to get a cup of coffee.

“Could I stand behind the coffin?” I asked.

Martin stopped smiling.

“The family's seated on this side.”

“I understand where the family is.”

“The arrangement allows them to see you.”

“Yes,” I said.

He waited for me to say something else. I thanked him.

On my way back down the aisle I noticed that the seat of his trousers had gone shiny. The man wore those trousers to work every day without apparently giving them any thought.

Alice was thirteen. Her dress had pockets, which she'd demonstrated to me at home because it was unusual for a dress to have decent ones. Now both hands were in them.

“Grandma says she wants you.”

“I've just been with her.”

“She wants you again.”

“All right.”

We stood beside a display of little cards with my father's photograph on them. They'd used a picture from a barbecue and removed the beer. Part of his thumb remained suspended beside his shirt.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“You keep going away.”

I took out my folded pages and pretended to check their order. She waited.

“You remember Granddad at Christmas?” I said. “When he asked if I'd forgotten something?”

“The presents?”

“No. When we were leaving.”

“Oh.”

“It's just a stupid thing with my trousers.”

She looked down.

“They're shut.”

The relief came so quickly that I nearly sat down on the card table.

“You can see?”

“Yes.”

“From there?”

“Dad.”

“All right. Thank you.”

She took one of the cards. She rubbed the edge with her thumb, looking at the photograph.

“Do they leave his glasses on?”

“What?”

“When they close it.”

“I expect so.”

“Can he—”

She stopped.

“Can he what?”

“Nothing.”

She put the card in her pocket. I wanted to get back to the seat before anything disturbed the certainty she'd given me.

There were four people ahead of me in the front row. I had to turn sideways to get past their knees. My mother's friend gripped my hand and wouldn't let go until she'd said everything about the hospital, the kindness of the nurses, the bed by the window. I stood bent over her with my jacket caught behind her handbag.

By the time I sat down I needed to look again.

The order of service said A Son Remembers.

I'd asked for Philip. Martin had said this was their usual wording.

The minister began. He'd met my father once, during a period when my father believed the night nurse had taken his lawn mower, and had spent most of that visit promising to look into it. Now he spoke about his generous spirit. My brother nodded.

I slid my right hand between my thighs. Through the cloth I could feel the bottom of the zipper, which was useless. The relevant part was several inches higher, beneath the folded pages and the heel of my left hand.

My mother leaned against me.

For a moment I thought she was trying to see what I was doing.

Then her shoulders started moving.

I put my arm around her. She was very light. Her face pressed into my jacket, and I could feel the damp through the shirt beneath it. I held the pages across my lap with my other hand.

Across the aisle, Alice watched us.

My mother reached for a tissue. The packet was in her handbag on the floor. I could have bent down and got it, except bending would move the pages and pull the material tight. I pressed my knee against my brother's.

He looked at me.

I indicated the bag.

He picked it up, took out a tissue and reached across me to give it to her.

“Jesus Christ, Phil,” he whispered.

I kept holding her. The minister was describing a man who always put his family first.

When he said my name, my mother moved away and smoothed the wet place on my jacket.

I stood.

The pages slipped. I caught them against my stomach.

From the front row to the lectern there were perhaps eight steps. I covered them with my notes held low. Then I put the notes on the wooden slope and had nothing in my hands.

Somebody coughed.

I could see the full length of the aisle. Near the back, a man I didn't recognize was resting his elbows on his knees. He was already looking in the wrong place.

“My father,” I said.

The microphone made my voice enormous.

I lowered it.

“My father was a man who believed in doing things properly.”

This was true. He would send a meal back with half of it eaten. He'd once made my brother take down six shelves because the screw heads didn't match.

“He believed that if you were going to do a job, you ought to be able to put your name to it.”

My brother nodded again. He'd installed the shelves a second time using screws I'd driven to the hardware store to get. Dad never found out about that part.

I rested one hand against the front of my trousers. Too obvious. I moved it to my side.

The man near the back sat up.

“When I started my first job—”

I knew this paragraph. I'd written it at the kitchen table yesterday, trying to remember the name of the shop where he'd taken me to buy a shirt before my first day at work. We ate lunch afterward. He let me order a beer and didn't say anything when I couldn't finish it. There was a decent afternoon in there if I could get to it.

The zipper tab might have shifted when I stood. It probably hadn't. Probably was fine for everybody sitting down. I was the one up here.

I looked at Ruth.

She held my gaze. She knew exactly what I wanted.

I gave the smallest possible downward movement of my eyes.

She didn't move.

It seemed an extraordinary amount of marital anger to bring into a room containing my father's body.

“Excuse me,” I said.

The microphone caught that too.

I turned a page. It was the wrong page. At the bottom I saw we'll miss you, Dad, although I had four minutes left.

My mother had put another tissue to her face.

Then Alice moved her coat off her knees and leaned forward.

She looked. Deliberately, long enough to be certain. She looked back at me and nodded.

I took a breath.

“Before my first day,” I said, “he took me to buy a shirt.”

Afterward, people told me I'd done well to get through it.

I said thank you. My aunt held my face and said my father had heard every word. There were several things wrong with that proposition, but I let her finish.

My brother went with the coffin. I'd said my back wouldn't manage the weight.

Ruth drove my mother to the cemetery. Alice came with me. At the car I asked whether she'd keep an eye on things, just until the day was over.

“Like before?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

She answered without making me explain again.

At the grave, the grass was wet enough to darken my shoes. The straps beneath the coffin squeaked. My mother made a low sound I hadn't heard from her before, and my brother took her elbow.

Alice stood a few feet away from me, where we'd agreed. She had the little card in her hand. When the coffin began to move, she turned toward it.

I caught her eye.

She turned back.

The machinery stopped. Somewhere behind me a shovel scraped against concrete.

“Can I look now?” she whispered.

“Just another minute.”