The Sitting Up

Wakes are the best places to eat, if you know how to behave.

Nobody asks questions at a wake. People turn up at strange hours wearing strange faces, and somebody hands them a paper plate. Grief is hospitable that way. It has too much going on to check IDs.

I don't eat the ham, in case you were wondering. I eat what's underneath the ham. A room full of people has a taste, and most of the time it's cold tea: sadness, tiredness, a little guilt about the casserole. Fear is different. Fear tastes like pennies. Fear is the good stuff, and a wake always has a little hidden somewhere, because somebody in the room did something, or didn't do something, or is just sitting too close to the thing in the box.

I stood at the bottom of the Pruitt driveway at 11:52 on a Thursday night in October, watching the house. Every window was lit. Cars lined both sides of Tolliver Road, and one old pickup sat in the yard with its door still open.

Sitting up with the dead, they call it out here. Somebody stays awake beside the body from midnight until sunrise, and the lamp never goes out. Nobody could ever tell me what you were guarding the body from. I'd been to a lot of these.

I'll tell you something I don't tell people. I don't pick the face.

I come in empty, like a glove. Then the room gets a look at me, and the room hands me somebody. Whoever it can't stop thinking about, whoever it's trying hardest not to think about. It's not a talent. It's more like being a mirror that hasn't decided yet.

So I walked up the steps at midnight exactly, and somebody opened the door, and I felt it happen. My shoulders got wider. My jaw went a little crooked on the left side. My hands got rough, with a white scar across the right knuckles I'd never owned in my life.

"Oh," said the woman who'd opened the door, and she sat down very slowly on the hall bench, as though someone had cut her strings.

I'd been in the house four seconds. I hadn't even smelled the lilies yet.

The front room was like every front room. A coffin on two stands under the good lamp, the lid folded back. In it lay a tiny gray-haired woman in a blue dress, with a rosary wound through her fingers that she probably hadn't touched since 1974. Every mirror in the house had a bedsheet pinned over it. There were a dozen folding chairs and a dozen people in them, and every one of them was looking at me.

The woman from the bench had followed me in. She was maybe forty, with tired eyes and a pen stuck in her hair that she'd forgotten about. She stood in the doorway and looked at the face I was wearing like it was a bill she'd been dreading.

"Wes," she said.

Nobody else said anything. Somewhere a fork hit a plate.

"Wesley Pruitt," she said again. Her voice went up on the last syllable, and then she dragged it back down. "We buried you."

That's the line. I'd like it noted that I didn't write it. I only work here.

"Dee," said a big man in the corner recliner. He was the only one sitting like a person who'd arrived early to a bad meeting. "Dee, honey, don't."

"We buried you," Dee said, to me, ignoring him. "Eleven years ago. There was a service at the lake. Mom spoke. You've got a stone, Wes. It has your name on it, and the dates, and a little fish."

"I'm sorry," I said, in Wes's voice, which was low and sounded like gravel being walked on. It was just the first thing that came out. In my experience it usually is.

The big man's coffee cup tipped, and coffee ran across the knee of his good trousers. He didn't look down.

There it was. Pennies. Just a thin line of it at first, the way a cut tastes when you find it with your tongue, and then more, flooding the back of my teeth. Every other person in that room was sad or stunned or half-delighted. This man was terrified. He'd gone the color of old dishwater, and he was staring at me like I'd walked out of the lake in my Sunday clothes.

I filed that away. Then I did what you do when a room hands you a name. I sat down and tried to be it.

For the next two hours I was Wesley Pruitt, back from the dead, and I was lousy at it.

An aunt brought me a plate. She was the one who'd been crying in the hall, and she held my face in both hands like a melon she was checking for bruises.

"Wesley," she whispered. "Oh, honey. I thought you were dead."

"That's the consensus," I said.

She laughed and cried at the same time and gave me extra potato salad. A cousin called Tommy clapped my shoulder and asked where I'd been, and I said "Around," which satisfied him because he was a little drunk. Dee watched me from the kitchen doorway the whole time, the way you'd watch a dog you suspected of something.

At 2:10 she crooked a finger, and I followed her into the kitchen. It smelled like coffee and old linoleum. She shut the door and leaned on it.

"What did you give me," she said, "the night you left?"

I did what a man does when he has no idea. I said, "I don't remember."

"Good," Dee said. She slid down the door until she was sitting on the floor and put her face in her hands. "Because it was nothing. You left in the middle of the night, and you didn't leave me anything. So you aren't him. Are you."

It's a funny thing. In all my years, nobody had ever just asked.

"No," I said.

She nodded into her palms, like it was the answer to a question she'd been carrying a long time. Then she looked up. She wasn't afraid. She looked like somebody who'd been awake for three days and had run out of room to be afraid in.

"Are you going to hurt anybody?"

"No." I thought about it. "I just sit near people. It's a very passive hobby."

That got me something almost like a laugh. "Then what are you?"

I'm not good at that one. I told her the truth, which is the easiest thing to say when you can't think of anything else. That I don't have a face of my own. That the room gives me one. That the room always hands me whoever it's most afraid of, and that at this wake most people were sad, but one chair was terrified.

Dee stared at me for a long time. Down the hall, through the door, somebody was murmuring a decade of the rosary.

"Gil," she said at last.

"The man in the recliner."

"My uncle. Mom's brother. He gave the eulogy at Wes's service. He cried more than anybody." She laughed, a bad dry sound. "He cried so hard."

"I can't tell you what it means," I said. "I only know what he tastes like."

She climbed to her feet, and I watched her set her jaw. For an instant I saw the whole family in her, the stubbornness, the long Pruitt chin.

"Go back and sit," she said. "Sit with him. Don't say anything."

"That's what I do best."

I'd like to claim I planned the next part. I didn't. I came back into the front room at 2:40 with a coffee I wasn't going to drink, and there was one chair left, directly across the coffin from Gil's recliner. I took it. Wes's face looked across Ruth Pruitt's folded hands at the big man who was supposed to be grieving her.

Most of the others had drifted off by then. Tommy was asleep with his mouth open. Two aunts had gone upstairs to lie down. Dee stayed in the kitchen doorway with her arms crossed and the pen still in her hair.

Gil lasted twenty-two minutes. I know because the clock above the coffin was one of those cheap electric ones, and I watched every minute of it go by.

He tried the usual things first. He looked at the carpet. He looked at the ceiling. He told a story about Ruth and a bake sale that nobody had asked for, and then he stopped, because I was still looking at him with Wes's eyes and saying nothing at all.

The lamp guttered, the way lamps do in old houses when the wind finds a gap. I felt the bedsheet on the hall mirror stir. It happens near me. I try not to take it personally.

"It was an accident," said Gil.

Nobody said anything.

"The dock was rotten. I told Ruth for years it was rotten." His voice was wet and rough. "You were down there that night with the money, Wesley, Ruth's money, and I only wanted to talk. I only wanted to talk. And you laughed at me."

The taste in my mouth was a mouthful of coins now. I held very still. Behind him, in the doorway, Dee had taken out her phone and was holding it flat against her leg.

"I hit you with the boat hook," Gil said. "Once. I swear to God, once. You went in the water so easy, and I stood there. I stood there for an hour, waiting for you to come up and call me every name there is." He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. "I put the blocks on you myself, under the end of the dock. I thought, if he comes up, I'll say I'm sorry. And if he doesn't."

He stopped.

"And you stood up at the funeral," I said, in Wes's voice, the first words I'd spoken in half an hour, "and cried."

I don't know why I said it. It just seemed like someone ought to.

Gil looked up. And the bedsheet slid off the hall mirror, quietly, the way a sheet will when its pin has been working loose all night, and the mirror caught the room.

I'll tell you what he saw, since I never get to. The lamp, the coffin, the back of his own head. And across the coffin from him, in the chair where his nephew should have been, something with a lot of faces, none of them finished, all of them looking at him with great patience.

"I thought you were dead," Gil whispered. His lips barely moved. "I made sure. I stood there and I made *sure*."

Then he made a sound I'm not going to try to spell.

He stood up and walked past the coffin and past me and past his niece, and went out the front door into the yard. He sat down on the bottom step in the dark. Dee followed him as far as the porch, with the phone already at her ear, and said in a flat, calm voice I would have liked to have, "Yes. I need to report a death. No. An old one."

The deputies came at 4:50. Two cars, no sirens, because the dispatcher had heard the word *wake*, and nobody wants to put sirens on a wake. Gil didn't stand up when they reached him. He told them where the dock was. He told them how deep. He said the number of blocks.

I stayed in my chair in the front room. Nobody came to get me, or even noticed me, which is my normal level of being noticed. Aunt Pat went by with a tray of coffee for the deputies and gave me a long, puzzled look, like she'd lost track of whose relative I was. Then she gave me a cup too. I held it. It was hot. I like that part.

By 5:30 the window behind the coffin had gone from black to the color of dishwater, and I felt the old thinning begin. It happens at dawn. The face loosens, the rough hands go soft, the little scar fades off my knuckles like frost off a window. Wesley Pruitt had never come back from the lake, and by sunrise I wasn't going to look like I had.

Dee found me in the hall. She looked at my hands, which were already going.

"Back door," she said. "Through the kitchen. I'll tell them you were a friend of the family who couldn't stay."

"Dee."

"Go on." She had dark circles under her eyes like thumbprints. Then she hesitated. "I'm going to go tell my mother they're bringing him up. She ought to hear it from someone."

She meant the woman in the coffin. She walked into the front room, and I stood in the doorway and watched her pull a folding chair up beside Ruth Pruitt's folded hands and start talking, low and steady, like you'd talk to someone who was only sleeping.

I went to the kitchen. The back door was already open, the screen held wide, and a stack of foil-wrapped plates sat on the step. I don't know who left them. I took one.

The yard was cold and wet, and the sky was going pink behind the lake. A deputy by the pickup looked right at me and saw nobody in particular, and I will never get over how much I love that.

"Thanks," I said, to the whole house.

I walked out into the morning with a plate of somebody's ham, and I didn't look back.

I'll tell you the last part, though, because it's the only part that's mine. They brought Wes up from under the dock a little after noon. I didn't see it. I heard about it two towns over, from a woman at a gas station who said the whole county had come out to stand on the bank. Dee's name was in the paper, spelled right.

It's been a while. But some nights, if I come into a house where somebody has pinned a sheet over a mirror, and I see a folding chair left empty beside the coffin like somebody thought a latecomer might still turn up, I take it. I sit down. I try to be no trouble.

And I say thanks. Just in case.