“I’m so glad you’re with me tonight,” Peggy says.
“I am too,” Darla says.
“Can you help me greet people now and then? Not to monopolize you. Robert needs you too.”
“Of course,” Darla says.
Peggy lets go of Darla, pulls back a bit, looks her in the eyes. “Thank you,” she says. She lets that register, and then she says, “Would you like a few moments with Bill now?”
Peggy Peggy Peggy. How do I say No to that? You have a talent. Darla says, “Of course.”
Peggy nods, steps away, revealing Robert still stuck standing where he was, looking at his wife with one side of his mouth and the corresponding curve of his cheek clenched in irony. “I’ll give you a few moments,” he says, and he too moves away.
Darla wants to rap him in the arm with a knuckle as he passes. She wants simply to follow him.
But she steps forward.
Her father-in-law’s face is a crude likeness, molded in hand-puppet rubber. But it’s him. No doubt. The distortion is simply death. It’s the stuff he’s pumped full of instead of blood. It’s all the makeup. And yet: I envy Robert. This thought surprises her. She does envy him. Her own father went face forward through his windshield and into an overpass pier. Darla and her brother, far away from the bodies, made the decision by telephone. It was logical. Don’t wait for us. Close the caskets. Seal them up. We don’t need to see our parents in that state. I don’t need to see the wrecked face of my wrecked father. But she did. And she didn’t know it until now, as she looks at the face of this boring, emotionally obtuse, river-dock-macho, son-bullying, simplistically jingoistic man lying here dead. As altered as the man’s face is, this moment with William Quinlan still feels like a kind of existential intimacy, and much to her surprise and a little to her horror, she ardently wishes she’d had a chance for these concluding moments of closeness with her own father. As bullying and politically knuckleheaded as he could be. As passionate over sausages and conservatism but reticent over her. So why does she long for that lost opportunity, to see his final mask of reticence? Her mind replies: Perhaps because it would say to you: This is the ultimate him and so it was always him. A him apart from you. A him he would have arrived at whether he felt tenderly about you or not. Whether you ever existed or not. You did not create the chill in him. You did not earn it. If he could give no more in life, it was only because he was destined to die. That dark wind was already upon his face. If you’d had these final moments with him, perhaps you could have understood all that for yourself. More than understood. You could have actually felt it.
But as she stands before this other father, these are only thoughts.
And so she aches.
Her eyes fill with tears.
She rues them. Rues they’ll be construed as mourning William Quinlan. Rues they could not fall upon her own father’s face.
She waits for them to subside.
She glances over her shoulder.
Robert is disappearing through the door into the visitation room foyer. Peggy is approaching two elderly couples Darla does not recognize.
And Peggy reaches these strangers now, the two old men and, apparently, their two wives. The women are rising from the chesterfield.
“Hello,” she says.
The two men turn.
“Thank you for coming.” She speaks with the exaggerated brightness of decorous disdain: These men are the first outsiders to mourn her husband, and she has never heard a word about them.
“I’m Peggy Quinlan,” she says.
At least they seem to recognize who she is. As soon as they all finish fluttering their names and their condolences at her, Peggy ignores the wives and looks from one veteran to the other as she says, “Remind me where Bill first met you.”
“Over at the American Legion hall.”
Neither has Bill ever mentioned the American Legion, much less its hall.
Peggy certainly has no intention of revealing her ignorance of all this. Fortunately, her three friends from church have finished in the kitchen and are now entering the room through its double door from the back hallway.
Peggy nods in the direction of their arrival. “You’ll excuse me.”
The strangers clamor their understanding.
She takes each of their offered hands and says, “Please step into the next room and have some food. There’s Irish stew. It was Bill’s favorite. Perhaps you knew?” She does not pause to have that confirmed or denied. Either way it would piss her off. “Or there are plenty of other things. Please.”
The veterans and their wives all agree to eat.
Peggy moves off toward her friends from St. Mary’s Catholic Church. They’ve taken a turn toward the casket, but the steps of her pursuit slow as she finds her mind accelerating to a thing she thought she left behind in New Orleans, a thing surely already dead, dead on its own, a thing that certainly has no business in her life now, not with the man himself dead, but it does have a life. It very much does. Because if he moved to Georgia and found these two men for friends and she never heard a word about them, then it proves he was capable of a private life full of people he kept from her. Worse. It proves everything she feared in New Orleans, feared for decades: His going off most every afternoon wasn’t simply for a drive and some coffee. It was for a woman. A woman he loved. Loved instead of her.
She has slowed now to a stop.
Ahead of her, the three friends are lined up before Bill.
She turns her back on them.
The strangers are heading for the food. Robert has vanished. Darla is in the process of vanishing as well, out the entrance door of the visitation room.
And Jimmy once again nears the Tillotson Funeral Home, featuring William Quinlan like the star of his latest movie—Husband, Father, Veteran. Jimmy and Heather have been chased back by the Impala’s open fresh air vent. A few miles down Apalachee Parkway it sucked in the nighttime stink of the tree-shrouded Leon County dump, a clear sign to both of them that they should give up the drive.
He pulls into the first empty space, far from the few other cars and the floodlit house.
He turns off the engine but does not move.
Heather says, “Cold feet?”
“The back of the crowd at the cemetery is one thing. But doing this … I don’t know.”
“Baby,” she says. “You want to put him in the ground, not just a casket. You need to see him in it, don’t you think?”
Jimmy shrugs in a slow-motion, exaggerated, high-shouldered way.
Heather smiles. She’s known him long enough to understand the gesture as pouty assent. She finds it endearing, which makes her suspect she’s falling in love.
He says, “We’re still too early.”
“So let’s sit here and make out for a while,” she says.
Jimmy barks a laugh at this.
But he turns a little in her direction and regrets the ubiquity of center consoles in modern cars. “We’d have to climb into the backseat to do it right,” he says.
“So?”
“On the way out,” he says. “After getting him into the casket.”
Heather laughs and leans across the console to him. She initiates a kiss, which they draw out for a time and end with as much of an embrace — of shoulders and chests — as they can manage. Jimmy’s attention drifts up to the funeral home. But it’s far enough away that he does not even register the figure silhouetted in the open front doorway.
Robert has only moments ago slipped his cellphone into his pocket, having absentmindedly carried it in his hand from the visitation room to this place in the doorway. The text message that brought him here was sent by his grandson. Almost there. The message pleased Robert, and surprised him a little. If they’re almost here, there’s no reason for Jake to text, except that he’s eager to see his granddad.