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Authors: Justin St. Germain
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was sorry, just like I wanted to say more than thanks, although that’s all we said before he shook my hand and walked inside.
It was the first of many halting and deficient conversations I would have that day. Soon Josh and Dad and Grandpop showed up, and we stood for a while by the doorway, thanking the people who stopped to offer their condolences, until we realized we were only making things worse for everyone and went inside.
I was surprised to see the church half full. The funeral was held on a Thursday morning, and Mom didn’t have much of a social life, so I hadn’t expected a big turnout. I saw some friends from college and a few old friends from high school I hadn’t talked to since I’d moved away. I saw the ex-girlfriend who’d broken my heart for the first time and wished she hadn’t come. And I saw the families who’d helped raise us, our mother’s few friends and our friends’ parents, people who had fed us at their tables and cheered for us at baseball games and told us, over and over, to get the hell out of Tombstone the first chance we got. Half the people in that town had a hand in raising me, and it seemed like all of them were there.
But so were some of the other half, people who’d hardly known my mother, people she’d avoided because she’d been the victim of their gossip. You can’t date as many men as she did in a town that small and hope to escape a reputation, the word the older boys on my junior high baseball team had calledher to taunt me—
whore
—or the term a friend had overheard the town marshal call her while gossiping about her death in the Circle K:
black widow
. Now a lot of those same petty gossipmongers were at her funeral, wearing black, shaking their heads and dabbing their eyes and saying how sad it was.
The priest came out of the sacristy and I sat in the front pew next to my brother. I tried not to focus on the faces behind me aglow with pity. The brass box of my mother’s ashes sat on a table in front of the altar. The priest was a hoary brimstone Jesuit my mother had disliked so much that she joined a different parish and drove all the way to Sierra Vista every Sunday rather than worship here. Whenever the Jesuit mentioned my mother, he looked at the urn, as if she were a jack-in-the-box waiting for someone to crank the handle. He flung some holy water and said it was time to say our final farewell to Deborah, and I bowed my head with the others.
The funeral director had offered us the chance to speak, and I’d tried to write something. But I couldn’t do justice to her loss, so I’d declined. As I sat in that church with people I knew had been whispering her name, listening to a priest talk about judgment and redemption, I wished I had tried harder. I was lost in a fantasy of barring the doors and lighting the place on fire when a hand squeezed my shoulder.
I turned and saw a man’s broad back disappearing down the aisle behind me. He was thick and tan and had a dark Mohawk. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew who he was: my mother’s only sibling, her younger brother. Uncle Tom.
When I was growing up, Uncle Tom would come stay with us for a while whenever he got fired or evicted, or whenever he’d blown all his money on drugs. Tom moved out to Arizona with his family a few years after we did, following his sisterwith the same idea: to start over. I was never told the details—I was too young—but I can guess why he moved. He had no job and a drug problem and a lot of old friends who didn’t help in either respect, and North Philly was no place to be in the eighties, with the factories shut down and crack on every corner. If you had somewhere else to go, you went. Tom moved his family out West, thinking at least it would be different.
It was different; it was worse. Soon after they moved to Tucson, the first of his five children, Tom Jr., was killed by a car while crossing the street. His third child, a daughter, died in her crib during a nap.
It was the first of many halting and deficient conversations I would have that day. Soon Josh and Dad and Grandpop showed up, and we stood for a while by the doorway, thanking the people who stopped to offer their condolences, until we realized we were only making things worse for everyone and went inside.
I was surprised to see the church half full. The funeral was held on a Thursday morning, and Mom didn’t have much of a social life, so I hadn’t expected a big turnout. I saw some friends from college and a few old friends from high school I hadn’t talked to since I’d moved away. I saw the ex-girlfriend who’d broken my heart for the first time and wished she hadn’t come. And I saw the families who’d helped raise us, our mother’s few friends and our friends’ parents, people who had fed us at their tables and cheered for us at baseball games and told us, over and over, to get the hell out of Tombstone the first chance we got. Half the people in that town had a hand in raising me, and it seemed like all of them were there.
But so were some of the other half, people who’d hardly known my mother, people she’d avoided because she’d been the victim of their gossip. You can’t date as many men as she did in a town that small and hope to escape a reputation, the word the older boys on my junior high baseball team had calledher to taunt me—
whore
—or the term a friend had overheard the town marshal call her while gossiping about her death in the Circle K:
black widow
. Now a lot of those same petty gossipmongers were at her funeral, wearing black, shaking their heads and dabbing their eyes and saying how sad it was.
The priest came out of the sacristy and I sat in the front pew next to my brother. I tried not to focus on the faces behind me aglow with pity. The brass box of my mother’s ashes sat on a table in front of the altar. The priest was a hoary brimstone Jesuit my mother had disliked so much that she joined a different parish and drove all the way to Sierra Vista every Sunday rather than worship here. Whenever the Jesuit mentioned my mother, he looked at the urn, as if she were a jack-in-the-box waiting for someone to crank the handle. He flung some holy water and said it was time to say our final farewell to Deborah, and I bowed my head with the others.
The funeral director had offered us the chance to speak, and I’d tried to write something. But I couldn’t do justice to her loss, so I’d declined. As I sat in that church with people I knew had been whispering her name, listening to a priest talk about judgment and redemption, I wished I had tried harder. I was lost in a fantasy of barring the doors and lighting the place on fire when a hand squeezed my shoulder.
I turned and saw a man’s broad back disappearing down the aisle behind me. He was thick and tan and had a dark Mohawk. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew who he was: my mother’s only sibling, her younger brother. Uncle Tom.
When I was growing up, Uncle Tom would come stay with us for a while whenever he got fired or evicted, or whenever he’d blown all his money on drugs. Tom moved out to Arizona with his family a few years after we did, following his sisterwith the same idea: to start over. I was never told the details—I was too young—but I can guess why he moved. He had no job and a drug problem and a lot of old friends who didn’t help in either respect, and North Philly was no place to be in the eighties, with the factories shut down and crack on every corner. If you had somewhere else to go, you went. Tom moved his family out West, thinking at least it would be different.
It was different; it was worse. Soon after they moved to Tucson, the first of his five children, Tom Jr., was killed by a car while crossing the street. His third child, a daughter, died in her crib during a nap.
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