The Art of Saying Goodbye - Ellyn Bache [106]
“Now’s your chance, girl,” Paisley had said, almost joking. “With all due respect, now that your father-in-law is gone, you and Eddie can do anything you want with the store. I bet Eddie would go back to computers if you’d tell him you’d take over.”
Ginger had already thought of this, secretly. But the idea was made so concrete, so possible, by the fact of its coming from Paisley’s lips, that it had hit her with something like physical force. “There’s nothing I’d like better,” she’d heard herself uttering. “But I’m going to wait until Rachel’s in school all day.”
“Wait that long and your hair will turn gray and you’ll be living on antidepressants.”
“It’s only two years,” she’d argued weakly
“Gray hair and antidepressants,” Paisley had repeated.
And with that, Paisley had somehow tapped into not only Ginger’s secret desire but also her primal fears: age and anxiety. Gray hair and prescription drugs. Three months later, Eddie was working full-time on the Teacher Toolshed, and Ginger had become what Paisley referred to as the Hot Tub Goddess. It was as if Paisley had given her permission to live her life, her intended life, and not some paler version of it she had fallen into by mistake.
Paisley had tried to help, Ginger supposes now, because Eddie was her lover.
More than eight years ago.
Eddie had slept with her. He had been unfaithful.
Does the fact that Paisley is dead make this beside the point, somehow?
Or does the fact of Eddie’s betrayal, years before, spoil everything?
Ever since she and Eddie shifted jobs, their lives have been better, not worse.
Ginger can almost feel the soft breath caressing her when Paisley whispered in her ear her explicit, secret request for the funeral.
Such sweet, warm breath. Now all she feels is acid, and it is consuming her heart.
Julianne sees how white Ginger’s face has gone. Nausea, she diagnoses.
Today, maybe they’re all sick. Maybe they ought to be.
Doug takes her hand. Toby, looking down, observes. She unlatches her hand, pats Doug’s knuckle lightly, sets her hand in her lap. She allowed Doug to escort her here because she knew Bill would be coming with his wife. She didn’t want to be alone. Originally, Toby planned to drive separately and sit with the other neighborhood kids. If she’d known he’d change his mind, she would have told Doug to go ahead to work.
She wishes she had.
The man in front of Andrea shifts slightly, and all of a sudden she can see everything. The closed casket sits at the front of the room, on what looks like a little stage behind the podium. Flower arrangements are everywhere, except on the casket itself, which is decorated with the ribbons Rachel and Brynne took down from the trees. They’ve been cleaned off and made into a bouquet. Against the glossy surface of the casket, they look elegant and innocent. Andrea casts a sidelong glance at Courtney, sitting between her and John, and sees the unshed tears glistening in her daughter’s eyes.
For a moment, Andrea can’t bear to think the casket actually contains Paisley’s body. It’s too sad to imagine her locked into something so confining. In her mind, Andrea transforms the polished wood into an enormous tree, far more beautiful than the rough trees in the front yards of Brightwood Trace, huge and expansive, its branches reaching out, its majestic trunk covered with bows and streamers—one, single, ribbon tree, a gift, wrapped for Paisley, to send her off with all their love.
Iona can barely listen to the elderly aunts and uncles telling their stories in shaking voices. They seem to have loved Paisley so much, far more than most aunts and uncles do. Every now and then a funny anecdote evokes a small ripple of laughter, but not often. A funeral is not a celebration, no matter who says it will be; it is a memorial to lives that have been changed forever, and changed in the direction of loss.
She notices that, through it all, Mason and the girls are dry eyed. Only Paisley’s mother occasionally dabs at her eyes with a tissue, then seems