No Way Home by Andrew Coburn Page B

returned the picture to his wallet. “What is your name?”
    She plucked one from the air. “Esther.”
    • • •
    The same sun that scored Florida fired the roses that walled the front porch of Drinkwater’s Funeral Home. Inside, his back to the two glorious caskets, the Congregational minister said, “Time softens sorrow, scatters it with the winds, but always leaves behind irreducible kernels. This is the human condition. The kernels we carry to our own graves.”
    The resonance of the minister’s voice carried beyond the seated gathering to the standing overflow in an adjoining room, where Chief Morgan, a ghost of his own clinging to him, gently tried to shrug it off. Alone, he might have sought to embrace it.
    Friends and neighbors seated closest to Lydia Lapham and her aunt felt elect, privileged, entitled. Most had known the deceased all their lives. May Hutchins, her hair an hour out of curlers, had shared her most intimate secrets with Flo Lapham when they were classmates at Pearson Grammar School. Malcolm Crandall, the town clerk, had been Earl Lapham’s best friend in high school. He remembered Earl’s first car, purchase price thirty dollars, an old Buick that snorted like a hippopotamus and farted clouds of oil.
    “Let us pray,” the minister said, and Doris Wetherfield, seated toward the rear, bowed her head. She had lowered the hem of the dress Flo Lapham was wearing in the casket.
    Lydia Lapham’s head was not bowed. Her ear would accept only one voice at a time, which at the moment was her father’s, full of pride on that sunny day she had graduated from nursing school, the top of her class. She was no longer that person, she had shed skin too many times since, and now she sat with her aunt, the only family she had left. When her aunt began to sob, she gripped the older woman’s hand. The minister, an austere figure in gray, said, “Amen.”
    Everett Drinkwater took charge, each maneuver scripted, his pale hand under Miss Westerly’s elbow as she and Lydia rose awkwardly to their feet. Matt MacGregor, clumsy in an ill-fitting civilian suit more appropriate for winter, threw out an unneeded hand of support to Lydia, who appeared stunned by the crowd of faces behind her, more than she had anticipated or wanted.
    Outside, Mr. Drinkwater and an assistant queued cars into a caravan that stretched up the street. Motors idled, headlights glowed in the sunlight, and pennants fluttered from aerials. The caskets would emerge later, their insides stripped of certain niceties, such as the pillows on which the heads of Flo and Earl rested. Randolph Jackson took the time to press the hands of people who every two years returned him to his selectman’s seat. “A sad day,” he said as a cat’s-paw of warm air reshaped his sandy hair and revealed the bald spot. Then he climbed into his Audi, which still smelled new. His wife turned to him from fixing her face and said, “What if that lieutenant is right?”
    He cast soupy eyes at her and frowned, which deepened the grooves in his spotty brow. He scrunched down behind the wheel in a way that doubled his chin and made a loaf of his belly. Then the side doors of the funeral home opened, and he straightened. “Here they come,” he said.
    At the cemetery, he breathed in air awash with the richness of the grass and the scent of potted plants in high bloom. Some of the grander tombstones carried ornate engravings that could have been diagrams for entering the other world. With the frown back on his face, he skirted the periphery of the crowd and surreptitiously approached Chief Morgan. He kept his voice low, his chin high. “I’ve heard some disturbing things about one of our officers, Jim. I hope to God it’s not true.”
    At the double grave site, Fred Fossey, wearing the full regalia of the American Legion, removed the flag draping Earl Lapham’s casket, wrapped it into official folds, and presented it to Lydia Lapham, who was gazing into the crowd,