Something Fierce by David Drayer Page B

looked at him, shocked. “I mean, there’s nothing they can do except give her a death sentence. A long, torturous, god-forsaken death sentence.”
    “That’s a real positive way to look at it,” Gail said.
    “There are things they can do,” Tina countered. “Medications. Mental exercises.”
    “To slow it down a little bit. Not to stop it. Not to really change anything.”
    “Are you okay, Bro?” Gail asked.
    “Yeah,” he said, though he hadn’t been okay since the talk in his mom’s car the other day. “I just hate funerals.”
    They walked along in silence for a while. “Aunt Rita looked nice,” Tina said. “Didn’t you think?”
    “Yeah,” Gail said. “Peaceful.”
    Seth didn’t comment. He didn’t see anything nice or peaceful about the aged, painted remains in the casket nor could he connect them to his aunt, a woman who used to be known for a shrewd sense of humor or raucous laughter. What he saw was indisputable proof of how harsh and unfair life could be, how ruthless and random. He saw a good woman, who, for no apparent reason, had been cheated out of a good death.
    “Did the prodigal son have any interesting conversations at the showing last night or the funeral this morning?” Tina asked, referring to the image some of the pious relatives had of Seth’s itinerant lifestyle.
    “Pretty much the same ones I had at the last funeral. Betty hit me with her usual inquisition: ‘When are you getting married? When are you having kids? Have you made any money as a writer yet?’”
    “You should have punched her,” Gail said.
    “Yeah, that would have gone over well.” Seth’s extended family—with the single exception of his Aunt Rita—had thought he was a chump when he left Cherry Run, all dreams and no means. They were sure he’d find out pretty directly that boyhood ideals rarely, if ever, meshed with the cold realities of adulthood. Then they stood in awe when he started showing up in the weekly paper, several times over the years, working his way through college, top of his class, Cherry Run’s first and only published writer, living in Los Angeles, taking a crack at the big time. But the last few years, with Seth not becoming rich or famous and his sole supporter outside of his immediate family deemed crazy, the relatives were starting to get that “told-you-so” look about them.
    “What’d you tell her?”
    “That I preferred living in sin, have no kids that I’ll admit to and that I’ve made a ton of money writing, but prostitutes and heroin dealers got it all.”
    “You should have,” Gail said.
    “I thought about it, but I was afraid she would start praying for me.” He wasn’t entirely kidding. He considered Betty’s prayers to be an exercise in misplaced passion. They were more like a prayer in reverse, surrounding one in negative energy rather than positive. While she prayed for a “sinner’s” deliverance—a sinner being anyone who believed differently than she did—her focus was vehemently on the sins she imagined rather than the absence of them.
    “No wonder she’s weird,” Tina said. “Could you imagine having Reverend Wells for a father?”
    “I can’t believe he’s still alive,” Seth said. “He’s been spewing fire and brimstone as long as I can remember.”
    “Speaking of,” Gail hit Seth on the shoulder, “I saw you sneak out of the service when he started crying ‘Repent!’”
    “He’s lucky I didn’t throw my chair at him,” Seth said, as they reached their destination and he uncovered a stack of several logs and kindling that he’d collected last summer and kept dry under an old tarpaulin. “Aunt Rita was barely mentioned. It was all sinners gnashing their teeth, praying for death and never dying. The man is a sadist. I swear he gets off on scaring people.”
    “Never miss an opportunity to inject some good old-fashioned guilt and fear,” Tina said.
    “As if everyone in that room wasn’t already riddled with them.”