The Funeral Dress by Susan Gregg Gilmore Page A

attention.
    Emmalee looked straight at Sissie. “Tennewa. Leona and me worked together at Tennewa going on three years. Side by side. Curtis came by the factory with a cold orange soda whenever he was in town. He knew Leona wouldn’t buy one out of the machine. You’re right. He was a real nice man. Sometimes he brought me a sandwich and a bag of potato chips.”
    “I didn’t know that about you and Miss Leona. I’m so sorry, Emmalee. Really I am. Think sometimes friends hurt more than family, but nobody pays them much attention.”
    Emmalee nodded. She thanked Sissie and promised to bring the baby back later in the week for her mama to admire. The truck lurched forward, and Emmalee steered onto the main road with a full tank of gas and fifty-two cents in her pocket. The sun shone in her eyes, and she lifted her hand above her brow to better see the road that led into town and to the Fulton-Pittman Funeral Home.
    The downstairs curtains were pulled shut at Fulton’s. The large wood-framed house with a broad wraparound porch looked grander than the other homes on the street, and Emmalee considered it to be the prettiest one in town. Mr. Fulton’s granddaddy, George Pittman, had been a furniture man who saw the money to be had in making caskets, not tables and chests of drawers. He opened his home to Cullen’s grieving families nearly sixty years ago, all the time making caskets in a shed in the far back of the property.
    When Mr. Fulton married, he took over the family business and moved into the home’s second story. Mr. Fulton told Emmalee once it had been the perfect place to raise a family, although he admitted his wife had grown tired of the town’s grief-stricken taking over her home as if it were their own. Some kept their vigil going all night and wandered into her kitchen in the early morning to scramble up eggs and cook a pan of biscuits. She even found a relative of the deceased sleeping off a bottle of whiskey in an upstairs bedroom, on her finest cotton sheets. Mr. Fulton said his wife pitched a fit that could have waked the dead down in Georgia. But this morning, the house looked peaceful, as if it might be sleeping, too.
    A paved drive led around to the back where deliveries were made and caskets, which Nolan had told her were now ordered direct from a company in North Carolina, were hauled in and out of the house. Large clay pots brimming with purple and white pansies accented either side of a wide concrete stoop. Emmalee bent to finger one of the purple petals, believing something so perfect must be fake.
    She wondered if the Fultons were lonely in this big house. Their daughter had moved to Birmingham with her new husband at the end of April, and Billy had started school up in Knoxville the first of September. Standing there on the porch steps, Emmalee missed Billy more than she had in months. She missed the way he twirled her hair between his fingers and kissed the tip of her nose. She missed the way he held her firmly in his thick, strong arms but never squeezed her too tight. She missed the way he spoke with a soft tone never seeming to fit his large, muscular frame. She wondered if he thought about her or if he had found someone new to love, someone he could bring home to his mother. It made her crazy to think so.
    Emmalee shook her head, trying to rattle the image of another girl out of her thoughts. She stared up at the windows on the second floor, wondering which room belonged to Billy. She had been inside the house only one other time. Her mama’s body had been kept at the house back in Red Chert. Nolan said he didn’t trust anyone, not even the Fultons, to stand vigil over his Cynthia Faye. Mr. Fulton came to the holler with a black bag in his hand and prepared the body right there in the frontroom. Emmalee had no memory of that day, only of her uncle Runt holding her in his arms.
    When her mama’s mama died, Emmalee had walked to the funeral home alone. She was only ten and carried no