The Second Sister by Marie Bostwick Page A

couldn’t.
    I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up and into the face of a man about my age, tall, with chestnut-colored hair and a beard, both neatly trimmed, and sympathetic brown eyes. His face seemed familiar.
    â€œLucy, I’m so sorry,” he whispered, and squeezed my shoulder.
    I ducked my head to acknowledge his words, wishing I could summon up a name to go with those eyes, wondering if I should say thank you or just keep silent. It seemed so odd to respond with thanks in a situation that was clearly so sad. I looked up again, but he was already walking toward the back of the crowded church, looking for a vacant seat.
    I looked at Barney, who was wiping away tears with the back of his hand. “Who was that?”
    Barney glanced over his shoulder. “Peter Swenson. Did you hear? He was just elected to the village council.”
    â€œThat’s Peter Swenson? Not the—”
    The organ stopped abruptly. A bell rang and everyone rose. Father Damon, dressed in his violet vestments, entered to begin the mass.
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    I hadn’t been to mass ten times in as many years. But the words of the liturgy, lodged in the deepest recesses of my memory, fell easily from my lips. There was some comfort in that, in submerging my voice into the murmurs of two hundred voices, in sinking to my knees and rising as one with the others. It made me feel less alone.
    We had decided against the custom of opening the floor to allow people to say a few words about the deceased. Father Damon had urged me not to, saying it could take hours, Alice being so beloved in the community. He gave a eulogy instead. He’d asked if I’d like to do it, but I’d passed, saying I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get through it without breaking down.
    Father Damon made a good job of it. When he told the story of how she’d snuck into the feed store and freed a flock of baby chicks just before Easter, everyone laughed, including me. Though I didn’t laugh quite as hard as the others. I’d never known anything about her staging a poultry prison break.
    It suddenly occurred to me that almost anyone in the room would have given Alice a better eulogy than me, especially the three women sitting in the front left pew. I couldn’t help but notice how Father Damon split his gaze equally between my pew and theirs as he spoke. It wasn’t intentional, I was sure of that, but it was clear to me that he, like the others, considered the three Friends of Alice to be chief mourners at this funeral, those who had lost the most on this terrible day.
    They were wrong.
    Those three women, intimates to Alice but strangers to me, were mourning the loss of what they once had. I was mourning the loss of what I could have had but never would, the chance to really know my sister, to amass my own collection of funny, tender, and memorable Alice stories to treasure even in the void of death. I had no one to blame but myself.
    As I cast my eyes forward to the polished wooden box, blanketed in pink roses, something cracked inside me. The tears I had been unable to shed flowed freely now. Barney, his own eyes red and raw, put his arm around me.
    Father Damon finished his remarks, and I sank to my knees with the others, still weeping. Words of contrition I’d learned as a child emerged from my memory.
    Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault . . .
    For all I have done and all I have left undone . . .
    Mercy. Mercy. Mercy.
    The words played an unending loop inside my head, rising from my mind and falling ineffectually back to earth, bringing no mercy, no relief. And then it was over; the mass was ended and we were instructed to go in peace.
    If only it were as easy as that.
    Barney and the other pallbearers came forward. The pianist began playing that old Carpenters song, “Bless the Beasts and the Children,” and a stubby-legged beagle in a pew near the back began to bay and every other dog in