So we went to church on Sundays and sat in our regular pews.
Louise two rows behind me. Wanda across the aisle. Eunice and Marge up front, where Eunice can see the hymn board.
And we watched the sign-up sheet on the kitchen door fill up with names.
The next three funerals were all small ones. Old-timers whose families had plenty of their own people to cook for them anyway. So Prairie Table’s lovely spreads went mostly fine. Soup in disposable bowls. Little plastic trays of cold cuts and cheese cubes. A sheet cake from the grocery store.
Nothing anybody complained about.
Nothing anybody remembered, either.
We came to those funerals in our good dresses instead of our aprons. We sat with everybody else, the way Tamra said would be nice.
It wasn’t nice.
It was just different. The way a room is different when somebody moves the furniture. And you keep walking into the spot where the chair used to be.
Then, the second week of October, Cole Haney’s wife died.
I didn’t know Cole well before that week.
He and his wife, Dana, had moved to our county eighteen months earlier. About the same time as Pastor Shay. They were so new in town that most folks still called them “the young couple renting the old Petersen place out on the gravel.”
Cole worked the loading dock at the grain co-op.
Dana was expecting their first baby in the spring.
She went into the hospital in Grand Island on a Tuesday with what the doctors first thought was a bad headache.
By Thursday, she was gone.
An aneurysm. The kind that gives almost no warning and takes almost no time.
The baby didn’t make it either.
Cole had no family in the county. His mother died when he was in high school. His father lived three states away and hadn’t spoken to him in years, over some old grievance Cole never talked about. Dana’s people were from Ohio. Too far, and too short on gas money, to come for anything but the service itself.
He was twenty-six years old.
At the funeral, he stood in the front pew at Zion with nobody beside him. Nobody at all. Just Pastor Shay’s hand resting on his shoulder.
In thirty years of funerals, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man look that alone in a room full of people.
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