The Stranger at the Back of the Funeral
Questions at the Fellowship Hall
The luncheon was held in the fellowship hall of Marlow Bend Methodist, a low brick room with linoleum floors, folding tables draped in white paper, and a pass-through window into the kitchen where the circle women moved like a practiced pit crew. There were ham sandwiches on soft rolls, three kinds of potato salad, a green bean casserole, a lime gelatin ring with pears suspended inside it, and a grocery store sheet cake with a cross piped in blue frosting. Renata filled a plate she had no intention of eating and began to work the room.
She did it carefully, the way she approached a family meeting at the hospice, letting people talk about whatever they needed to before asking anything of them. She accepted condolences. She heard about her father’s famous refusal to let anyone else touch the transmission on bus 22. She heard about the time he drove out to the Yoder farm at two in the morning because their furnace quit and their baby had croup. That one surprised her. She had never heard it before.
Then she asked.
“Did anyone notice the man standing at the back during the service? Tall, canvas coat, mechanic’s hands. He left before the end.”
Most people shook their heads. A few said they had seen him but assumed he was some cousin from out of state. It was Bev Tolliver who gave her the first real thread. Bev had driven route nine for twenty-six years and still wore her silver hair in the same short, practical cut she’d had when Renata rode her bus in the third grade.
“I saw him,” Bev said, stirring sugar into a foam cup of coffee. “Didn’t know him. But I’ll tell you one thing, honey. That man has worked in a garage. Maybe our garage, a long time back.”
“How can you tell?”
Bev smiled a little. “The way he stood. Everybody who worked in that barn stands the same way. Weight back on the heels, like you’re waiting for something to roll toward you. Your daddy stood like that till the day he couldn’t stand.”
Renata thanked her and moved on, a small cold excitement building in her chest. She found Hollis Graber at the end of a table near the coffee urn. Hollis was eighty-eight, the oldest living mechanic from the bus barn, and he had trained her father in 1971. He sat with his cane hooked over the edge of the table and a slice of sheet cake he was eating with great concentration.
“Mr. Graber,” she said, sitting down beside him. “Can I ask you something about my dad?”
“You can ask,” Hollis said. “Don’t know that I’ll know.”
She described the man at the back. She described the guest book. She told him about the side door and the morphine and the whispered words. Hollis listened without interrupting, which was its own kind of rare. When she finished, he set down his fork and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, folding it twice before he spoke.
“There was a winter,” he said slowly. “Eighty-eight, maybe eighty-nine. I came in early one morning, earlier than usual, and the coffee was already made. Your dad’s truck was in the lot, and the break room smelled like somebody had been sleeping in it. Blankets folded up on top of the parts cabinet where they didn’t belong. I asked him about it.”
“What did he say?”
“He said there was a boy he was looking after.” Hollis looked at her over the top of his glasses. “I asked him what boy. He said, ‘Hollis, you’re a good man, so I’m going to ask you to mind your own business about this one.’ And your father never asked me for a thing in thirty-five years. So I did. I minded it.”
Renata stared at him. “A boy.”
“That’s all I know,” Hollis said, and went back to his cake. “But I always figured someday somebody would come asking. I just figured it would be the boy.”
