The Stranger at the Back of the Funeral
What He Never Told Joyce
Renata didn’t answer right away. The maple dropped another leaf. Somewhere at the far end of the cemetery, a groundskeeper started a mower and then shut it off again.
“No,” she said finally. “She never knew.”
Lyle closed his eyes.
“She thought…” Renata stopped, then made herself go on, because he deserved the whole truth the same way she had wanted it. “She thought my father was seeing another woman. That winter. Every night he left the house with a lunch pail she packed, and he wouldn’t tell her where he was going. She cried a lot. Things between them were never really the same after that. I was fifteen, and I took her side. I spent the rest of my life taking her side.”
For a long time Lyle didn’t say anything at all. When he finally spoke, his voice was thin.
“I didn’t know,” he said. “I swear I didn’t know. I thought he went home and told her some kind of story. That she knew a little and didn’t ask. I never thought…” He pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead. “I asked him to keep a secret. I didn’t know I was asking him to give up his marriage for it.”
“He didn’t give it up,” Renata said gently. “They stayed together. Forty-six years.” She hesitated. “But something broke. I always thought it was him. That he just loved his work more than us.”
Lyle shook his head slowly.
“I asked him about it once,” he said. “Not about your mom. I didn’t know enough to ask that. But I asked him why he couldn’t just tell his wife. I said she sounds nice, her pie is good. And he said something I didn’t understand back then.” He took a breath. “He said, ‘Joyce would take one look at you and bring you home and put you in Curtis’s room and feed you three meals a day. And by Sunday the whole county would know there was a boy living at the Pruetts’ whose mother was sleeping in a car. And somebody would mean well and make a phone call.’”
Renata felt something shift inside her, a heavy thing that had sat in one position for so long it had worn a groove.
“He was right,” she whispered. “That’s exactly what she would have done.”
“He said she had the biggest heart in Marlow Bend,” Lyle said. “That was the problem. He said, ‘I’d rather she be mad at me than have you lose your mother.’”
“I’d rather she be mad at me than have you lose your mother.”
Renata thought about her father in that kitchen the winter she was fifteen, standing at the back door with his coat on and his wife’s accusation hanging in the air behind him. I’m not stupid, Orrin. And him saying nothing at all. Not because he had something to hide, but because he had someone to protect, and the only way to protect him was to let the people he loved think the worst.
She had built a whole life on the silence that followed. She had moved two counties away on it. She had chosen a career sitting with other people’s dying parents, perhaps, because it was easier than sitting with her own. She had called once a month for six minutes.
And he had let her. He had never once tried to defend himself.
“He could have told me later,” she said, and her voice broke on it. “Years later. When it didn’t matter anymore. When you were grown.”
“I think he gave his word,” Lyle said quietly. “And I think your father was the kind of man who didn’t know how to take it back.”
The two of them sat side by side on the cold bench, a stranger and a daughter, looking at the fresh clay over the same man. Renata realized she was crying, really crying, for the first time since he had died. Lyle didn’t try to stop her. He just sat there, the way her father had once sat on an overturned bucket in a cold bus barn and waited for a frightened boy to finish eating.
After a while, Lyle reached into the inside pocket of his canvas coat.
“I brought something,” he said. “I meant to leave it with him yesterday, but I lost my nerve. I think maybe it’s supposed to go to you instead.”
