Finishing his call, Nick unbuttoned his jacket and sat down next to her. ‘Glad you could make it, Rose,’ he said. ‘You going to say some nice words about the old man, huh.? Let everyone know what he was like?’
‘Yes, Nick.’
‘I never was much good with words, just make sure you get it right, Rose,’ he said smiling at her again and dusting a stray hair off his shoulder. ‘Like the suit? Italian wool’
She thought how much he looked like their father and how little like their mother he was. Mama had waited on the boys as if they had been little gods, but she used to cry to the Virgin Mary and pound her breast with her fist, mea maxima culpa, when she heard the sound of the leather strap her husband used to ‘make men of them, to make them ready for the world’. Sophia had tried to tell Mama that her husband had died but all she did was laugh and ask what time the boys would be home from school.
Rose felt a little more relaxed now. Nick had smiled at her; he had forgiven her and that meant Spyros had forgiven her. She hadn’t seen either of them for over a year; not since the terrible argument she had had with her father.
‘You apologise to the old boy, bitch,’ Nick had said. ‘You hear me, bitch. You hear me,’ as he stabbed her in the chest with his finger. ‘The old boy’s sick. The past is the past. Leave it there.’
‘Yeah, you apologise, bitch, ya hear,’ echoed Spyros.
Rose never apologised.
Nick’s phone rang. ‘Business waits for no man,’ he said smiling at her, again. He had a way of leaning forward when he spoke on his phone holding it to his ear almost lovingly, his voice taking on a kind of religious intensity.
‘Got the little bastard. The old man would have been happy about that,’ said Nick as he snapped his phone shut. ‘Okay, girls. Spyros. Youse ready? Let’s go see the old man. This is his big day.’
Nick held the door open for Sophia and Rose when they arrived at the funeral chapel. Rose felt buoyant, euphoric even, as she and her sister held hands and walked up the stairs to the chapel. A woman in a blue suit met them at the entrance and held the door open.
‘Stay as long as you like,’ said the woman with an air of well-practiced professional respect and a news-reader’s smile.
Feeling almost curious, Rose walked slowly toward the open coffin, looked in and saw a motionless effigy that had been her father once.. She watched herself as she collapsed onto Sophia’s shoulder. She heard herself crying - a deep primal cry like the sound of wounded animal. As if watching from above, she saw her brothers, first Nick then Spyros, bend and kiss her father’s head seeming not to hear wailing.
Once out of the chapel Rose managed to compose herself, almost without effort. The visitation of overwhelming grief seem to leave as quickly as it had descended upon her – the type of grief that poets warn us of - a grief too fleeting to absolve anything.
The funeral was at midday; the drive to the church was slow. The air inside the church was heavy with the heat of cramped bodies on the hot January afternoon. Familiar faces of their father’s family and friends - old women wearing black dresses and gold jewellery, dabbing their eyes with white handkerchiefs, pot bellied men in suits, their hands clasped respectfully in front of them – nodded to them and smiled as Rose, Sophia, Nick and Spyros made their way their family pew. Their father’s coffin was blanketed in a thick cover of red roses.
Silence fell and shuffling ceased as the priest began. He spoke quietly, comfortingly. What a well-loved and respected man their father was. Hadn’t he always been there to help his friends and hadn’t he shown outstanding love for his family? When it was time, the priest motioned Rose to the pulpit. She watched herself as she stood in front of the large congregation and heard herself read without flinching, except for a brief pause when she noticed that she had made a spelling error.
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