“I know you do, honey. You take your time. We’ll tell the driver to wait.”
The head disappeared and he heard the clacking of her heels on the hardwood of the upstairs hallway. Sara had moved like a ghost in rubber-soled shoes. A lifetime of nursing left her with a bad back, a penchant for soft-soles, and a sense that she was constantly disturbing someone. Most of Sara’s friends were nurses. They would all be there today if they weren’t on shift at Mayo. A few doctors might come, but not many. Unless the nurses were young and beautiful or total screwups, the doctors didn’t much notice them.
Shrugging into his jacket, Richard looked around at what had once been his parents’ bedroom. Now it was his; he’d taken it against Sara’s wishes when they’d moved into the Raines house. That, too, had been against her wishes, and though it was twice the size of hers and immeasurably grander, she’d never been comfortable in it.
“Why don’t we sell it?” she’d say. “Buy something more modern?” He knew she wanted the move more for his sake than hers, at least in the first year they’d lived there.
When getting him to sell failed, she tried to change the house from within. “Why don’t we knock this wall out, make this room into one big space? It would be much lighter in winter.” Or, “Let’s get rid of all this dark old paneling and put up cheery wallpaper!”
Richard didn’t change anything. Dylan might need to come back here, might need to see it again, and he wanted the house to be as his brother had left it.
Richard turned back to the mirror. He looked like a million bucks, which, with the inheritance his parents had left, the little nest egg from Sara, and the gifts of cash from kind-hearted Minnesotans back when he was an injured child, was very close to what he was worth. Richard knew the value of money. Money bought time and influence; that it also bought cars, and books, and meals out was a side issue. People who focused on that didn’t keep their money long.
Dylan was looking like a good candidate for early parole. If it came through, Richard was determined to give the court no excuse not to release his brother into his custody. Money would do that for him. What made bellboys and chief justices alike was that they respected money, believed the rich were more deserving than the poor.
With luck, Dylan could be out in a couple of years.
Good old Phil.
Richard’s mouth tightened. He wished he could be the one to help his brother, but Phil Maris must have moved up the food chain since he’d been fired. He evidently had connections in high places now. Maybe he’d had some even then. The whole incident of the firing from Drummond had been swept under the rug. Nobody but Richard, Drummond’s warden, and maybe Dylan knew he’d gotten canned. The official story was that he got a better position in St. Cloud.
Richard dismissed Phil from his mind.
In the mirror, the image of his face softened, saddened. “Sara was good to me; we were good for each other. I shall miss her,” he whispered. Shrugging into his new coat, he took a last look in the glass. Satisfied, he headed downstairs to the waiting limousine.
Valhalla Cemetery was outside of town, situated on gentle rolling hills, wooded at the crests, with the headstones filling the valleys. There wasn’t a nicer place to be dead than Valhalla. The plot had cost a bundle, but it came with perpetual care, and Richard knew it would please Sara’s friends. They would believe her to be resting easier there than in a more crowded, less scenic graveyard in the old part of town.
It was January; the trees were black and wiry and the hillsides dun colored. An early thaw warmed the temperature to near fifty. Muddy remnants of snow were shrinking, filling the narrow lanes with running water. Richard winced as it ran over his new dress shoes but held steady to help Ellen and Sara’s other best friend, Opal, from of the back of the limousine.
Across the dead grass a clot of people waited at the gravesite, standing on three sides of the hole, staring expectantly into it as if it were giving instead of receiving today. On the fourth side of the grave, incongruously kelly green under a covering of fake grass, was the soil that had been removed. It was oozing back into the earth in drips and drabs as the ice melted.
Dr. Ravi, not yet American enough to know he didn’t have to show his respect for the dead if they didn’t have an MD, stood alone and to one side. In a tight group at the opposite end stood Dylan and two “counselors.” Discounting the psychiatrists and high school teachers, Richard doubted if there were half a dozen college degrees in all of Drummond.
“Brother,” he said and left Sara’s friends looking daggers after him, past him, toward Dylan. Richard hugged his brother and was startled to feel hard muscle where a boy should have been.
Dylan leaned awkwardly into him and Richard realized they had him in handcuffs. Anger flashed through him like klieg lights coming on in a dimly lit theater; suddenly every corner was thrown into stark relief. Illusion was destroyed, stark reality exposed.
The men who had brought his brother to his adopted mother’s funeral in shackles had no more original thought than dumb animals. Far from stirring compassion in his breast, it made him want to bludgeon them with a sledgehammer the way they felled cattle at slaughter houses. For a brief moment, time enough for the guards to see the darkness behind his gaze and shift uncomfortably without knowing why they did, he considered them as dead meat. With the barest of nods, he released them. It would be inappropriate to make a scene at a funeral.
Dylan smiled, shrugging off the embarrassment of the manacles. Clumsily, he clasped Richard’s arm in lieu of a hug. “Whoa,” Dylan said and banged gently on his brother’s arm, pretending to listen as if to ringing steel. “Been working out, huh?”
Richard was inordinately pleased by the compliment. Though he courted admiration, he didn’t really care much about it. But when it came from Dylan, Richard basked in it. He was Dylan’s best friend. And Dylan was his.
“You, too, buddy,” he returned the compliment sincerely. “Pumping iron? Don’t go cliché on me. I don’t want you coming out looking like Bluto.”
For a moment they grinned at each other, foolish as puppies. Then, “Hey, man, I’m sorry about Sara,” Dylan said quietly.
Remembering where they were, Richard sobered up as well. “Sara was good to me; we were good for each other. I’m going to miss her. It’s my fault… ” he began and was surprised to feel tears welling up.
“You can’t take that on yourself. You took care of her as well as she took care of you,” Dylan said. “You remember that. You carry the weight of the world, brother. Put some of it down. This one isn’t yours.”
The minister made come-to-order noises. Richard stepped away from his brother to share himself with Opal and Ellen. Ellen, the closer of the two, took his arm possessively and glared at Dylan as if he was going to murder them all.
After the service was read and Richard had dropped a clump of mud onto the casket’s lid-there wasn’t a dry handful of dirt to be had in all of Valhalla at that moment-the two brothers, two elderly ladies, and two prison guards watched the pastor leave, hurrying over the wet sod, picking and hopping like a water bird trying to scare up lunch.
“I wish we could have had Father Probst,” Ellen said sadly.
Richard groaned softly. Opal hissed, “Ellen!”
Ellen, looking older than she had on the drive out to the cemetery, her nose reddened with the chill, her eyes with crying, grabbed the breast over her heart as if stricken. “Honey, I am so sorry. I just meant… ”