The Funeral
Charlene Penticton raised her head and stared at the shiny, somber black box at the front of the church. Her father, Charles Albert Ray Penticton had been the last family member she had left. At twenty-six she was unprepared to face the world totally alone.
The huge church was packed. Charles had been a good, fair man and people loved him. Business associates, old and new friends and those he had mentored and befriended throughout his too short life packed the church almost full.
The rows of pews with the somber faced, tear filled eyes were so orderly that Charlene wanted to scream. She kept her back carefully turned to them, kept her eyes glued to the front. A strange numbness settled over her. She blinked, trying to dispel the wild, detached feeling. It was like she was standing somewhere else, on the roof perhaps, if such a feat were possible, staring down at the rest of the people gathered there.
“We commit this soul to god,” the pastor’s deep voice boomed out over the people assembled.
Charlene barely heard it. She imagined herself, long blonde hair curled and pinned up, not a tendril out of place. Her neck was bent, exposing the strand of pearls that had been her sweet sixteen birthday gift from her father. Her black dress was expensive silk, the best she owned. It fit her well but hid the lush, womanly curves that lay below. It was a chaste dress. She’d picked it in Paris when her father took her with him on a business trip just short of her twentieth birthday.
He had always urged her to choose her purchases with care. To create an image that reflected her personality. She’d picked the dress because she saw it as something that was classy and tasteful. Because it was black, with a tight fitting waist, flared skirt that fell to the knee and a sheer, lace pane in the back by her shoulders, it was feminine and dainty.
Her father had loved that dress. She remembered trying it on for him, spinning around, feeling like a dark fairy. The shine of love in his eyes had been unmistakable. He’d proudly escorted her to dinner, a small place with tables that spilled into the cobbled street.
Charlene felt the sting of tears well at the corners of her eyes. Her throat closed painfully, the fire of grief burning its way up her throat and flooding her mouth. She blinked rapidly and forced herself to take deep, steadying breaths.
She raised her head again when she was able, slamming back down into her body. The sense of detachment was gone. She knew that in a few hours, her father would be laid to rest under layers of black soil. She would never see him again.
“Daddy,” she breathed out, the world inaudible to anyone around her. The cancer had come so quickly for him, reducing him to a shell of the man he once was. His suffering had thankfully been brief. In less than three months it was all over. A promising, beautiful flame snuffed out, plunging Charlene’s world into darkness.
The aged pastor droned on. This had been part of her father’s last wishes. To have a proper church burial though to the best of her knowledge, he hadn’t been religious.
Charlene had gone through the motions of death and grief woodenly. She chose a casket with care. Drained the last of her savings account so her father could have the best in death as he’d given her in life. Throughout the last months of her father’s illness she’d nursed him. She had that consolation at least. That ironically, her profession should have been so apt. She’d quit her job at the hospital, giving up her coveted nursing position so she could be at Charles’s side day and night.
She just hoped the will would be sorted out soon. She didn’t know how she was going to scrape together enough money to make her mortgage after all the expenses. She had enough left for one month. Enough to see her through.
Panic welled in up Charlene’s chest as she thought of returning to her house, the cold, empty rooms providing no solace for her pent up grief and wild rage.
The house wasn’t a mansion but it had been the one she’d been raised in since the time she was a small baby. Her mother had left them when Charlene was four years old. She hardly recalled what Clair Penticton even looked like. She didn’t even know fully why she’d left. All her father ever told Charlene over the years was that he never had any doubts her mother loved her. He shouldered the blame and never spoke ill of the woman he had loved and married, who had born his child and vanished.
Their home had always felt like a home. Would it now be little more than a cage of memories? Charles Penticton worked hard. He traveled for business and Charlene had seen much of the world on his trips. He’d moved heaven and earth to be both father and mother to her.
And now she had neither.
A sudden burst of piano music brought Charlene out of her dazed memories. She struggled to tear herself away from the pit of anxious worries, of cold, hard grief that threatened to consume her. There was an elderly woman at the piano. She had a kindly face. She closed her eyes when she played.
Charlene imagined the woman’s arms, soft and warm and grandmotherly. What would she give right now for a kind touch? For a few words of encouragement that would help her go on living.
Soon it was all over. The pallbearers lifted the coffin and filed slowly past Charlene’s front row pew. She felt as though if she wanted to cry it would be acceptable in that moment. Ironically enough, the tears refused to come.
She turned to watch the six men bear her father down the aisle to his final resting place, the tiny grave yard outside. It seemed perfectly suited to the man that he had been in his life, the man who valued love and family over anything else, that he should choose this quaint little Williamsburg church with the tiny plot of land beside it. In all of Virginia- no, in all of the world, nothing seemed more fitting.
Charlene’s gaze followed the stoic, broad backs of the last two men, friends of her father. They had discussed all this when he’d found out he was ill. It was like he knew it was his time. She’d been so shocked that he arranged everything so quickly in order to spare her. He had even contacted the men who were bearing him away now, personally, before his illness had him in the grips of pain so intense it was madness.
The church doors were opened and the bearers moved through the day lit portal. Sunbeams spilled onto the red carpet of the little church. Charlene wondered if they would ever feel warm on her skin again. Was grief always that way? Like a hard ball of ice freezing the insides so the outer layers felt no warmth?
She copied the rest of the people assembled and rose from the pew woodenly. Her actions were guided by the masses. Her eyes fell on the last pew, the one closest to the door as she began the long, torturous journey down that same aisle her father had been borne.
Charlene blinked when she saw him. Once. Twice. Her long, honeyed lashes framing shockingly emerald eyes. She stopped walking, shock gripping and squeezing her lungs so that they refused to take another breath. Chest on fire, she waited. He saw her and he stopped to. Their eyes met and the world closed in around them.
He looked exactly as she remembered him.
She was relieved when he turned his back and filed out ahead of her, into the open air. The rushing blackness rushing at the corners of her vision faded away. Her burning lungs inflated with life giving oxygen.
Ten years. It had been ten years since she’d last seen her father’s closest friend, Clayton Ellison. Now that her father was dead he could not have prevented the man’s coming. They had broken years ago, their friendship in ruins. Had he come to pay his last respects, wish the man who was once a brother to him, a final farewell or had he come for something more?
“Clayton,” Charlene whispered, her words evaporating in the church like the fog of breath on a cold winter morning.
Charlene squared her shoulders and forced her wooden legs to take the required amount of steps to propel her into the heat of the mid July day. Her heart pounded wildly in her chest. A tiny spark of hope bloomed. Perhaps she wasn’t as alone as she had thought.