“Because of the way he killed them.”

  Waylon’s face went to stone, but his eyes flooded with rage. Beside him, Caleb laid a hand on his arm.

  “That’s right. We’re going to have pictures of them. Your uncles brought their pictures, and you can both have as many as you want. We’ll pick ones we want to put out for the funeral.”

  “Can we do a gallery wall here, Grammie? Not just with their pictures. I mean with everybody’s?”

  “Rem, that’s such a good idea.” Lucy beamed at him. “We’ll go through my picture albums sometime soon and start on that.

  “The funeral home, they’re going to pick up”—she hesitated, then went on—“the caskets from the airport. Cora had white and pink hydrangeas in her bridal bouquet because she favored them, so we’re having those at the service, and at the gravesite. I thought we’d have just one stone because they’re together and always will be.”

  She cleared her throat. “In my first anger and grief, I thought about having it say something like taken from us through cruelty, but that’s not how we should remember them. So I thought, something that honors them. I thought what John put on Cora’s anniversary watch. For All Time.”

  “That’s perfect, Mama,” Caleb told her.

  “None of us are big churchgoers so I thought having the service right in the funeral home’s the best. Caleb, Waylon, I’m going to ask you both for something hard. Caleb, I’m asking you to do their eulogy, to get up there and speak for all of us, if you think you can.”

  He didn’t speak, just nodded.

  “Waylon, the hard I’m asking you? That song, ‘Endless Love,’ they had at their wedding for their first dance. I’m asking you to sing that for them, and for us, just like you did for the wedding.”

  “Mama.” He closed his eyes, then, like his brother, nodded. “Of course I will.”

  “Is all of that all right with you, Thea, and you, Rem?”

  “Can one of the pictures be their wedding picture, the one on the gallery wall in Virginia?” Thea asked. “If we’re having the flowers and the song…”

  “That’s just perfect.”

  “Can Cocoa come? They loved Cocoa.”

  “Well, I’ll find out about that, Rem. If she can’t come in the funeral home, she can sure come to the gravesite. We’ll have the funeral day after tomorrow, and after, people will come back here. The eating places in town are sending food. They won’t take money for it. But I’m going to make a ham and an apple stack cake. Cora favored my ham, and John surely loved my apple stack cake. I’ve got a list of what I need at the market, if one of you boys would drive in and get that for us.”

  “I’ll take care of that, Mama,” Waylon told her.

  “I appreciate that. I’ll give you a check you can fill out when—”

  “No, you won’t. Don’t say that to me, Mama. Don’t. Cora was my sister, John was a brother to me.”

  When his eyes went teary, Lucy rose and went to him. “You’re right.” From behind his chair, she hugged him, kissed his shaggy hair. “We all have to say goodbye in the best way we can. If I’ve left something out, or you want something else, just say.”

  “Will a lot of people come?”

  “I expect they will, Rem. And your granny’s coming up tomorrow with Stretch, and my brother, my sisters, your cousins. Your mama and daddy had friends in Virginia, and some of them are coming, too.”

  “A lot of people,” Caleb confirmed. “When they’re all in here, if y’all just need to get away from them for a little bit of a while, just want the quiet? Then you go on up to your room and take that quiet. If you need something else, you just find me or Waylon.”

  “Give me your list, Mama, and I’ll do your fetching. How about taking a ride with me in Grammie’s truck, Rem? You, too, Thea, if you want.”

  “That’s okay. I want to put my things away. And I want to help make the apple stack cake. I want to learn how. I’m going up now, Grammie, to put my things away.”

  And to think a little, she added to herself. To think about how many people would come to the house. She needed her grandmother to teach her how to hold back all that grief and mad. She felt so much from her uncles. As calm as Caleb made himself look and sound, she’d felt as much grief and mad from him as Waylon showed on his face.

  All from them, from her grandmother, from Rem, inside herself got so heavy.

  It hadn’t been like this before, not before that night. She needed to know how to hold some of it back because it almost felt like it could crush her.

  She needed to learn.

  She waited to ask until Lucy came to tuck her in that night.

  “You said there’d be a lot of people.”

  “Yes.”

  “You said the gift doesn’t want to hurt me, and I should open myself to it. But when we were all talking after lunch, and a couple of other times today, it—it did hurt, Grammy. Uncle Caleb feels the way Uncle Waylon does, even though he doesn’t show it as much. And with lots more people—”

  “I understand. Sometimes you have to close a window.”

  She nodded to the open one letting in the night air.

  “If you closed that window, you’d still see outside, see the rain if it’s raining, or the sun or the wind in the trees. But you wouldn’t feel it nearly as much as you would if that window stayed open. This is the kind of time where you need to close that window.”

  “How?”

  “You’ve done it plenty already. Maybe not as thoughtfully or deliberately. Accepting what you have doesn’t mean you have to use it every day. If you need more than a window, imagine a door, close it up, turn the lock. It’s yours, Thea. Maybe you decide, all right, I can open the window a little bit, or leave the door ajar. Or you don’t because you need that quiet Uncle Caleb talked about.”

  “Do you leave it open or closed?”

  “Oh, I guess mostly a little open. Sometimes all the way open or all the way closed.”

  “If I can, I want to keep it closed when we have the funeral.”

  “Then that’s what you do. And if you need help, you come to me. All right now?”

  When Thea nodded, Lucy leaned down to kiss her. “Dream something happy now, or something full of adventure. Don’t carry weight into sleep.”

  Thea closed her eyes, imagined a window. It stormed outside. The rain, the tears. The wind, the grief. The thunder, the mad.

  And imagined herself closing the window.

  * * *

  On the day of the funeral, Thea put on the black dress she and her mother had picked out for the spring chorus concert at school. She’d felt so grown-up wearing it, and the shoes with the short, stacked heels.

  She knew she’d never wear either again.

  She braided her hair, and put on the earrings the police had given back to her uncles.

  Granny had come with her well-to-do second husband everybody called Stretch. She’d heard her grandmother, and her mother, too, call Carrie Lynn O’Malley Riley Brown a force of nature.

  Standing a full six feet tall with a long spill of bright red hair and sharp green eyes, she looked like one.

  She’d cried, and when Thea let the window open a crack, she saw a heart that carried deep scars.

  The aunts and uncles and cousins brought more tears with them.

  Because Waylon and Caleb had driven down in the U-Haul and they only had her grandmother’s truck, Stretch rented cars for driving down to the funeral home, to the graves, and back home again.

  She sat in the back of one beside her grandmother, Rem on the other side in his best and only suit.

  Waylon drove, with Caleb in the seat beside him and Cocoa between.

  The funeral home sat on the far end of town, a big redbrick building with white trim and windows that shined in the sun. It stood on a slope of a manicured lawn, and to Thea’s eye, did look like a house.

  A man with gray hair opened the door to them. He wore a black suit and shiny black shoes, and spoke in the quiet voice you’re supposed to use in church.

  Thea decided not to listen, because her heart started to beat so fast.

  Everything smelled like flowers; everything felt too hot.

  She wanted to run back outside and keep running, but gripped her grandmother’s hand, as Rem did on the other side. With Cocoa on the leash, they all followed the man into a big room where the sun beamed through the windows, and folding chairs sat in line after line after line.

  A table held the pictures they’d picked out and more flowers. Two big white vases held the pink and white hydrangeas beside an easel with the picture Stretch had enlarged.

  Her mother in her wedding dress, and her dad in his wedding suit. She knew it was from their first dance because it had hung on the gallery wall.

  They looked at each other. She’d heard her grandmother once say you could see the stars in their eyes.

  She made herself look at the caskets as they walked toward them down the aisle between the lines of chairs.

  Boxes, polished up, more hydrangeas flowing over them.

  With her parents inside.

  She remembered how they’d looked the day they’d left for home.

  It seemed like a minute ago. It seemed like a year ago.

  Even with the window closed as tight as she could, she knew Rem started to cry. She knew tears ran down her grandmother’s face. Her uncles’ grief layered over her own.

  Lucy looked at her, pressed her lips to Thea’s cheek, and some of the terrible weight lifted.

  They let the rest of the family come in next. Though Rem went with Caleb, Lucy kept Thea’s hand firm in her own.

  Even when they sat in the front row of all those chairs, Lucy held Thea’s hand.

  More and more people came. Even when all the chairs filled, others stood in the back. The man in the black suit walked to the front. He spoke about knowing Cora since she’d been a little girl, about meeting John. How everyone here felt their loss, the tragic loss to their families, to their young children, to the community.

  Waylon got up, strapped on his guitar. He’d shaved his face smooth, tamed his hair.

  “This is Cora and John’s song, the one they danced to first as husband and wife.”

  He played it slow, and when he sang the lyrics, Lucy’s hand trembled in Thea’s.

  This time Thea gripped tighter.

  Waylon didn’t cry until he sat back down again.

  Then Caleb went up. He was very pale, and somehow more handsome with it.

  “There are people in the world who make it better just by being in it. People who bring joy, bring love, simply because they have joy and love in them.

  “Cora and John made the world better. They brought joy and they brought love. They were taken from the world, from their children, from all of us by a senseless and brutal act.

  “And still, they bring joy, they bring love. Through our grief we feel that joy, that love because they send it to us. To all of us, friends, neighbors from near and far. They send it to our family.

  “To you, Mama, to you, Waylon, and especially to you, Thea and Rem. Their loss cuts so deep, it’s hard to get through and believe that. But we do, and we will. The light they brought into the world, it’s never going out. It shines on in their children.”

  When Caleb sat again, the man in the black suit invited anyone who wanted to say a few words to come up.

  Plenty did, to say kind things or tell a funny or sweet story.

  But as Thea sat, her heart stopped pounding. Waylon’s song, Caleb’s words seemed to flow right into her. And somehow they dulled the sharp, cutting edge of pain she’d fought against since she put on the black dress.

  The cemetery lay outside the town proper, with its stones and monuments on rolling hills.

  The man in the black suit spoke again, then both Caleb and Waylon got up.

  “What are they going to do, Grammie?”

  “I don’t know, Rem.”

  They stood together on the sun-washed hill with the flower-draped coffins behind them.

  “We’re here to say goodbye to Cora and John. Mama and Daddy raised us with music, so Caleb and I, we decided we’d sing them off. Not with a sad song, but a song about life, and the love in it.”

  They sang, a cappella, “In My Life.”

  At the first line, Lucy choked back a sob. She swallowed the tears, let out a long, long sigh.

  She kissed Rem’s hand, then Thea’s. The three of them sat, joined, while her sons’ voices carried over the rolling hills.

  After, people came up to offer condolences, embraces, but eventually they stood alone together, brothers, mother, children.

  “I want to say how proud I am of you, my boys. For the song in the service, Waylon, for your words, Caleb. How they’re going to stay with me for the rest of my days. And for what you did here. None of that was easy for you to do, but you did it for them, and for me, and these children.

  “Let’s go on home now. People will already be there, and we’re grateful to the friends who stayed back from the gravesite to greet them. Let’s go on home, and we’ll come back when the stone’s set. We’ll bring flowers.”

  * * *

  People filled the house, spilled onto the porches, wandered on the grass, front and back. They ate ham, collard greens, cornbread, casseroles, and cake. They drank sweet tea and lemonade and beer and wine.

  Younger kids ran around outside with the dogs. With Lucy’s permission, Rem changed out of his suit, but Thea kept her dress on. Since it would be the last time she wore it, she decided she’d keep it on until people left.

  But she did take some of the quiet time in her room. Better for it, she came down. Even with the window opened only a crack, she could tell the grief didn’t weigh as heavy. People wanted to tell stories about her mom and dad, especially her mom, that made that weight a little lighter.

  She met a man who’d gone to college with her parents, who’d been best man at their wedding.

  “You won’t remember me,” he said. “I haven’t seen you since you were about five or six, not in person. I moved to Chicago, so I didn’t get to see your mom and dad much after that. This is my wife, Melissa.”

  “They went to your wedding. We were here with Grammie, so they went to your wedding in Chicago. Not last summer, but maybe the one before that.”

  “That’s exactly right. He was my best man, like I was his.”

  “You came all the way from Chicago?”

  “I loved him,” he said simply. “Your mom, too.”

  She’d thought it would hurt, all the people, all the feelings, but it helped, at least a little.

  Somebody convinced Waylon to get his guitar, and somebody else got another, and somebody else a banjo. So music started on the front porch while little kids and dogs raced around back.

  And that helped somehow, too.

  She walked outside to sit on the back porch swing. Not really quiet time with the kids shouting, the music playing, all the voices carrying out the windows.

  But enough just to sit in the air.

  A girl came out. She had a head full of braids with white beads on the ends. She wore a black skirt that brushed her knees and a white top with flowers on the collar.

  Carrying a big red plastic cup, she sat right down beside Thea.

  “I’m Maddy,” she announced. “It’s really Madrigal, but that’s a whole mouthful. My mama’s a friend of your grammie’s, and my daddy’s the sheriff.”

  “Oh. I’m Thea.”

  “I know. I’m real sorry about what happened to your mama and your daddy. I hope the man who killed them gets warts and boils on his pecker.”

  The laugh just burst out of Thea, and Maddy smiled.

  “Well, I do. My mama always says how you shouldn’t wish bad on others, but I bet she wouldn’t mind if he got those boils and warts. You want some of my lemonade?”

  At Thea’s hesitation, Maddy smiled again. “It’s okay. I got rid of all my cooties. We’re the same age, so we’re going to be going to school together. Might as well be friends.”

  Thea took the cup, sipped. Cold, tart, and just right.

  Just like that, on the day she buried her parents, she met a lifelong friend.

  From the kitchen window, Lucy watched them. Then reached back for her lifelong friend. “Look out here, Leeanne, look at our girls. Thea’s smiling again, and meaning it.”

  “Maddy’ll shake the sads out of anyone. She just won’t quit. If she’s decided to be Thea’s friend, Thea doesn’t have a chance.”

  “She needs friends. So will Rem. Good Christ, Leeanne, don’t let me be too old to do all this right by those children.”

  “I’ll remind you, Lucinda Lannigan, I’ve got a twelve-year-old, too.”

  On a light laugh, Lucy sliced more ham. It helped to keep her hands busy.

  “I’ve been at it a lot longer.”

  “That’s experience, not age. You raised a fine daughter and two fine sons. And when Zachariah left us, you did it on your own. I don’t know anyone in this world, Lucy, who’ll do all of this more right by them than you.”

  “Thea needs a friend who’ll hold her up like you do me.”

  “Trust me.” Leeanne peeked out the window again, watched Maddy and Thea on the porch swing. “She’s got one.”

  It took a long time for the house to empty out but for family, and longer yet before it came down to only Waylon and Caleb.

  Lucy’s friends had tucked away all the food left and cleaned the kitchen to a shine.

  “Waylon, do your old mama a favor and get her a glass of that wine.”

  “I don’t have an old mama, but I’ll get my beautiful mama some wine. Which? I think Stretch bought out a wine store in Atlanta.”

  “If Stretch bought it, it’s bound to be good. You pick.” She let out a groan as she toed off her shoes. “I don’t know the last time I had dress-up shoes on for so long. Thanks,” she added as Waylon set a glass of wine in front of her.

  She took a sip, glanced around. “They didn’t leave a thing for me to do. And didn’t Will see that the animals were tended. I’m not sure I know what to do when nothing needs doing.”