Finding orion, p.8
Finding Orion, page 8
Blech.
Some people might think it’s cool to have a sister who’s a fencer, but they would be wrong. It just made me mad. Of course Cass gets a sword, but I have to keep my knife that was a gift to me from my grandfather in the attic. Plus she even gets to wear her sword out in public. Not all the time, of course, but for one weekend a year when we go to Ren Faire.
That’s short for Renaissance Faire. Which is, itself, short for Ye Longe Boring Day, most of it spent sitting on hay bales watching drama queens and kings parade around pretending like it’s the 1400s and nobody has cholera. Imagine a bunch of people in knee-high boots and frilly shirts slogging through the mud, drinking beer out of ivory horns, and saying “Forsooth” a lot. Sprinkle in the smell of horse manure for full effect. There’s a Ren Faire that happens in July less than an hour away from our house, and every year my parents drag me along for the entire weekend so I can watch my sister pretend to be some kind of fairy pirate handmaiden or something.
Don’t get me wrong. Parts of it are cool. The jousting and the archery contest and the guy who eats fire. But after a while you start to feel like you’re an intruder, and the people who are dressed up in flower crowns and billowy pants are having a lot more fun than you are because they know something you don’t.
Come to think of it, I get that feeling a lot.
I gathered my stick and joined Cass in the backyard. The morning dew was cool and slick on my feet.
“Remember what I taught you,” she said as I approached. “Salute. En garde.”
Even dressed in her zebra-stripe flannel pajamas, Cass looked like a pro, striking the pose I’d seen a zillion times: branch out, leg extended, one arm back. I held my stick droopingly out in front of me with both hands like an apathetic Jedi. It wasn’t how I was supposed to stand, but I didn’t ask to be dragged out of bed this morning.
“Are you going to take this seriously or not?”
“When last we met, I was but a learner. Now I am the master,” I replied.
“I take that as a no,” Cass said. Then she shouted “Allez!” which is French, I assume, for “Prepare to have me beat you senseless,” and she lunged, swiftly knocking my stick out of the way and jabbing me in the belly. I collapsed, clutching my stomach with both hands, moaning and rolling from side to side.
“I think you punctured my spleen,” I groaned.
“I barely touched you. Now will you please get up and try this time, you big baby?”
I stood up and brushed myself off, only to be skewered again. And again. And again.
That’s how it went for the next half hour or so. En garde, allez, and then Cass somehow disarmed me or knocked me off-balance before stabbing me in the heart, the liver, or the lungs. I did try, eventually—mostly out of an instinct for self-preservation. The harder she poked me, the harder I tried, though it wasn’t easy with her shouting at me all the time.
“Feint! Feint! Parry! Riposte! Riposte! After you parry, why don’t you ever riposte?”
“Because I never posted in the first place!” I said, which earned me an eye roll and another jab. “This is stupid. Stop poking me!”
“You know, it wouldn’t hurt you to try something new every once in a while. Just because I like it doesn’t mean you automatically won’t.”
No. But it made it highly probable. “What’s there to like about you stabbing me?”
“You know what I mean.”
I guess, maybe, I knew what she meant, but I was still tired of being beat. I tossed my stick into the line of trees behind Aunt Gertie’s house with a grunt and turned back toward the door. Cass called out behind me.
“You can’t quit now. We’re just getting started.”
I ignored her.
“You know Papa Kwirk always tried new things. And he never did anything halfway.”
And see where that got him, I almost said, but I didn’t. In fact, I instantly felt bad for even thinking it.
It seemed like something my father would have said.
By the time I’d washed my hands—Mom refused to let you join the table without sniffing them to detect a lingering presence of soap particles—everyone else was seated. Dad was back from his walk and was already wearing his suit and reeking of aftershave. He owned at least twenty colorful bow ties, polka dots and fancy stripes and even a black one with little gold stars that Mom said was her favorite, but the tie he wore today was of the straight and skinny variety, simple and boring, patterned black and gray. I had never seen it before and wondered if he kept it in the back of his closet just for occasions like this—though our family hadn’t had many occasions like this. He looked strange with his hair slicked down and his shirt cuffs buttoned. Not at all like the dad I was used to.
That set me to wondering if Papa Kwirk would look just as weird to me when I saw him today. Except for that one picture on Aunt Gertie’s wall, I’d always only ever seen my grandfather in a short-sleeve buttondown, the top two buttons loose to show off his patch of curly silver chest hair. I wondered if they would trim his bird’s-nest beard. Wondered if he would look like him or like a wax replica, like something you would find in a museum. Maybe I could avoid going up to the casket to say goodbye, just so I wouldn’t have to look, but then it would seem like I didn’t care, which wasn’t true at all. I just wanted to remember Papa Kwirk the way I’d always seen him. Leaning against Jack Nicholson, or snoring in our La-Z-Boy, or sitting on our stoop with a piece of licorice dangling out of his mouth.
“Eat up,” Aunt Gertie said, setting a plate of pancakes on the table. She had, indeed, made the whole box, the stack threatening to topple over. We worked through them, though—it kept our mouths busy chewing. Unlike yesterday, when it seemed preferable to talk about anything other than Papa Kwirk, today it seemed wrong not to talk about him, so nobody said much of anything. Not until Lyra, who had only taken one bite of her breakfast, pushed her plate away.
“You okay, honey?” Mom asked.
My little sister shook her head, lower lip bulging. “I still haven’t found Beelzebub.”
“That’s what’s bothering you?” Aunt Gertie said, sounding relieved. “No worries, dear. He’s got to be around here somewhere. His food bowl’s half empty, and there’s a big wet spot in the litter box, so I know he’s not dead.”
Dad choked on his pancake.
“Sorry, Fletcher,” Aunt Gertie said.
“It’s all right,” Dad said, wiping his mouth with his napkin. He looked at Lyra. “I’ll try to help you find him after the funeral, okay, sweetie?”
“Funneral,” Aunt Gertie said, pronouncing it with a short U sound, like in “gun.”
There was a pause, the room so quiet I could hear the grandfather clock in the living room ticking.
“Sorry, what?” Dad asked, his fork hovering over his plate.
Aunt Gertie just kept eating, though, speaking with food in her mouth. “Jimmy always said that the problem with funerals was that they were no fun. So instead we’re calling it a funneral.”
I waited for the wink, but Aunt Gertie was all business. She didn’t flinch.
“You can’t be serious,” Dad said.
“Serious as a funeral,” Gertie replied. “Which is why today is going to be something different.”
Mom suddenly looked uncomfortable, squirming in her chair like she’d gotten an itch in the middle of her back. “So what exactly is the difference between a funeral and a . . . um . . .” She cleared her throat as if the word had gotten lodged there. “Fun-neral.”
“I guess you’ll just have to wait and see,” Aunt Gertie said, her eyes flashing. She shoveled a forkful of pancake into her mouth with a smile of relish.
Wait and see? Now I was nervous. Were people going to jump out from behind the coffin? Would there be streamers? Those little cone-shaped horns you blow at New Year’s? My experience with funerals was limited, but I sort of knew what to expect from them. Black clothing. Speeches and prayers and lots of sniffling. Everyone with their hands in their laps. Hugs and flowers and organ music. What did Aunt Gertie have planned?
“Will there be more clowns?” Lyra asked, saying out loud what I only dared to think to myself.
“It’s a funeral, not a birthday party for a five-year-old,” Dad told her.
“Funneral,” Aunt Gertie repeated in a carefully measured tone, fixing my father with her eyes. “Jimmy gave instructions for how he would like to be remembered. It was all outlined in his will. And as executor of that will, I intend to honor his final wishes.” The tone of her voice was oddly authoritative all of a sudden. Like she was giving us a warning. Or an ultimatum. “It should be well attended, though,” she continued, her voice softening. “Most of Jimmy’s other family will be there.”
“His other family?” I asked. I could have sworn that my grandfather’s entire family was sitting at this table. I looked over at Dad, but he seemed to still be hung up on the difference between funeral and funneral. He rubbed at his forehead with one hand.
“Your grandfather lived in this town most of his life,” Gertie explained. “Almost sixty years. You don’t drop anchor somewhere for that long and not get barnacles on your boat. There are quite a few people here who knew and loved him. I think of them as family.”
“Not my family,” Dad said.
“Well, it’s not your funneral,” Gertie replied shortly. “When you die, you can make the guest list.”
I could sense Lyra wanting to point out the logistical problem with this statement, but she popped a strawberry into her mouth instead, chewing slowly.
“Your grandfather was a fixture in this community,” Aunt Gertie continued, looking at me now, I think maybe to avoid looking at Dad. “Did you know he used to volunteer sometimes at the high school, talking to troubled teens?” I shook my head. Just as expected, I was learning new things about Papa Kwirk already. “Well, maybe if your dad had brought you around more, you would have,” Gertie said.
The sound of Dad’s fork clattering to his plate startled me.
“Around? You want to talk about being around? How about you tell the kids how often Frank was around when I was their age? Ask them if they knew where he was when I left for school some days? Or when it was time to make dinner? I’m sure they’d love to hear how around he was.”
Aunt Gertie frowned and set her fork gently on the table. Mom looked up to the ceiling. Cass shifted in her seat. Mealtimes at Aunt Gertie’s were starting to follow a familiar pattern.
Lyra swallowed her strawberry. “Did you guys know that the aurora borealis can be seen from outer space?”
Everyone looked at her, except for my father and my great-aunt. Normally this would be the point when Dad would jump in and say something about charged particles and magnetic fields and start to explain away the mystery of the whole thing, taking some of the beauty with it.
Instead he said, “I think I’m full,” and stood up. “Thank you for breakfast. I’m going to go finish getting ready for the . . .” He paused, and I could sense that whatever came next could trigger an explosion at the kitchen table. “For today,” he finished. I watched my pancake soak up the last of my syrup as he tromped upstairs.
“Do you really have to make this more difficult than it already is?” Mom snipped at Aunt Gertie, before standing and following him.
I was starting to wonder if either of them would ever finish a meal the whole time we were in Greenburg.
“What was that all about?” Lyra wondered out loud.
“I’m afraid your dad and I don’t always see eye to eye when it comes to your grandfather,” Aunt Gertie said with a sigh. “But we will by the time this is all over. At least that’s my intention.”
I was pretty sure by “this” she meant the funeral, or funneral, or whatever it was called. I had no idea what we were in for. None of us did.
Only Aunt Gertie knew for sure.
Shaking Things Up
I’d only ever been to one other funeral in my life. A few years ago, friends of my parents lost their six-year-old son to leukemia. His name was Ferran. He’d been born with thick black hair as a baby. He enjoyed riding his bike and baking cookies. He spent the last few month of his life stuck in a bed.
My dad worked with Ferran’s dad, and though our families never hung out together outside of company picnics, I knew what the Amaris had been through. The treatments and the extended hospital stays, the expensive medications and the steadily worsening prognosis. The year before his passing, the community had a Festival for Ferran to raise money for treatment, a pitch-in street fair complete with kissing booths and pool-noodle swordfights. Naturally my family ran the mystery jelly-bean challenge booth: identify all five flavors correctly and get a prize. In total we raised eight thousand dollars, enough to pay for a few months of meds, maybe. They didn’t stop him from dying, though. All the kisses and jelly beans in the world couldn’t have done that.
Ferran’s funeral service was held in a big Catholic church, filled to the aisles. The priest led the congregation in prayer after prayer, some of them in Latin. There were songs and poems. Ferran’s older sister stood up and sang an a cappella version of “Stand by Me,” but she couldn’t make it through the chorus without breaking down, which choked me up, because crying can be contagious. I remember that the sun was brutal that day, sneaking through the haloes of the saints in the stained-glass windows, beating down on us later as we stood at the gravesite. I remember my mother holding my sweaty hand the whole time as they lowered little Ferran into the ground.
Papa Kwirk’s memorial, as my dad insisted on calling it, wasn’t going to be held in a church. Not because Papa Kwirk didn’t believe in God—I knew he did, because I’d asked him once. We were standing by our Christmas tree looking at an ornament, given to us by a friend, showing Jesus in the manger. Papa Kwirk was telling me how he’d once had to sleep in a barn too, “though no camel-ridin’ kings showed up with bags fulla gold for me.” That’s when I asked him.
“Hell yes. I believe in all of ’em,” he told me. “I wouldn’t’ve come back from ’Nam otherwise.”
Papa Kwirk believed, but he never went to church, at least not that I knew of. Maybe he couldn’t find one in town that would let him worship all of ’em at once. Or maybe he had too many other ways to spend his Sundays. On Sunday God rested, or so I’m told, but resting wasn’t really Papa Kwirk’s style.
Which all helped explain why his memorial service was being held at a neighborhood park instead of a church. That, and the fact that Papa Kwirk would have liked the idea of being surrounded by trees rather than walls. That’s what Aunt Gertie said, and she was the one calling the shots.
We arrived at the park early at my father’s insistence, following the little yellow flags and parking the Tank in the one space marked by a white sign that read Immediate Family. That was us. Immediate. The clouds sported angry gray bruises that threatened rain, so Mom pulled two giant umbrellas from the trunk that she kept there, just in case. She wasn’t allergic to rain (though she was afraid of lightning); she just didn’t want to get her nice black dress wet.
I scratched my armpits where my fancy fresh-from-the-package dress shirt was itching me. The pants itched too. When I complained about it out loud, Aunt Gertie told me that being uncomfortable was the price you pay for beauty and pointed to her own high heels. She then told the girls that they looked gorgeous in their dresses. “Don’t your sisters look pretty?” she said, poking me with her elbow.
“You really don’t want me to answer that,” I told her.
The park was pretty, though. A patch of emerald studded with elms and evergreens and yellow and orange flowers, like flickers of fire, sprouting from pockets of mulch. A playground could be seen in the distance, peppered with kids running and swinging. I had to remind myself it was Sunday afternoon and there was no school for them either. They were all dressed in shorts and T-shirts, lucky jerks.
“You’ll ruin your outfit,” Mom said, noticing me staring longingly at the playground. “Besides, it doesn’t look like we’re that early after all.”
In the center of the park sat an amphitheater, which Aunt Gertie said was used for summer concerts sporting local musicians. Today it was packed with white plastic folding chairs, already filling with people. Lots of people. “Quite a crowd,” I said.
“I told you, your grandfather had a big family,” Aunt Gertie said. “Everyone in town knew him. And most of them even liked him, which is to their credit.” She grabbed my hand—hers was surprisingly rough for someone who had spent most of her life in New York City conference rooms negotiating business contracts—and walked with me, all the way down to the front row, her heels clicking on the paved steps. There, on a small metal stage, sat Papa Kwirk’s casket and a few chairs, but little else. No flower bouquets. No wreaths or flags. A podium with a microphone stood next to an easel, on which sat the only other evidence for why we’d all gathered here: a portrait of the man himself.
Except it wasn’t a portrait, exactly. It was a caricature. One of those silly drawings you can get at the zoo or at Disney World for twenty bucks, where your head is twice as big as your body and everything’s slightly out of proportion. Grandpa’s caricature was especially overblown. His ears were much too big and his inky eyebrows too bushy. The artist had drawn him sitting astride Jack Nicholson, smiling, missing tooth and all. That missing tooth used to drive my great-aunt crazy.
The casket was closed, thankfully. Which meant that instead of seeing Papa Kwirk’s waxy face, layered in makeup, with a forced, tight-lipped smile, I would get to remember his giant gap-toothed grin. I thought it was better that way. Obviously so did Aunt Gertie.
Dad felt differently.
“Closed casket?” he asked, pointing up at the stage. His suit must have been itchy too, because he’d been squirming in it ever since we left the house.
“Jimmy’s wishes,” Aunt Gertie said. It was the fourth or fifth time I’d heard her say it already this morning. Every time Dad would ask a question, Aunt Gertie would deflect it or say it was a surprise and then follow it with “Jimmy’s wishes,” which only frustrated my father even further.
