11/16b

Ah, yes. My mother’s funeral. What a lovely event it was.

You would think, wouldn’t you, that maybe—just maybe—they’d be compassionate. Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you just think they’d say to themselves you know, she’s obviously grieving, and it’s a good thing she’s got someone to stand beside her and hold her up in her hour of need? I mean, it’s not like I had a family or anything. It’s not like they were ever there for me—even when my dad died, or when I got divorced, or anything else.
No, they all just stood there looking at us—looking at Damien standing beside me, thinking their hateful little thoughts. Aunt Ronnie even came to me and informed me that my mother would have been ashamed of me, bringing “that man” to her funeral.
And—I’ll admit it—she was right. Which is about the only thing you’ll EVER hear me admit to being “right” about Aunt Ronnie, or Uncle Bill, or Uncle Rich, or Aunt Cyn, or any of their upwardly-mobile kids. Or anyone else on Mom’s side of the family. But Mom would have killed me if she knew I brought Damien to her funeral. But see, she didn’t know—she didn’t have any say in it.
I know—a petty revenge, right? A petty revenge against a poor old murdered widow-lady for not giving me a pony when I was little, or for not telling me I was her favorite, or whatever. Well, if my revenge is petty, it’s also mine. And no one knows what it’s for, either.
Bringing Damien wasn’t revenge, though. Bringing Damien was my hedge against the horror of it all. Damien was my wall—he stood between me and those people with all their questions, those people with all their cameras. “How do you feel?” they would ask me. How the fuck do you THINK I feel, you microphone-wielding ass? My mother was stabbed eleven times. I would never say that, of course. They all think I’d say something just exactly like that, but I never would. But I’d let Damien say it for me, if the opportunity arose.
So Damien stood beside me, uncomfortable in his only suit and tie, towering over everyone else in the room and holding back more weight and memories than he will ever know. God bless him, I say.
Yeah, I know. “Not your mother’s God, that’s for sure...” Aunt Ronnie said that too. Well, there’s another reason not to go to church, if I was looking--my mother’s God was apparently a racist, too, along with being a murderer and a right-wing bigot. Cool, I say.
I’ve had enough of family. I’ve had enough of funerals. First Daddy, then Grandpa Bill a year after that, and Grandma; then Gabriel. I’d have had enough of funerals at that point no matter if no one on Earth had ever died before. My sweet, sweet Gabriel.
Of course, they never knew about Gabriel. They take it as an article of faith that Damien is the one they’ve been referring to for all these years as “that man Grace is with”, but they’re wrong. Damien has only been around for twelve, fifteen months. Gabriel was there for three and a half years.
So of course, they blame Damien for the things they think they know about me. They blame Damien for the things my mother told them about me. “Oh, THAT’s the one who got her started.” “THAT’s the one who gave her the drugs.” They think they know. They think I had nothing to do with it, that I was led astray. That fits in with what they like to think of themselves—that nothing that ever came from them could be bad, could be wrong, could be corrupted.

11/2 thru 11/16a

They came and interviewed me, of course. The detective was one of the boys from my Karen’s class at Mother of Sorrows; in fact, if I remember rightly I think he might have been the one who took her to the eighth-grade dance. Mark or Marty or Mickey—some M name.
Of course now he wasn’t Mark or Marty or Mickey—his nametag said “Det. Malinowsky” and he wasn’t wearing a bad sportcoat now, he was wearing a full police uniform. He took off his hat and I remember thinking—isn’t it funny what you think about, at times like these?—I remember thinking that he probably would have been a much better choice for Karen, all things considered, than that no-good dago she married.
“Good morning, Mrs. Shea,” said Detective Mark-or-Marty-or-Mickey. “I hope this isn’t a bad time...”
“Oh, no, of course not,” I said. “Come on in—would you like some coffee, Detectiv...”
“Michael,” he said. “Don’t bother with the ‘Detective’ stuff...How’s the family?”
“Not bad,” I said. “Karen’s twins are making their Communion next month, and I’m going out to Portland to see Lisa in July...”
He smiled. “Sounds like everyone’s doing good...I can’t believe we’re all so old now--I still remember falling out of that treehouse you all had in the yard...I remember Jimmy told me not to say anything because you wanted it torn down and you were just looking for an excuse...How is Jimmy, anyway?”
“Um...He’s fine,” I said. Then, just to keep the silence from getting any more uncomfortable, I asked him, “So how’s your father doing?”
“Not so good,” he said. “He’s kinda in and out of consciousness—sometimes he knows we’re there, sometimes he doesn’t. It’s really been rough on Mom...”
“I can only imagine,” I said, pouring the coffee into Auntie Rose’s teacups. “Well, as I always say, the Lord knows what he’s doing...”
“Mrs. Shea,” he said, “I’m sorry to have to do this, but I really need to talk to you about what happened to Mrs. Buckley...”
“Yes, I thought you might stop by about that. Would you like some cookies?”
“No, thank you,” he said. “Did Mrs. Buckley ever say anything to you about the work she did down at the soup kitchen?”
“Not in any detail,” I said. “I told Lillie I thought she was foolish going into that neighborhood...at least, I told her that a couple of times...Did you know her daughter?” I asked him.
“Grace? Yeah, my little brother was in school with her. I mean, I knew who she was, but I didn’t realize whose daughter she was til I went to interview her about what happened.”
“It’s a shame, really,” I said.
+++
“Lillie was such a good woman, and she had so much trial in her life. And then to die that way—she was only trying to help that boy, you know.”
“The two of you went to the same church, right? I mean, she still went to Lady of Sorrows, didn’t she?”
“Oh, absolutely. She tried St. Agnes for a while, just before they installed the new pastor, but then once he got there she came right back to good old Lady of Sorrows. That pastor they put over at St. Agnes, he was no good at all.”
“How so?” Detective Michael asked me. He bit into a cookie and waited as though he was honestly interested in the answer—small talk was all it was though, really.
“Oh, he’s horrible! Bringing in all those guitarists, for one—my friend Eva goes there still, but she just refuses to go anywhere near that 9:30 Sunday mass. Calls it ‘the hippie Mass’ and I don’t think she’s too far wrong. And then...well, of course you know about the scandal, right?”
“You mean....the thing with Father Feeney?”
I laughed. “Oh, no no no. That was all just rumor, Eva told me—that boy’s family wasn’t even Catholic to start with, and if you ask me I think they just saw a chance at a quick buck. No, I mean that...thing....the pastor had in January. On the news they called it a ‘ceremony’ but even if you put lipstick on a pig and called it Saint Theresa, it would still be a pig.”
The detective smiled, a little. “Oh, you mean the marriage.”
I swear, I nearly dropped Auntie Rose’s teacup. “Marriage!” I said. “That’s no marriage. That’s an abomination before God, if you ask me! Really, Michael—I know your mother raised you as a proper Catholic. ‘Marriage’, my eye.”
I was waiting for him to apologize but all he said was “Did Mrs. Buckley feel the same way as you did...about that, I mean?”
“Of course she did! Lillie was a good churchgoing woman and she believed in the Word of God. And that’s what she was doing when she died—just passing along the Lor’'s words to that poor hellbound soul...”
He nodded, but said nothing. He finished his coffee and stood up. “Well, Mrs. Shea, thanks for your time...Tell Karen I said hello....”
“I certainly will,” I began.
But that wasn’t enough; oh, no-- he looked dead into my eyes and finished. “oh, and Jimmy too..you know, when you see him.”
I stood up and showed him to the door. “Have a nice day, Detective Malinowsky,” I said, and closed the door behind him. Then I latched the bolt, loudly, just so Mr. Big-Detective Know-it-all knew I was on to him, too.

“Say hello to Jimmy,” indeed. I wouldn’t speak to that boy if he crawled back home on his knees with a swimsuit model and a pack of babies in tow. Much less the way he is now. I swear, Lillie had no idea what REAL heartbreak was about. I mean, sure, her daughter had problems, but at least her Grace wasn’t completely beyond salvation.
“Say hello to Jimmy.” Say hello to your hellbound fairy son. Say hello—and stick out your pinky when you say it, too. About the only thing I have to say to him would be “Does it feel good to know you’re breaking your mother’s heart?”
And my daughters! Karen told me that Renee actually had them out for dinner one night—him and that person he’s living with. I told Renee the next time I went to her house, I would be bringing my own hand towels. God alone knows what diseases that other one carried in with him.
No, Lillie didn’t know heartache at all, really. She always believed that everything could be put right in the end, and as I could tell her, that’s just not how it works. But she had her head on straight about some things—she was trying to convert that boy, to bring him back to the Lord, and instead of saying “Gee, thanks,” he stabbed her eleven times, three times through the heart, and left her in the doorway of a filthy old abandoned building. Lillie deserved better than that. ANYONE deserves better than that—well, with a few notable exceptions.
At least my daughters turned out well, even Renee with her little do-gooder bleeding heart streak. Karen has the twins and a little girl just starting kindergarten next year, and Joseph has a good steady job at the hospital, something with computers. Lisa just got married last July, and her husband is a tax attorney with a very prominent firm out in Portland. And even Renee is finally doing okay for herself; she finally got rid of that boy she was so tangled up with, and she’s got a job at the insurance office, processing claims. It’s not what I would have wished for her, but at least she got that whole “artist” thing out of her system before it was too late.
But Lillie only had the girl—and she started off so well, or so Lillie would tell you. Karen was only a year ahead of Grace at Lady of Sorrows, and of course they knew some of the same kids, and from what Karen tells me, there was something strange about that girl from the start. She was just....eerie, somehow, even when she was a little girl. She didn’t seem to have a lot of friends, and then she just never seemed to care about her looks the way the other little girls did—you never saw her with the other girls, off in the corner braiding each other’s hair. She was always the one off in the corner with her nose in a book, more often than not with her hair all in her eyes like a sheepdog. They said she was a cryer, as well—that any time anyone ever teased her, she’d just burst into tears. She was a strange duck, all right. But smart, that’s for sure. Lillie kept all the test scores and all the paperwork—a lot of good it did her. She sent the girl to the best high school, the best college, and she got through all right—there was a boyfriend, apparently, who kept her pretty much on the straight and narrow—but she wasn’t out of college three weeks, Lillie said, before things started going wrong. Of course, she’d lost her father a few months earlier, but my kids lost their dad when Renee was only three, and none of them went that far off course.
But when Grace moved in with that colored man...well, that was when Lillie started going downhill, really. Oh, none of us ever talked about it, but we could all see it, in subtle little ways. First she stopped coming to the widows’ group meetings; then once in a while she wouldn’t be in her pew at morning Mass, and you’d see her later in the day looking all red-eyed and miserable. Once or twice I dropped by for one reason or another, round about the dinner hour, and I was pretty sure I smelled liquor on her breath.
+++

11/1/04

You could call it a premonition, though if you tried to quote me on that I would say I never said it—after all, I like to consider myself a good church woman and our church doesn’t hold with all that premonition business. But call it what you will—premonition or hunch or God’s will—I knew all along that Lillie wasn’t long for this world.
It wasn’t just her daughter. MOST of it was her daughter and she would tell you that herself, if she was here; if the heart disease hadn’t killed her or the bleeding ulcer or the cirrhosis of the liver that I knew she MUST be getting by now, that girl was going to be the death of her and I knew it, she knew it, all her friends knew it too. That girl was nothing but trouble and it was just the trial of her life, the cross God had given her to bear. It was the girl who had kept her drinking for all these years—I mean, what was she to do? Everyone in the neighborhood had seen her daughter, all dead-eyed like a fish, dirty and skinny, coming home in the middle of the night. Everyone had seen her and That Man she went around with. Wouldn’t you drink too?
But like I said, Lillie wasn’t the healthiest woman in the world to begin with, and we all knew her suffering was soon to end anyway. She had a pacemaker, and a whole list of medicines she had to take—for her heart, for her blood clots, for her arthritis, for her ulcer, for her depression. Every dinner conversation was all about her health and some of us were a little bit weary, I’ve got to tell you, of hearing about all her problems.
Be that as it may, though—none of us would have wished for her in a million years what really took her in the end. Not even her daughter, I would like to think, though I may be giving that girl a little too much credit by saying it. But I try to think the best of everyone, and so even if I don’t believe for 100% certain that the girl wouldn’t have wished her mother dead by some stranger’s hand, I can at least try to be Christian about it.
I will admit it, though—when Kay called me and told me what had happened, I have to admit the thought crossed my mind. After all—the girl was a dope addict, pure and simple, and then there was that colored man she was living with. Who knew what people like that were capable of? I mean, really. Lillie told me that one time when we went to Door County for the weekend, she came home and her great-grandmother’s silver candelabras and a pearl brooch were missing. SHE said it was the cleaning lady, who knew where the spare key was kept—but we all knew she was just trying to save face. We all knew who had really taken those things. And if she’d steal from her mother—or even if she didn’t do the dirty work herself, even if she’d just set up one of her friends with a spare housekey and told them where to find the valuables—anyone who could do something as cold-hearted as that...well, someone like that could kill, couldn’t they? Especially when they thought there might be something left to inherit?
And frankly, no matter what the police say, I still think the girl might have had something to do with it. They can say all they want that it was that man from the soup kitchen who killed Lillie—but who’s to say he wasn’t a friend of her daughter’s too? All those hopheads know each other, anyway. Lock them all up and throw away the key, I say, but no, all these bleeding hearts want to SAVE them. Even Lillie, who I would have thought had better sense than all that, wanted to SAVE people. That was why she was ever at the soup kitchen in the first place...”I just want to feel like I’m doing some good for someone,” she said. “And if I can bring a few of these poor souls back to God, well, that would be even better.”
As for me, I thought God was doing plenty fine without a bunch of dirty scum to worry about, though of course I never said that to Lillie. I did tell her, though, that I thought she was being foolish, going into a neighborhood like that. After I said it, though, I felt a little awkward, when I remembered that her daughter had moved somewhere around there. But Lillie knew what was what, after all—she’d said it herself, half a hundred times, how much she wished her daughter would move to some other part of the city. I think maybe working in that soup kitchen was Lillie’s way of trying to keep in touch with her only child—I don’t know. But I did tell her she was courting trouble—that I did.

Introduction

Read this and you will understand.

The name is just a working title, from the fact that as I discovered this NaNoBlogMo thing, I was watching Gangs of New York, which is unaccountably one of my favorite movies.

I think I know what this novel is about. But I'm never sure--I've never been sure before, so why start now?

Come back in November. There will be more.