But he did show. The next day, Froehmer slipped into the funeral once the service had started and took a seat behind me. I was sitting behind Casey. The first pew had just the family, Casey and her parents, all dressed in black. The mother seemed small in her black dress, a tiny cinder left at the end. The father flipped through the hymnal or some other book. Casey hugged me and motioned for me to sit behind her. It was straight church, with hymns, and readings and the Book of Common Prayer. I stood when everyone else stood and knelt when everyone else knelt, and read along with the prayers and the hymns, but I kept my mouth shut. The words meant nothing to me. I wished they did. I can see how they might bring comfort to somebody, the idea that they’ve left us for some place better, a mansion, the priest said, but I didn’t believe it. The priest talked about the death of Lazarus and how Jesus said that anyone who believed in him would not die, but then Jesus goes and raises Lazarus from the dead. All I could wonder why Jesus didn’t raise everyone from the dead, then. Why didn’t he raise Frank from that box? If death meant nothing, why was Lazarus brought back after four days in the tomb? It was just a story, just like the thieves on the cross and all the rest of it. It meant nothing to me; they’re just stories. They may have power over the others, but it doesn’t work on me. They might be afraid of pain and punishment in the afterlife, or heaven and all that, but if I do something wrong, I want to pay for it in my own way. That’s all I could think about as we went down to our knees and back up again and the words and more words came and went, and Frank stayed there in the front, barely mentioned in the whole service.