“She’s our mother,” Murphy said, “so it is our own fucking goddamn business.”

At which point Horace merely pointed his finger at her and held it there, one inch from Murphy’s face.

I waited for her to bite it. I hoped she would snap it clean off at the knuckle.

But such was Horace’s power—the fierce, unblinking stare, the menace of his outstretched pointer finger, the lit cigarette smoking (indoors, a thing that would have been inconceivable in our house before)—that it cowed even Murphy. She shrank from him, trembling.

For the life of me, I could not understand what Mom saw in the guy. And I guessed now I’d never know.

The day of the funeral was gray, threatening rain, the sky all rumbles and groans. No one came to the service except a few kindhearted busybodies and some old lady named Shondra that nobody knew. None of Murphy’s cool friends showed, and I didn’t have any friends. I figured at least a few of Mom’s exes would be there—Mom had more than enough to pack the place—but turns out jilted ex-boyfriends don’t show up to funerals. Not even our grandmother came—our mother’s own mother. It would have been nice to have met her for the first time. After all, this was the woman who had paid for everything in our lives—even down to our old house, the one we had before we moved in with Horace—through this bank trust she had set up for us. I had always wondered about her, begged Mom to let us know her, to go and see her sometime. But Mom just went grim and refused, same as always. I wondered if Grandma even knew that Mom had died.

Horace kept his distance from us. He hadn’t said a word to us all day—not when we ate breakfast together (stale Cheerios in skim milk), not when he drove us to the funeral, not even at the visitation as we stood next to our mother’s mannequin-looking body in the casket. I mean, what they had done to her was shameful. She looked fake, like some kind of human Barbie doll, her cheeks caked with this awful makeup, a contented smile on her lips, the sort of placid look I never saw on Mom’s face when she was alive.

At the service nobody spoke except the preacher, and he didn’t have a clue who Mom was. It was insulting, him droning on about being in a better place, about God forgiving, about all of us meeting again in the hereafter. What fucking hereafter? Mom had never believed in God or the afterlife or anything except the moment, the right now of everything. And right now Mom was dead—a corpse, emptied-out and embalmed, a husk. There was nothing left of my mom in that casket or maybe anywhere else. The whole thing felt like a mockery.

I was so grateful for Murphy, that I didn’t have to do all this alone. I sat there bawling my eyes out, watching Murphy try not to cry, her back unnaturally straight in that black dress of hers, gripping the pew all white-knuckled, holding everything in. I wished I could get her to just let go for a minute, but that wasn’t the kind of thing Murphy did. I was the weepy sibling, something Murphy managed to never give me any hell about. Murphy was good like that.