How the cops’ 3 a.m. phone call felt. How his poor child looked, expired on the operating table. We all waited for his return to Clyde. We craved that. Soon we tilted forward, cheering the salesman home toward his topic—face-up in the box. Maybe Clyde had offered some consoling Bible verse at 4 a.m.? Or flowers, coffee-to-go? Anything! But no. This speech was not about my dad in any way but one: Clyde’s love kept offering others permission. Be yourself, bud. Go for it!

From beyond the grave, “Museums should be phoned.” “Not our Clyde,” Bible-scatterers addressed a God all the more invisible today.

These businessmen were too upset to make much sense.

And in the end, only that made sense. Finally, I felt my father’s presence, forgiving, sleepy, half amused, seated right beside us; Clyde nodding at their every crude confession, at each man’s listed grief. From here, I could see one of my actual dead dad’s shoe soles, tipped against white satin; a metal tap nailed near its toe “to save on shoe leather, bud.” And yet I seemed to also feel him slouched here in the pew beside me. One bony arm proved fully long enough to reach well past me, curl around, and include Mom within Dad’s pterodactyl form of a lank angel embrace.

This hug seemed so firm, I remember thinking, “Good, must mean his bone has healed.” (Morticians had, for purposes of sparing his best suit, simply snipped the cast right off that mending arm.)

•  •  •

Soon as Amen ended it, black people and white people I’d never seen, having cried unto coughing, left without addressing Mom. Everybody whispered about her. Strangers openly pointed at us here alone on Clyde’s front row. No eulogy mentioned Mother once. All praise sloshed instead toward me, “his little fellow missionary.” I felt unconsoled, bitter. I felt a Clyde-like lack of vanity. I felt, in fact, so old.

Black members of Dad’s Bible Club sat, for the first time ever, right alongside mourning white members. (By whose order? By some unexpected provision of Dad’s will?)

Janine, genius waitress from The American Grill, sent one hundred decrusted sandwiches to our home for whatever reception might happen afterward. White bread, deprived of brown crust, looked nude. Nobody came. Leaving direct from the cemetery, Mom’s brothers drove right back to Castalia.

Three hours after the service, Colonel Begonia knocked at our front door. A yellow taxi waited. God knows what it cost him or how he reached us from Edenton, half a state away. He lifted toward Mom one pot, his “best boy” beefsteak begonia.

Colonel said he’d come to deliver it/him personally. Mom didn’t understand why, on leaving (carrying five pounds of sandwiches we pressed on him), the old crew-cut gent cried like some unwed mother exiting an orphanage.

“Goodbye,” Colonel told the plant comically healthy. “Be a good boy.—Semper fi,” he called.