I had never before felt so alone when surrounded by so many people. The funeral had not started on time, and I suspected that my mother was somehow to blame. In her absence, I remained in the lobby of the funeral home, the center of attention for everyone in need of someone to whom they could direct their condolences.
For the past half-hour I had been the constant recipient of awkward hugs that lasted too long, whispered sympathies that each contained the same insincere words as the last, and pats on the back from people who I couldn’t recall ever seeing before.
My father and sister have been dead for nearly a week, and I still hadn’t shed a tear. I might cry now, not out of any sudden sense of sadness, but from the strength of the perfumed candles lining the wall near where I was standing. The smell of flowers might have been pleasant in a smaller dose, but the overwhelming nature of it made me wonder if it was causing me to experience a sudden onslaught of allergies.
I resisted the urge to rub my knuckles against my eyes, not because I didn’t want to garner any more displays of empathy from the roughly sixty or so attendees milling about the room, but because mother had put makeup on me for the first time ever, and I didn’t dare risk incurring her wrath by making a mess of it.
Two days ago, we had gone shopping for an appropriate dress, as the growth spur I gone through in the past six months – putting on another six inches in height – made my previous dresses obsolete. Ladylike wasn’t how anyone would describe me. Sure, I was now as tall as my mother, who wasn’t a short woman, but I remained gangly after growing so quickly. Still, the dress was by far the nicest outfit mother had ever purchased for me. Pitch black and elegant, it streamed down to my feet in way that my other dresses did not. More importantly, ankle-length dress was loose enough around my waist that it didn’t reveal the outline of my diaper.