Aunt Sandy, Dad’s sister, was folding napkins into neat triangles because she needed something to do with her hands. Uncle Nolan cleared plates. My cousin Sadie sorted the stack of sympathy cards on the side table. And Greg moved through all of it like a host, refilling drinks, touching shoulders, being the person everyone turned toward.
He brought me a coffee. Two sugars, exactly how I take it, because of course he knew.
He glanced at the plate of food I had not touched. I looked away from it.
Then he put his hand on my shoulder and leaned in close.
“Dad would want me to take care of you,” he said.
Something pulled tight under my ribs. He said it in a particular way, as if Dad had handed me off. As if I were a duty Dad had left behind and Greg had signed for at the door.
“We’re all we have now, Chlo,” he added, and squeezed.
I nodded, because what else do you do at a funeral. Then I took my coffee out to the back porch so I could breathe.
Joshua came out after a minute. He always knew when I needed a minute and when the minute was over.
Joshua is my fiancé, though by then Dad had long stopped thinking of him as anything but family. He picked up Dad’s old tape measure off the porch railing, the one from when the two of them had rebuilt the steps together the summer before, turned it over in his hands, and gave it to me without a word, because he knew I would want to hold something of Dad’s.
Dad and Joshua had liked each other from the first day. They were the same kind of man, patient with objects, patient with people, good with their hands. They would repair things together all weekend, and they had a joke they shared. Every time one of them ruined something, stripped a screw, cut a board too short, one of them would say it.
“What comes next?” Dad would ask.
“We try again,” Joshua would answer.
Every time. It drove me a little crazy and I loved it.
I closed my fingers around the tape measure.
Through the kitchen window I could see Greg. He was watching us. Watching Joshua and me out on the porch, and there was something in his face I could not read, something that was not grief.
Then he saw me looking, and his expression changed like a channel flipping, and he smiled and lifted his mug at me through the glass.
Before I could name what I had seen, the screen door opened and Ms. Richards stepped onto the porch.
“I need everyone in the living room,” she said.
