poppies (lester averman)(INDEFINITE HIATUS)

chapter twenty-two

•─────────•❋•─────────•

chapter twenty-two: my house with all the cobwebs

a/n:

TWS — BAD PARENTING, CONCERNING BEHAVIOR

•─────────•❋•─────────•

They didn't throw a wake.

Too many people would want to come, Oliver reasoned.

He'd have hated it, anyway, she said back, and then she laughed. Best to get it over with.

However, now, standing beside her father in front of her grandparents' mausoleum and watching the pallbearers slide the casket into its final resting place, Rory feels like she'll never laugh again.

The ceremony itself was corny. A priest came even if Eli was never religious and read a sermon, and one of her aunts delivered a tearful rendition of a Frost poem that Rory's sure she doesn't know the true meaning of, and there were dozens of people that shook Rory's hand and let her know that they were so sorry for her loss. Part of her knows that it's only common courtesy, that there's a universally agreed on way to speak to the bereaved at a funeral, but a bigger part can't help but be angry. Elijah Myrtle was not a good man. People shouldn't be lining up just to grieve him. He didn't do anything good. And, even then, where were all of these crying people when he was dying? Where were they when she was wiping his sweat and wetting his lips with wet sponges? They didn't love him. They shouldn't have.

Yet she did, and didn't, somehow, in equal measure.

She realizes that, as the tomb's door closes for the last time, she's spent so much time telling herself not to be sad that she never got to process any of it. The fact that he died in front of her, and the fact that he was mean, and the fact that, maybe, she had wanted him to go.

Krystal grabs her hand and squeezes it reassuringly, but it doesn't matter.

She wants more time.

She wants to go back in time, shedding the years like layers of skin, and do it all over again. To do it right.

But, as she learned a very long time ago, the universe cares very little for what she wants, and she has no other choice but to let her stepmother pull her along the winding path back to the home, leading the people away and leaving the l caretakers to do what they needed to.

The after 'party' is hardly that. It's more of a blur of somber faces. Some she can recognize, most she can't. They repeat the same two phrases about his character and share vague, obviously censored stories of their interactions with her grandfather that she doesn't ask for, doing their best to aid her but boring her more than anything. She smiles this thin-lipped smile that doesn't quite reach her eyes and drinks anything that's handed to her, but the buzz does nothing to make her feel any better.

If anything, it just dulls the edges of everything, makes their tall tales easier to listen to.

She, unfocusing her eyes as one of her grandfather's old coworkers realizes that he was about to tell her all about how lecherous he was to female coworkers, starts to wish that she hadn't told Rick not to come.