Spoiler
Hi! I've been reviewing a little around here but I've never posted anything of my own before, so I figured it was time to put up or shut up. 
This is the "traditional narrative, realistic plot" piece from my creative writing portfolio. Any comments are welcome!
This is the "traditional narrative, realistic plot" piece from my creative writing portfolio. Any comments are welcome!
All of her children came, even though none of them wanted to.
It was a horrible thing to be true, and they knew that. They were meant to attend their mother’s funeral with the same dutiful energy they had used to troop upstate for their father six years ago. On that day they had stuffed all of their granddaughters into the black wool dresses that made the girls itch and scream and given a joint eulogy during which they had wept real tears.
They ought to be doing the same thing for their mother. They should not be leaving the youngest great-grandchild, Robert Joseph, as home with the babysitters watching him; they should not be yawning as they chose the flowers.
But they did anyway because the air was whipping around with springtime excitement and the full-to-bursting flower buds had no patience for death. Their mother had died a long time ago, anyway, hadn’t she, on the day of their father’s funeral, sometime in between their throwing away the leftover potluck lunch and kissing her cheeks and getting into their cars and never coming back.
Only now she was dead for certain, and they had to face it.
Doug arrived first, which made sense because he was the only one whose car wasn’t down with spouses or children or obligation. He sat in the driver’s seat parked beside the curb and smoked for half of an hour, tipping ashes onto the asphalt where he used to play marbles. After a while his brother Eddie and sister Victoria Jr. pulled up, one right after the other as if they’d planned it.
In high school everybody had called Victoria Jr. Vicky J, but that hadn’t fit on the business cards. She went by plain Victoria now. She and Ed towed spouses in their respective passenger seats and had two children apiece: Dylan and Cody and Liz and Tob (“It’s short for Tobias, but nobody calls him that.”) The children’s individual lineage didn’t really matter because as soon as the youngest ones saw one another they shrieked and then joined up into a sticky amoeba mass which proceeded to grow and degenerate throughout the day as other relatives arrived and mothers pulled their daughters away to retie bows and shoelaces.
Sheila, the eldest of the group, showed up with her husband and all of their children and grandchildren in a carpool. Doug, who lived alone with his pet cat, blinked in astonishment at the emergence of flesh from all four of the station wagon’s doors. By this point a real congregation was underway on the front lawn, relatives hugging and looking at one another sideways, checking for changes and flaws which they would then report to other, closer relatives, on the other side of the driveway.
Beth arrived last, behind all three of her grown children. When her van growled to a halt on the gravel drive Doug and Eddie raised their arms up in mock relief, a gesture that hearkened back to the days when Beth would lock herself in her room, curling her hair and keeping them all waiting for church and only emerging when they were too late to make up the difference by speeding on the back roads. As she got out of her car they all snickered when they saw that she had done her hair up in those old rollers again; they were still hot and half the hair still hung loose, which meant that she had plugged them in at a rest stop somewhere just to orchestrate a laugh.
The funeral was to be the next day. Meeting up early at the old house had seemed like a practical idea on the phone but now they all stumbled around on the lawn, holding the hands of the youngest children and pointing out memories to the oldest, catching and releasing each other’s gazes. They all tried particularly hard not to accidentally wander towards the west side of the front yard where the ground sloped down. Their mother had been found dead there three days ago by the mailman, which was something they had all jointly decided not to share with anyone who hadn’t overheard it already.
That night, when everybody else was asleep, they met in Doug’s room.
“Tell me what he said to you again,” said Beth to Sheila.
“I’ve already said it.”
“Only on the phone. This is different.”
Sheila sat down on one of the twin beds and covered her eyes with her hand. “They said that her body looked as if it had been lying there all night. Her neck was broken.”
“Geez, Sheila. Make it sound like a murder case, why don’t you?” said Ed, leaning against the doorjamb.
“How do we know it isn’t?” said Beth. She shivered.
“Oh, please,” said Victoria. “She was lying underneath the willow tree and Sheila told us that the mailman said her hands and knees were all dirty. She was trying to climb it and fell. It’s the only thing that’s logical.”
“If you think that’s logical then you’re obviously not remembering Mother right,” said Sheila. “When did she ever climb trees? When did she ever get dirty, for that matter?”
“She was old. Maybe her mind was going. I don’t think she was ever right after Daddy died, and can you blame her for that?” said Beth.
“I thought you were supporting the murder theory.” Doug rolled his eyes.
“There is no murder theory. We’re just talking here.”
“We should have visited,” said Ed from where he sat on the floor. “This never would have happened if we had checked up on her more often.”
They looked at one another while Doug’s old ceiling fan gyrated above their heads, its pull cords swinging in gentle circles.
“I don’t think that’s necessarily true,” said Victoria. “I mean, she was old.”
“Eighty-six.” Sheila nodded. “I don’t expect that she would have lived much longer regardless.”
“That’s exactly the point,” said Ed. “She was eighty-six years old. Why on earth would she think it was a good idea to climb a tree? How could she have managed it?”
Another silence greeted his words, until Doug pointed out, “Well, to be fair, she didn’t manage it.”
“Doug!” Victoria and Beth spoke in the same breath, their voices set in the same reprimanding pitch.
Doug hunched his shoulders and looked at the ground.
“That’s what I’m saying,” said Ed. “There must have been something wrong for her to get it into her head to do something so reckless. We should have known about it.”
“Or maybe there was nothing to know,” Beth suggested.
Victoria shook her head, shut her eyes, and fell backwards onto Doug’s spare bed. “The police don’t think it’s a murder,” she said. “I think we’re being crazy, trying to blame somebody.”
“Vicky J’s right,” said Sheila. She patted Beth on the shoulder. “I know it’s difficult, but we should remember that it was just her time to go. We’ll never know exactly what happened.”
“Imagine it, though,” said Victoria. “Our mother, climbing a tree.”
“She did do it before.” Doug spoke distractedly. His eyes roved the room, squinting as he tried to catch and hold the memory. “She climbed that tree after Ed and me when we were kids.” He faced his brother. “Didn’t she?”
“I don’t remember that.”
“No, it happened,” Doug insisted. “I was nine. We were playing that we were superheroes and she got angry at us when we wouldn’t come inside from dinner. She chased us across the yard and followed us up the tree. We were amazed that she could get up at all…”
“Mother never would have climbed a tree,” said Sheila, shaking her head.
“Maybe that’s what happened this week. Maybe she thought it was thirty years ago and you were still up there,” said Beth.
“Maybe she thought it was thirty years ago this week, and you were still up there,” said Beth.
“No. It didn’t happen,” said Ed. “If it had, I would have remembered it. Right?”
They looked at one another without saying anything for a long moment, until Beth awkwardly changed the subject with a mention of her husband's recent run-in with glaucoma. Sheila retaliated with the college plans of her youngest son, Troy, and they carried on for a while like that, trading tidbits and gossip like playing cards, the fan swinging gently above them. Doug rebuffed his sisters' suggestions that he find himself some nice girl by mocking their husbands. Finally, Beth announced that she was tired, and they all filed out of the room, the boys stretching their arms above their heads and the girls shaking out their hair.
***
Their mother had wanted her casket closed, her priest succinct, and her ceremony short. Except for Doug the children did not sit in the front pew but peppered themselves all througout the church, their hands spread out over the tops of their heads of their youngest sons and daughters, their waists encircled by the arms of their spouses. When the thing we over they blinked as if roused from daydreams and required assistance in walking to the cemetery. Ed and Doug, along with Sheila’s sons, served as pallbearers, leaving the girls to walk alongside them with their arms conspicuously empty.
Beth, whose hair was straight today, cried openly at the gravesite. Sheila and Ed stood side by side with Vicky J tucked under Sheila’s arm. Doug stood a little distance apart, the thin line of his mouth wavering. They all experienced a kind of resigned hopelessness which made their heads heavy but their limbs light with the knowledge that there was absolutely nothing to do.
The headstone Victoria had ordered had not yet arrived so for now their mother was nothing more than a mound of earth surrounded by mourners, which may have been the most poignant of all grave markers if not for the fact that they would leave soon, if they didn’t happen to be at this very moment exhaling relief at the idea of abandoning her there.
The children looked at one another, the five them standing together in a sort of polygon. Beth wiped at her eyes and Doug scratched the back of his neck. They could all imagine their mother hidden, tucked away in a place where she could no longer see them, the place where they had put their father and the house they had grown up in and the parts of their lives they felt they had outgrown. In their imaginings they saw their mother beneath the willow tree, her eyes closed and her hands clean.
