We picked up some Chinese takeout on the way back to the house, only to find out that Jodi had found a package of frozen chicken in Mom’s basement freezer and had a pan of honey-baked chicken in the oven. “Told you you’d make a good Jewish mother,” I teased, giving her a hug. I pulled her aside and told her about the purple knit hat, making her promise not to tell Lucy we’d discovered it.
All of us were too beat to do any more sorting or packing up of Mom’s things, and we actually ended up playing a ruthless game of Monopoly all evening—well, we three sisters and Jodi, that is. Lucy and Dandy disappeared outside for their evening walk, and Aunt Mercy announced that her Monopoly days were long gone, and she’d see us tomorrow for church.
I looked at my sisters. They looked at me. I cleared my throat. “I think we’ll take a pass, Aunt Mercy. The funeral and burial are tomorrow afternoon. I think we need the morning to keep sorting Mom’s stuff. We don’t have that much time.”
Which turned out to be true. The next morning Jodi packed most of Mom’s clothes in large plastic bags to take to Goodwill—none of us sisters could bear to do it—though she asked permission to let Lucy pick out some things as a keepsake. I knew Mom’s dresses, skirts, and slacks would never fit Lucy’s ample behind, but the old lady almost reverently picked out some silky head scarves and took all of Mom’s socks.
The day seemed to pass in a blur. At one point, Lucy asked where she could find a shovel, and I sent her to the garage, too distracted to wonder what she wanted a shovel for. Outside, the sky was clear and the heat index hovered somewhere up in the nineties. “Thought it was s’posed ta be cold up here in the North,” Lucy grumbled as the five of us climbed into Moby Van to meet Aunt Mercy for the two o’clock funeral. None of us answered, willing the AC in the van to hurry up before we all sweated our good clothes. Jodi had ironed Lucy’s flower print skirt that she’d worn to Mom’s funeral at Manna House and even tried to style her choppy hair a little, but to little avail. The old lady had been wearing the purple knit hat for so long, I hadn’t realized what a squirrel’s nest had grown underneath.
I could only imagine what the good folks of Minot were thinking when Lucy plonked herself down in a front-row seat at the funeral home.
Aunt Mercy had printed a nice program with a picture of Mom on the front and the obituary I’d written on the inside. Several new flower arrangements from my parents’ church and some of Dad’s old employees flanked the casket, open once again for a half hour before the service, then closed for the last time.
But the funeral service had almost no meaning for me. It lacked the life and celebration of the service we had at Manna House, though people were kind, said how good it was to see the three Shepherd girls home again, what wonderful people Noble and Martha Shepherd were, the town was going to miss them . . .
The burial, however, was a different story. The white-haired pastor of the little stone church my parents had attended in recent years read the Twenty-third Psalm as we three girls and Aunt Mercy sat in folding chairs by the open graveside, which had been dug right beside my father’s grave. A final prayer, and then several people pulled flowers out of the arrangements standing nearby, placed them on top of the casket poised over the open grave, and turned to go.
“Wait a minnit!”
I winced at Lucy’s gravelly voice behind me. Heads turned. The old lady pushed her way through the small crowd until she stood right beside the grave. She was carrying the shovel, which she must have put in the van. “We ain’t done yet! Look at that—they even got the pile o’ dirt all covered up with that fake grassy stuff . . . whatchu call it? That sure ain’t how it’s done back where I come from.”
Celeste started to rise up out of her seat, but I put out an arm to stop her. “It’s all right,” I said, loud enough for the others to hear. “This is Lucy, my mother’s friend from Chicago.” I got up and stood beside her. “Do you want to say something, Lucy?”
“Yeah. I ain’t got any fancy words, but ever since we brought Miz Martha back home here, it’s been eatin’ at me. I met this lady here”—she patted the casket—“at a homeless shelter back in Chicago, where we was both stayin’ . . .”
Celeste and Honor squirmed, and glances passed between folks in the crowd.
“. . . an’ then I come here and see that Miz Martha has a real nice house, just like a picture in a magazine. Not big an’ fancy, but comfortable, nice place ta raise a family, nice place ta grow old in. Lot better than a homeless shelter, even if Manna House is one o’ the better ones ’round Chicago.”
Jodi slipped up and stood on the other side of Lucy, as if owning what Lucy was trying to say. A smile passed between us.
“An’ yet she came to Chicago and stayed in a shelter, and ever’body called her Gramma Shep . . .” That got a chuckle from a few folks in the crowd. “An’ she loved on the little ’uns ’at didn’t have no home, an’ read ’em stories, an’ let Hannah paint her nails, an’ let me take care o’ her dog, when I ain’t never had no dog of my own . . .”
Now tears were spilling down Lucy’s cheeks. I saw a few other tears on the faces around the grave, too, before my own eyes blurred up.
“Just gotta say . . . kinda reminds me of all that Jesus talk I hear at the shelter, ’bout how He left heaven and came down to earth to live with all us riffraff.” She sniffed and wiped her wet face with a big handkerchief she pulled out of somewhere. “That’s all I wanna say. ’Cept”—she waved the shovel—“I don’t plan on walkin’ off till I see this good woman to her final restin’ place. Now, you there . . .” She pointed at the funeral home staff. “Get that fake grass stuff off that pile of dirt, put the casket in the ground, and let’s finish this up right.”
Later that night I sat on the foldout couch with Jodi, and we laughed and cried, remembering the stunned looks on my sisters’ faces as Lucy shoveled dirt on top of my mom’s casket and then handed the shovel to me. But in the end Celeste and Honor had shoveled, too, and not a soul left without taking a turn shoveling that good, brown earth on top of the metal-blue casket. Someone even started to sing a hymn, as if decorum was being buried, and we’d all relaxed, witnesses to the natural cycle of life.
“And I’ll bet your mom was looking down from heaven, enjoying the whole thing,” Jodi murmured, pulling her knees up under Denny’s extra-large Bulls T-shirt she usually slept in.
I giggled. “Yeah. Who ever thought we’d hear Lucy, of all people, preaching about the Incarnation!” Which set both of us off once more, laughing and crying.
But in fact, Lucy’s little homily stayed with me all that night and into the next day, making me realize something I’d never really thought about before . . . just how much Jesus really did know about how I felt, because it all happened to Him—being rejected, scoffed at, homeless, no money, unappreciated . . .
For some reason I just wanted to sing and praise God the next morning, so while Jodi was making us all some breakfast, I got her gospel CDs out of the van and riffled through them. To my delight, I discovered she had the same CD her son, Josh, had given to me, the one with “my” song on it. I dusted off my mom’s CD player—had she ever used the thing?—and turned up the volume.
Where do I go . . . when there’s no one else to turn to?
Who do I talk to . . . when nobody wants to listen? . . .
I stood in the middle of Mom’s living room, letting the words flow over me. Yeah, that’s why I can talk to God, because Jesus understands what I’m going through— “Hey!” Lucy poked her head into the living room. “Howza body s’posed ta sleep when you makin’ such a racket? ’Sides, Miz Jodi says it’s time ta eat.”
My sisters and I barely had time to eat Jodi’s breakfast, get dressed, and pile into their rental car for our appointment with Mom’s lawyer. Aunt Mercy, who’d taken the day off from work, threw up her hands in relief when we walked in at two minutes past ten. “This man charges by the minute,” she hissed at us. “Get in there.”
We made Aunt Mercy come in too—she was family, after all—and we all sat across the table from the lean man with hawk-like eyes. He peered at us over a pair of reading glasses perched on his nose, as if uncertain we were all related. “I’m Frank Putnam, senior partner of Putnam, Fields, and Pederson. Which one of you is Celeste? . . . Ah, all right. You’ve been named executor of the estate, as you probably know.”
In a rather perfunctory manner, Mr. Putnam read through the will, which, he said, was fairly routine. “Bottom line, all assets should be divided equally between you three siblings, after paying any remaining costs surrounding Mrs. Shepherd’s last illness, outstanding bills, and funeral expenses. Which are . . . ?”
Aunt Mercy handed over statements from Mom’s bank and a handful of bills that had come in the mail since Mom had been in Chicago. I had brought the death certificate and receipts from the funeral home in Chicago. “I don’t have the doctor and hospital bills yet from the past two weeks.”
“All right . . .” The lawyer paged through a number of papers. “Your mother had Social Security and an annuity, both of which, of course, are cancelled at her death. But according to her bank statements, her checking and savings account amount to . . .” He punched numbers on his calculator. “. . . a few thousand dollars, which I recommend you leave in her account to cover any outstanding bills. As for the rest of her assets, there is, of course, the house—”
“How much do you think it’s worth?” Celeste interrupted.
“Well, good news there. Your mother paid off the rest of the mortgage with your father’s life insurance policy when he passed, which means you’ll realize the full value of the house when it sells—minus any taxes and insurance due, of course. However, the real—”
“How much?” Honor’s skinny, multicolored braids fell over her shoulders as she leaned forward. “Like, how much do houses sell for around here?”
Putnam shrugged. “I haven’t seen your mother’s home, but—”
“Your mother had it assessed not long ago,” Aunt Mercy broke in. “Similar houses in this area are going for anywhere from one-twenty-five to a hundred seventy-five thousand.”
The three of us sisters looked at one another with probably the same thought. We might realize a hundred fifty thousand from the house—fifty thousand each. My heart started to trip double-time. That would be a nice nest egg to enable me to start over again. Even rent that nice apartment in the Wrigleyville area. Except . . . how long would it take the house to sell? My heart started to sink again. Probably not soon enough to rent that apartment—or any apartment—before school started for my sons.
I was so engrossed in my thoughts, I didn’t catch what the lawyer was saying until Honor gasped, “What?!”
The lawyer did all but roll his eyes. “I said, after paying off the house, your mother used the rest of the money from your father’s life insurance policy to buy a simple term life insurance policy—which, I told her at the time, wasn’t the wisest thing. A cash value policy would have also given her cash to invest or use to enjoy her retirement, go on a cruise, visit the grandchildren whenever she wanted, but”—he shrugged—“she insisted. Small premiums for her, its only value a benefit to her survivors.”
Mr. Putnam handed a fat business envelope to Celeste. “Here it is—a term life insurance policy worth six hundred thousand dollars, to be divided equally between the three of you. With the death certificate, you should be able to cash it in fairly quickly. If you want, I can handle that for you and mail you each a check.”
Our mouths hung open. Six hundred thousand dollars? Six. Hundred. Thousand. Dollars. Divided three ways? I couldn’t breathe. That was two hundred thousand each . . .
No one spoke . . . until Honor screeched. “I—I could buy the house! With my share! And—and still have fifty grand left over!”
“Plus your third of the house sale,” the lawyer said. “If that’s what you want to do.”
Celeste turned to her. “Do you want to? I mean really, Honor?”
“Yes! . . . I think.” Her forehead scrunched. She chewed on one of her skinny decorative braids. “Or maybe not. I mean, it’s cold here in the winter. River and Ryan would probably refuse to leave California . . . oh, I don’t know!”
Mr. Putnam cleared his throat. “Uh, ladies. I have some papers here I need you to sign. You no doubt have some decisions to make, but I think we’re done here. If you have any further questions, feel free to call my office. And, Ms. Shepherd”—he gave a short nod at Honor—“Putnam, Fields, and Pederson would be happy to handle the real estate transaction, if that’s your decision.” He stood up and shook hands all around.
I walked out the office door with my stupefied sisters, my mouth dry. I could hardly think what this meant. Except I kept hearing Jodi Baxter’s off-the-cuff remark as we were driving here in the van: “God must have a better plan . . .”
I wanted to scream. Dance a jig and shout hallelujah! With two hundred fifty grand, I could afford an apartment! Get a real address! Bring my boys home! Maybe afford private school for them if I needed to!
Except . . . my heart twisted at the same time. God, did my mother have to die for me to get back on my feet? Wish there’d been some other way.