After the Portraits

Claire had not planned to stay long. The town lay under a late autumn sky that made every familiar roofline look like a watercolor brushed with gray; the trees outside the cemetery gate wore the last of their leaves like a hesitant audience, reluctant to leave. She had driven the same route a dozen times in her head: arrive, read a few names on unfamiliar programs, accept condolences measured and polite, sign the papers, take the box of her mother's things, and return to the city she had chosen because it did not require remembering the smallest cruelties. Instead, she found herself unclipping the seatbelt and looking at the house that had raised her, at the porch light that had been kept on all these years as if the world were a shore and her mother a keeper. The house looked smaller now, or perhaps it was the absence that made rooms thin. She had been an adult the first time she stood in that foyer without somebody bustling about, folding towels or setting out the kettle. Now she walked inside with the muffled rhythm of visitors’ footsteps still in her ears and a funeral card in her pocket that read Nora Montrose, beloved before it read anything else.

People at the wake clustered in corners of the living room like migrating birds, hesitant, keeping to the edges of their own grief so they would not be swept into someone else’s. Town rituals moved with an economy she had never learned; they were exacting and practiced, a choreography of sympathy. There were neighbors she recognized only by last names, faces she had watched grow older through windows when she lived away. Jonah Reyes had been there in the front row, his palms pressed together in a way that made her think he had not expected to be called upon to play a role beyond attendance. He caught her eye once and offered a look she remembered from childhood: the recognition of a person who had also been counted on in a quiet way. People spoke Nora’s virtues as if reciting a ledger: reliable, a problem-solver, steady through storms. Those attributes were the scaffolding of her mother's public life; Claire accepted them like a costume, heavy and familiar against her ribs.

The priest’s voice murmured, and the room folded into a softness. People pressed against one another with hands that said sorry without offering reasons. Claire listened and catalogued: who had come, who had not, who stood too near to the casket and who lingered at the back with their coats buttoned up. She felt a small, distant pride that the room could gather in such numbers for a person who had been above them and beyond them at once. It was a strange sort of love, public and gleaming and a little cold. During the reception that followed, people told stories that circled like paper boats on a pond—safe anecdotes about garden clubs, about Nora’s penchant for strict curfews for raccoons that raided the backyard trash. Laughter arrived like a spare condiment, used with caution. Claire had come with a suitcase and a plan to leave it behind temporarily, but the house, with its photographs and its familiar smell, reached up like a hand and did not let go.