Chapter 17

She was awake before her alarm.

The clothes were already laid out. A dark wool dress that came below her knees. A black coat. Black tights. Flat shoes that would not sound on stone. Her hair she had washed the night before and now she pulled it back hard against her scalp and pinned it in a low knot at the nape of her neck, tight enough that no strand worked loose, and she set a black silk scarf over the knot and tied it under her chin. In the mirror the red of her hair was a thin band at the front of the scarf and nothing more. She tested the angle of the kitchen light from three sides of her dresser. The band did not catch.

She put on no jewelry. She put on no makeup. She looked at her reflection and saw a young woman whose face would slide off a stranger’s eye without registering. That was the morning’s first task accomplished.

Downstairs her mother was at the kitchen table in her own dark coat with her hands around a cup of coffee she was not drinking.

“You don’t have to come.”

“I’m coming.”

Mara looked at her once, the way she had been looking at her since the hospice ended, and let it pass. They left the house at seven-forty. Mara drove. Kiya sat in the passenger seat with her hands folded in her lap and went over the building in her head.

She had driven past Saint Bartholomew’s twice in the last week. Once on Tuesday afternoon when no service was running and the side door was propped open for a delivery, and she had walked through the nave at a tourist’s pace and had counted the pews and had timed the walk from the back row to the side exit on the south transept. Once on Friday morning when a smaller weekday service was letting out and she had stood across the street and watched where the hearse for that morning’s funeral had been positioned and which set of doors the casket had come through and where the family had gathered on the steps after. She knew the building. She had not told her mother she had done this.

They reached the church at eight-twenty.

The funeral was at nine. Mara wanted to be early because Mara was family and family arrived early. Kiya walked in beside her mother and let herself be seen as a young woman walking in beside her mother and not as anything else. An usher she did not recognize handed them programs. Mara took two. They went down the center aisle and Mara chose a pew on the right side, eight rows back from the front, on the family side without being inside the immediate family rows. Kiya sat where her mother sat. She did not look around. She set the program on her knee and folded her gloved hands over it and waited.

The nave filled slowly. She listened more than she watched. She heard the doors at the back open and close. She heard footsteps come down the aisle and stop and people slide into pews and the soft creak of wood under weight. She heard a woman behind her start to cry quietly and then stop. She heard the organist begin a prelude she did not know.

At eight-fifty Nathan came in.

She did not see him come in. She heard him. She heard the doors and then a particular set of footsteps on the carpet of the center aisle, and the footsteps did not slow at any pew until they reached the front, and they stopped at the front, and she knew without looking that he had taken his place in the family row. She let her eyes go to her program and stay there. She had committed his walk to memory at the hospice when she had watched him leave Stephanie’s room from her chair in the hallway. The walk was unmistakable.

The casket came in at nine.

The congregation stood. The pallbearers carried it up the aisle and the priest followed. Kiya stood with her mother and did not look at the casket. She looked at her program. She had decided in advance she would not look at the casket. Stephanie was not in the casket. Stephanie had been in the chair beside the hospice bed and was now somewhere Kiya did not need to specify and the casket was a piece of furniture being moved through a room and she would not give it her face.