Leaving Bluestone (12 page)

He swallowed hard. “Will you?”

“Sure.” But she shifted back to the chair and picked up her beer.

***

She knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep in Quinn’s bed, but after she stretched out beside him, he fell into a deep sleep, his hand curved over her hip. She couldn’t sleep in jeans, she couldn’t sleep in a strange bed, and she couldn’t sleep with the man she loved right beside her. Maybe someday that would change, but for now, she’d have to resign herself to going to the funeral with bags under her eyes.

She wondered if he’d ever have been able to open up to her back home in Bluestone, or if he had to be away from that place, back in this place that made him sad and restless. Would he have come home and told her how hard it had been for him, or did she only learn it because she’d come to him?

She shifted away and he stirred when she climbed off the bed. When she returned from the bathroom, he was sitting up, rubbing his eyes.

“What time is it?” he asked, his voice rough with sleep skidding right over her proximity-heightened nerves.

“Just after seven. Did I wake you?” Duh. Of course she had. He’d been asleep when she left the bed. “I’m sorry.”

“Doesn’t matter. I haven’t slept like that in—a long time.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed away from her and waited a minute, hands braced on the mattress. “We didn’t drink too much, huh?”

They hadn’t even opened the bottle. “No.”

“So why do I feel hungover?”

She shifted her weight, wishing she’d brought a toothbrush. “Too much emotion? I don’t know. I’m going to go to my room and shower so we can get over to your mom’s for breakfast.” And she made her escape without looking at him.

***

His mother’s house was much quieter when they arrived, dressed for the funeral, and bearing muffins. Rose was at the stove scrambling eggs, Tammy was operating the waffle iron and his mother was cooking bacon in the microwave. The children slumped in their Sunday best in the living room, eyes glued to some movie Rose must have put on.

Lily stepped forward. “What can I do?”

She was set to making orange juice from concentrate as Quinn set the table. He didn’t ask where his brothers or Rose’s husband were. He didn’t care to know.

“You’ll be a pallbearer, won’t you?” his mother said as she transferred the curled bacon to a platter.

One of the plates slipped from his fingers and clattered on the table, rolling on its rim for a few moments before coming to a stop. The room was silent as the women looked at him, his mother and sister expectant, Lily and Tammy sympathetic.

“He would want it,” his mother said, her voice sharp when he hesitated.

He hadn’t thought about that, hadn’t expected. He’d been a pallbearer for Gerry, but he’d wanted to do that. He’d needed to do that, to be as much a part of Gerry’s end as he’d been in his life. His father...

“It would look bad for his sons not to be his pallbearers,” his mother continued. “Liam and Jared and Tom, as well as some of our younger friends from church. You need to do this, the last thing you can do for your father.”

His father wouldn’t be aware, he wanted to say, but it wasn’t about him. He met Lily’s eyes and nodded, then finished setting the table. When she passed behind him to carry the juice to the table, she let her fingers trail down his arm and gave him a small hug.

Rose leaned past them to call the kids in, while Tammy went to the back door and called to the men. They came in, more red-faced than the temperatures warranted. They’d been drinking, it seemed. Great. And his mother worried he’d embarrass the family.

Everyone sat and joined hands, but all Quinn could think about with Lily’s hand in his was that in a matter of minutes, he’d be carrying his father’s casket.

“Lily, I wondered if you wouldn’t mind staying here during the funeral,” his mother said as she passed the syrup.

“What?” Quinn snapped, glaring down the table.

“We need someone to get everything laid out for the wake,” she continued in a reasonable voice. “We thought since Lily didn’t know your father, she could stay behind and do it.”

“Doesn’t matter. She came here to be with me. Don’t you have neighbors or people from the church who can do it? I mean, you had a plan in place before Lily came, right?”

His mother frowned. “We did, but the ladies who volunteered would rather honor your father at the funeral.”

“I want her there with me,” he said, stubbornly, aware he was being childish.

“What were you going to do before Lily came?” his mother countered, her lips in a thin line.

He scowled.

“Quinn.” Lily squeezed his hand. “Of course I’d be happy to,” Lily said to his mother. To Quinn she said, “I’ll be here for you when it’s over.”

He looked into her pretty brown eyes, and almost heard her say, “It’s not about you.”

With a grunt, he nodded, and looked back at his food, but he couldn’t eat anything.

After breakfast, the family rose and, one by one, they left the table without clearing the dishes.

“Lily, you don’t mind?” his mother said in her long-suffering voice.

Quinn stared at the mess on the table—a mess made by thirteen people, five of them kids. “We can at least clear the table,” he said.

“We need to get going,” his mother said. “People may want to pay their respects before the service.”

“And the ten seconds it will take to move our plates and glasses to the sideboard will stop them from doing that.” He leveled a look at his mother, and she relented with a sigh.

While everyone was doing that, he grabbed Lily’s hand and pulled her onto the back porch. The morning was gorgeous, blue sky stretching over them, the only sounds bird songs and the occasional car engine. The air held just a touch of the crispness of fall. This was one of his favorite kind of days, the kind too rare in Minnesota, and he was missing it.

“I want you with me,” he said.

“I know,” she said, covering his hand on the rail with hers. “I want to be there with you, but—”

“It’s not about me,” he finished the thought for her.

“I’ll be here for you when you get back.” She turned him to her and slid her arms around his waist.

He slipped his hand under her hair to curve around the back of her neck, his thumb stroking the skin below her ear. “I don’t want to carry my father.”

“I know.” She leaned forward and rested her cheek against his chest, and he breathed her in, willing himself to carry her with him out the door and into the church.

“Quinn! It’s time to go!” Rose shouted.

“I’m driving myself. I’ll meet you at the church.”

“You’re going to lead the procession in that rental car?” his mother asked, poking her head out the door.

Better than Rose’s beat-up minivan, but he didn’t say. Instead, he drew back from Lily. “Yeah.”

She opened her mouth to say something, but Rose appeared and touched her arm. “Let’s get going, Mom.”

“Don’t dawdle,” his mother snapped to him, and disappeared. Rose followed with a roll of her eyes at Quinn.

“I’m going to dawdle, just a minute,” he said, and bent to brush his lips over Lily’s.

Several minutes later, he willed himself to lift his head and release her. Without a word, she squeezed his hand and watched him walk away.

Chapter Seven

The metal of the casket handle was cold as Quinn wrapped his fingers around it. When the six of them lifted—his brothers and brother-in-law and two men he didn’t know—it was heavier than he expected. His father probably hadn’t weighed a hundred twenty pounds there at the end.

Christ, he hated this tradition. It made him sick to his stomach to know his father was in that box, that Gerry had been in the last box he carried. Between that and the cloying scent of all the flower arrangements, he thought he’d hurl the little breakfast he’d managed to choke down. Who the hell came up with all these morbid rituals? The droning dirges, the funeral sprays, the preacher’s somber intonations that made him want to bolt.

He set his father on the dais in front of the altar and followed his brothers and Tom into the family pew. He let himself tune out the minister’s words. He was a regular church-goer, but he couldn’t listen to the words spoken over his father’s body. Maybe someday he’d regret that, but he couldn’t open himself up to them. Soft sniffles surrounded him, punctuated by Rose’s occasional sob. He would have rather been in the middle of mortar fire, and only that training kept him in his seat instead of tearing down the aisle and out the door.

He was grateful he’d driven by himself, because once he helped return his father’s casket to the hearse, he escaped to his car to be alone for a few minutes before he had to carry his father one last time. But the drive was much too short.

He parked his car along the curb in the well-groomed cemetery—the only well-groomed thing about this cursed town—held onto the steering wheel for a long moment before he propelled himself out of the car. Tonight he’d be home, in his own bed, and all this would seem like a bad dream.

He joined his family at the back of the hearse and waited for the funeral directors to open it. Randomly, he wondered why people chose to be funeral directors. What an endlessly sorrowful job.

He grasped the end of the casket and helped draw it out, helped lead the way to the covered gravesite, guided it over the device that would lower it and went to sit in one of the metal folding chairs in the first row. More words by the minister, followed by silence. He braced himself for the twenty-one gun salute. It echoed across the open land, and it was all Quinn could do to keep from diving under the damned folding chair.

And then it was over, people coming forward to say something to his mother, to his family who lived here in town. He saw a few ladies hug Jared, but he turned to his car and made his escape.

***

Lily stood beside the microwave, wondering when she should start heating things up. Admittedly, she hadn’t done as much as she’d expected, because she got nosy and went looking through the house, wondering which was Quinn’s room, figuring it was probably the bigger of the two bedrooms that weren’t the master. The room held a full-sized bed now, and there was some luggage in it. Jared’s, maybe. No sign remained of Quinn’s life here, other than the pictures on the wall.

She’d decided to use the oven to heat things up instead, when the front door opened. She looked up to see Quinn striding toward her.

“Is everyone on their way? Because I should start—”

Before she could finish, he’d snatched her against him, holding her so tight it almost hurt, his face buried against her neck, his body shaking.

Crying. Oh, God.

She wrapped her arms around him, stroking his hair, as he cried silently against her shoulder.

The front door opened again and she eased back a little, thinking he wouldn’t want anyone else to see him like this. She slipped her arm around his waist and led him out of the kitchen and into the bedroom she’d reasoned was his. She locked the door and sat on the bed.

He didn’t sit beside her. Instead, he moved to the window overlooking the back yard. She could see the tears on his cheeks, spiking his dark lashes, saw his lips in a tight line as if that could force the tears to stop.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, not knowing what else to do. Finally she pushed off the bed and wrapped her arms around him, resting her cheek on his back, feeling his shuddering breaths as he tried to get himself under control.

Finally he turned, pressed a kiss to her forehead and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

She could hear the voices of people outside the room. Likely everyone had returned, bringing other mourners with them. “We can’t. Not yet.”

“The funeral’s over. I don’t want to be here anymore. I’m not a part of this family anymore.”

“Like it or not, you are. We need to stay a couple of hours. Then we can head home.”

His mother gave them a dirty look when they emerged from the bedroom, and Lily was beginning to get irritated with the woman’s judgmental attitude. Couldn’t the woman see her son had been crying?

“Lily, I’d really hoped you could’ve started heating up these casseroles,” his mother said, ignoring the spread of cold cuts and Jell-O salads and chips and dips, all arranged nicely on the table and the sideboard. She’d even set up a drink station separately.

“I didn’t know when everyone would be back, how long the service would last. Warming them up twice would just dry them out.” Lily used her sweetest tone when she felt Quinn tense beside her.

The older woman pressed her lips together and Lily forced herself to have sympathy. She’d just watched her husband waste away and die. Lily could handle a few barbs. She moved forward.

“I’ll get this,” she said, moving forward to take one of the casseroles from the older woman. “You go visit with your friends.”

The woman nodded, then riveted her gaze on her son. “You need to make up for your disgraceful behavior.”

“My what? You mean that?” He pointed toward the bedroom. “We weren’t—I just needed some privacy.”

How could the woman not see that her son was suffering?

“You shouldn’t have just left the cemetery like that. We have an image to maintain.”

“An image?” Quinn snarled.

Lily put her hand on his arm, though she wanted to snarl, too. “It’s a difficult time to know the right thing to do,” she said.

“The right thing is to be with your family. We’re all hurting, Quinn, and we watched him decline for months. You just come in at the end and think you’re entitled.”

“He is entitled,” Lily said quietly. “Now isn’t the time for this conversation. Maybe in a few weeks when everyone’s feelings aren’t quite so on edge. Now why don’t you go see to your guests? I’ll let you know when everything is warmed up and ready to serve.”

If looks could kill, Lily would be a pile of cinders on the floor. But his mother lifted her chin and marched into the living room, which was growing louder each time the door opened and closed.

“You don’t have to take this,” Quinn muttered.