Katherine Gehan Funeral Song
The paper said Vivian Thompson had died of natural causes at the age of eighty-eight. Henry was eight months old. That seemed a nice span of time. Wisdom resonated in the numbers between lives. When overwhelmed with the new life in his possession Jack found comfort in the study of death, and so they were off, driving southwest on route 93 to attend a stranger’s funeral. The foothills wore their early summertime greenish grey, and the afternoon thunderstorm had already passed over and was rumbling off in the east. Henry squealed. In the rearview mirror Jack watched his kid gum a rubber toy, his eyes the color of his mother’s. Marlee flashed through Jack’s chest. Last fall, she’d barked out the results from the pregnancy test from an outhouse. Positivity smelled like
cedar and shit. When she emerged from the little shed, she shook her head, barely made eye contact, and marched back into the small-town junky bar Jack had booked for their band. “I’ll make no kind of mother,” she’d hissed back at him. She kept her promises. Later that night Marlee had a lot to say about being pregnant. In a motel room that smelled like bleach, she’d explained herself, makeup smudged beneath her pale eyes, her dress hiked high around her waist. “When I was a kid I decided that for a whole week I’d pretend one of my dolls was a real baby: dress it, feed it, change its diapers—everything.” She took a drag off of the cigarette in her hand and looked squarely at Jack, who had watched in alarm as he considered