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CHAPTER TWENTY
“You ready?” Jake asked, squeezing his hand around hers.
Petra looked out the window of the limousine at the rolling hills of the cemetery, the lush trees beginning to turn their fall colors, the gaping hole in the ground near one big oak. Where her father would be buried. Beside her mother.
She sighed and nodded.
With another squeeze of her hand, he let her go and climbed out. Then he turned and offered Petra his hand again. She took it and let him help her to her feet.
For a long moment, she stood beside the limo, in the wedge of the open door, and looked around. The past week was mainly a blur of numb horror and the Herculean effort of focus to make sure she was able to do everything she needed to do to get her father properly to his rest. There was so muchpaperworkinvolved in burying a loved one, and no quarter for the paralysis of grief. She found it deeply abusive.
Jake’s mother, when she’d come to the apartment a few days ago with a stack of prepared meals and a duffel of clothes for Jake—who’d hardly left Petra’s side—had told her that the first week was a relentless flurry of things that had to be done, but to be prepared for the second week, when the flurry was over, to be harder.
Petra couldn’t prepare for that because she couldn’t imagine it. She’d survived the sudden death of her mother, but that had been an accident. The suicide of her father was a choice he’d made, to abandon her, to leave her utterly without family. The idea that there was worse pain ahead of her than what she felt right now beggared comprehension.
She heard a sound and turned toward it. The driver of the hearse and the driver of the limo had met at the back of the hearse, ready to remove the casket. Quickly, Petra looked elsewhere. She watched the short procession of cars from the church as they parked along the curb.
So few people. For most of his life her father had had lots of friends and even more friendly connections. He’d been important in the banking and financial world of Tulsa. He’d been a decades-long member of the Tulsa Country Club. He’d sat on charitable boards.
True, he’d folded up into himself after Mom’s death, but even so there should have been hundreds of people at his funeral. Instead, there were maybe two dozen. She’d struggled to find enough people to be pallbearers. Her father’s family was from Delaware, and he’d outlived all but the most distant cousins anyway. Two had sent condolence cards, and a few had left a note on the memorial page of the cemetery’s website or the page attached to his obituary in the TulsaWorld, but none had made the trip to his funeral.
Mr. Vermeyer, who’d been a steady help all week, had offered to take a handle, but no one else had even responded to Petra’s request. Jake had stepped in to be one, though he’d never met her father. When it came down to the wire and they still didn’t have six, Simon and Duncan had stepped up, as well as Jake’s father. And Katie, Petra’s friend, had taken the last position.
Most of the attendees of Petra’s father’s funeral wereherfriends, there to support her. Even Jake’s family and friends were more prevalent than her father’s. Five of her father’s pallbearers had never known him in life.
Whether it was the manner of his death or the circumstance of his legal trouble, or both, keeping his so-called friends away, Petra didn’t know or care. She was furious. Right now, she was too numb, too dazed, to express it, but it heated her belly like a banked fire. All it needed was a little air, and it would be an inferno.
“I’ll take you over and get you settled, and then I’ll come back for ...” Jake’s sentence faded out.
Petra knew what he meant. He’d come back to take his place carrying the box full of her dead father.
“It’s okay. I can walk myself over there.”
He frowned. All week, he’d made that exact face each time she’d asserted she didn’t need his help with something. Since she’d tried to force him to leave and he’d known she’d needed him to stay, he doubted her every assertion of independence.
Strangely, she’d needed that, too. She needed him to ignore the weird, wild moods that had stormed through her all week, filling every space that wasn’t fully involved in planning the funeral, and stand steady and be there. Jake had known it.
Setting her hand on his face, she smoothed his worried look away. “I’m okay, Jake. I want you to stay with my dad. You’ll be with me again soon enough.” Manufacturing a small smile, she added, “And I’ll be in sight the whole time.”
It took another considering pause, but eventually he nodded. “Okay.” Leaning down to press his lips to her cheek, he murmured, “I love you.”
“And I love you.”
“I’ll walk with you, if that’s okay,” Jake’s mother, Willa, said as she approached.
How bizarre to have met Jake’s family like this.
“Thank you,” Petra said and let this woman she barely knew link arms with her and walk with her to her father’s unfilled grave.
