The Boy in the Black Suit: Chapters 4–6

it reminded me of something my mother used to say. She used to call the boys from the neighborhood ghetto penguins because of the way they waddled.

“But like I was saying, pallbearers are the guys who, pretty much, carry the casket.”

Staring at stoop after stoop, I thought about my mother. I can’t really say what I was thinking about exactly. Just everything. Just her.

It’s crazy to believe you can always put into words what you think of when you think of a person who’s gone, mainly because a lot of times it’s not about specific things. Sometimes you just think about how that person made you feel. That’s what I was daydreaming about. The way she made me feel. Like I was the luckiest kid in the world. Like I couldn’t lose. Like I was somebody important.

Then I caught a glimpse of myself in the side-view mirror, and it was me who looked dead.

We hoisted the casket onto what looked like a big table.

It was pretty short, I guess because Nancy’s life was only nineteen years long. She barely had time to do anything. I thought about how if I died, my obituary would only be a few sentences.

I also couldn’t help but think about her mother, in the front row, heaving and rocking, and occasionally lifting her hands as if begging God for some kind of help.

I could feel the churning in my stomach.

I left the church right after we put Nancy’s casket in the back of the hearse.

Now here I was, by myself, coming back from being a pallbearer at a funeral of a girl around my age who had no idea she was going to go. And to make it worse—oh man, here it is—I liked being at the funeral! Yeah. Weird.

I mean, all right, I felt embarrassed enough—I didn’t want Chris to see my old man not being the Mr. Miller he knew growing up. I didn’t want to see it either.

Inside, I dropped my backpack at the door. Then, I picked it back up and plopped it down on one of the kitchen chairs, worried that if I left it by the door, Dad would come stumbling in, trip over it, and we’d have a repeat of the night before.

The sink was dripping. The fridge was buzzing. Things cracking and creaking as, like my mother used to say, the house settled. The rain came down hard, sounded like television static. And the sirens still wailed. So annoying. But the noise I wanted to hear—the sound of someone else—wasn’t there.

A shadow, long and thin, like death itself with its awkward assistant, trying to bang my door down.

The smell of damp, and liquor, sifted through the space left between the three of us.

You would think that after your new drinking buddy got hit by a car, you would sober up.

He has multiple fractures in both legs, a few cracked ribs, and a hairline fracture in his jaw from hitting the windshield.

More tests to make sure the ribs haven’t punctured anything, and that the broken bones in his legs haven’t lacerated any blood vessels, and then straight to the OR we go.

My father laid in the bed with both of his legs strapped up in some weird contraption, already with thick white casts on them.

He’s got a few extra screws in him, to bond the bones, and we're still going to monitor his legs closely, especially the inflammation, but so far so good.

We also had to immobilize his jaw so that the fracture would heal, so it’s wired shut.

I didn’t know if I should be angry with him for doing this to me—to himself—or if I should feel sad. Or even happy, just knowing that he would survive, and recover. I didn’t know what to feel, and that frustrated me.

As we got closer to the bottom of the steps, the light, though still dim, got a little brighter, and I could see that the room, this dungeon—the vault—was overloaded with photos taped to the walls like posters in a teenage girl’s bedroom.

I mean, so close, and then something fluke happens and ruins everything.

One day, December seventeenth, 1975, a bitter cold night after a day of rain, she left the house to come meet me. I guess there was black ice or something on the stoop. She slipped, hit her head, and was gone before anyone could even get to her.

I used to sleep down here, on that couch, around all my sadness. But I always kept upstairs all clean and new because I didn’t want nobody to know about this—to even suspect it—my pain room.

I did my best to maintain composure and just take it all in.

People did make it seem like chess was a game about life and that you have to always think out your next three moves and the moves of your opponent in order to win...at life.

“This is really the holy grail of games,” he said, dealing the cards one by one. “The game of life.”