Getting Over It by Anna Maxted Read Free Book Online Page A

wrong?” My mother is sobbing and trembling so violently she can barely speak. Uriah bustles over, full of official concern. “Okay,” I say soothingly, stroking her back. “It’s okay, just calm down. What’s [duh!] upset you?”
    My mother is gasping and choking but eventually manages to wheeze out the word “ring.” Ring? “Ring?” I say. “Ring who?” This prompts a fresh, energized burst of woe: “ Nooaaaaaaaawww !” she wails. “Wedding ring! His wedding ring! It’s still on his fi-fi-fin-ger-her-herrrr!” My jaw drops and I gawp at Uriah aghast. He gawps back. He presses two bony fingers to his pale temple as if he has a headache. Which indeed he has.
    At first, Uriah tries wheedling. “But Mrs. Bradshaw,” he intones, “if you remember, we did go through this, we filled in the form—” My mother’s sagging head snaps up sharply like a bad-tempered puppet. Her eyes glint. She is queen of the classroom and Uriah is a silly little dunce who hasn’t done his homework. “I don’t care!” she hisses. “I don’t want to hear your excuses! I’m paying you! I want my husband’s wedding ring! Now, get it!” I am briefly dumb with horror and mortification. I glance nervously at Nana, who says nothing but looks at my mother once, quickly, a look of unconcealed hate. I stammer, “But you… you can’t…” I stare helplessly at Uriah. This is a man who knows when he’s beat. He raises a thin weary hand. “We can.” He sighs.
    And so, the rumors rumble back through the chilled, bewildered crowd until everyone present knows that the coffin containing my dead father has been wheeled behind a couple of conveniently tall headstones, the mahogany top prised off it, the gold wedding band forcefully wrested from his pink finger, polished on Uriah’s black tailcoat, and presented to my sulkily defiant mother. Luke sidles up behind them to peek and later tells me, “Honestly, Helen, he looked really well! He didn’t look corpsey at all!”
    After this unscheduled interlude—during which I spy the minister checking his watch—we make it to the graveside. I try to steer my mother’s attention toward the garish floral tributes propped around the hole and away from the fresh pile of earth heaped beside it, and the two scruffy men standing not quite far enough away, each one casually leaning on a great big, sodding, dirt-encrusted shovel.
    The pallbearers and a relieved Cousin Stephen lower the coffin to the ground. No one is quite sure where to stand. One elderly guest with crepey skin and hair like candyfloss observes in a loud whisper, “I would have expected more flowers. But I suppose they’ll come later.” The minister approaches us and asks if there is anything we’d like him to say. My mother becomes flustered. Someone has given her a red rose to throw on my father’s coffin and she has picked it to bits. “Like what?” she says. “Well, er, any particular tribute to the deceased,” he replies.
    “No one told me about tributes!” she exclaims rudely. “Helen, you should have said! I’d have written something down!” Talk about ungrateful! “Me!” I cry. I have just about had it with her flouncing. “How should I know! Why is it my fault?” A small worm of guilt niggles its way into my consciousness because possibly vaguely, maybe I sort of recall the minister’s message might have mentioned the wisdom of writing a short note for him to include in his address, but I’m sorry, I can’t be responsible for every piddling detail!
    “He was a loving, attentive father,” I lie, reading off a nearby gravestone, “and a wonderful, kind, adoring husband,” I add in a rush to appease my mother. She sniffs approval. “He was good at golf,” she says. “Say that.” The minister nods, backs away, clears his throat, trots out a thin service and the speediest, tritest, most anodyne accolade I have ever heard, bar the one my headmistress made at my school leaving ceremony.
    The