Miss You by Kate Eberlen Read Free Book Online

arms. The tarmac path had little bits of confetti trodden onto it, pink horseshoes, white
butterflies, lemon hearts. Hope skipped away from the church, chasing occasional falling leaves. I stood watching her, thinking that if she caught one, it would most definitely be a sign. Of course
she didn’t. Autumn leaves have a habit of darting away when you think you’re on to them and Hope’s coordination was never the best. Before frustration could turn to fury, I took
her down the road for a McFlurry.
    So we missed whatever trite words Father Michael had to say about Mum being a dutiful mother and wife, and Charlotte Church singing ‘Pie Jesu’ on the CD player, and the coffin going
into the ground, which you’re supposed to see for closure. I wonder whether that’s why Mum still sometimes appears in my dreams, and I wake up with this lovely moment of relief –
I
knew
it couldn’t be true! – before my brain cells reorder themselves back to reality.
    Mum was a popular member of the community and her friends took it upon themselves to organize the wake in the church hall. The small kitchen beside the stage was a production line of women in
aprons turning out platters of sandwiches and mini quiches, scones and home-made cakes, great plastic bowls of crisps and trays of piping-hot sausage rolls, while others wielded the big metal pots
of tea they used at the Christmas Fayre and poured glasses of sherry for the women and whiskey for the men.
    It wasn’t long before the atmosphere shifted from sombre to animated, and people started telling their stories. Mum’s sister Catriona talked about how when she’d heard Mum had
passed away she went to the room in the house that had been hers and she’d smelled a powerful scent. Didn’t they say that when people returned, they sometimes brought a fragrance with
them? She’d been sure for a moment that Mary was there, before she remembered that she’d put an Autumn Breeze air-freshener plug in the room because it was a bit musty from lack of
use.
    Dad regaled anyone who’d listen with the anecdote about how they’d met. He’d gone back to his home town in Ireland for his grannie’s funeral and he’d spotted my
mother across a crowded room and the light of love was in her eyes.
    That phrase, ‘the light of love’, made me think of Mum’s eyes just before the end. It was a good description. Dad could surprise you like that. You’d be looking at him
and wondering what it was that had drawn someone as gentle and intelligent as Mum to him, and then you’d get a glimpse.
    ‘We met at a wake, and now we’re saying goodbye at one!’
    His closing line became more tearily indulgent as the evening went on, and people clutched his arm and said wise words like ‘The cycle of life, Jim,’ or ‘You’ve a lot of
happy memories to see you through.’
    ‘Ach, she was a wonderful wife to me!’ he told them, which was true, although I’d never heard him say it to her.
    I didn’t think he’d been nearly a wonderful enough husband to her, but Mum had never complained.
    ‘Your father’s got a lot on his mind,’ or ‘Your father works very hard to put food on the table,’ were the usual excuses for why he was more often at the
bookie’s or down the pub than at home. Not that any of us hankered for his presence because there was always an aura of threat hanging around Dad.
    ‘It’s the drink, not the man,’ Mum had even defended him after the terrible night it came out that she had secretly been paying for Kev’s ballet classes with the
housekeeping money, and Brendan had to leap on Dad’s back, kicking his calves to hold him back, and I’d run down the street shouting at the neighbours to call the police because I
thought he was going to kill them.
    By the time it got dark outside, there was quite a party atmosphere, with that fug of alcohol and exaggerated emotion that you often get at weddings with family members who
haven’t seen each other in a