The Summer the World Ended by Matthew S. Cox Read Free Book Online

feel awful. She slumped to her knees on the cushioned pad, forehead atop her fingers, and wept.
    Dad moved up alongside her. He didn’t say anything until the room behind them fell silent.
    “It’s time to go.”
    “I don’t wanna.” She lifted her head. “I wanna stay with her. I…”
    “It’s all right,” said Victor. “We just need a little room.”
    Riley backed up two steps, clinging to her father’s arm instead of the coffin. Two men folded in the padding around the edges while Victor turned a crank, lowering her mother flat inside. She stared until one of them reached to close the lid.
    “Wait!” she yelled, surging forward.
    The man froze with a startled look as if he’d been about to step on a puppy. She hovered over her mother’s body, sniffling.
    “I love you, Mom.” Riley kissed her on the cheek.
    Five minutes later, Dad threaded his arms around her from behind, peeling her away from the casket so the men could lower the lid. It shut with a dull
thunk
that felt as if it hit her in the heart. An attendant gathered up the pleated curtain concealing a wheeled, metal frame beneath the coffin.
    Riley hung limp in her father’s embrace as the men pushed her mother around the bank of seats and out the door.

    Slumped on a plastic folding chair in the shade of a green canopy the cemetery staff had erected to protect attendees from the relentless sun, Riley alternated between sniffling into a tissue and staring into space. With no clergy invited―at her mother’s request―her coworkers took turns droning on about how great a person Lily McCullough was. No one dared touch on anything approaching religion or spirituality, though several commented on Mr. Hensley chasing away the homeless while Mom sometimes bought them lunch. Riley didn’t have any tears left. She gazed at the white coffin perched above a hole, surrounded by mats of fake grass, ignoring eleven people in a row all saying more or less the same thing: pretty, smart, went before her time, oh her poor daughter, on and on.
    Eventually, the nattering faded away, replaced by the rustle of formal clothes and the rattle of cheap chairs. Metal doors slammed in the distance, engines started, and cars drove off. A few workers congregated around the coffin, one tactless enough to give Riley a ‘come on, get going’ look.
    “Mina’s going to take you back to the shelter for a little while to collect your things.”
    “What?” Riley snapped out of her daze, looking up at him. “I’m not going with you?”
    He sighed as if annoyed. “I’ve gotta sign some stuff, show some papers… prove I’m who I say I am. It shouldn’t take more than an hour or ten.”
    “I hate that place. It feels like jail.” She stood, wandered as close as she dared to her mother, and sat on the grass. “Can I wait here for you?”
    Frustrated, the worker pushed a button. Electric motors whined as the coffin started its sluggish journey downward.
    “No, Squirrel, we can’t leave you out here.”
    “Don’t call me that.” Riley squinted as the sun glimmered off the sinking casket. “I’m not six.”
    “Do you really want to sit here while they fill in the grave?”
    “Yeah. I wanna sit here forever.”
    He took a knee at her side. “Don’t talk like that. Lily wouldn’t have wanted you to give up just because something bad happened to her.”
    Riley frowned.
    “You’re all that’s left of her in this world, kiddo. I swear you two could be clones.”
    “Great, my brain’s gonna explode too?”
    Dad kept quiet for a moment as the casket slipped out of sight behind a line of grass. “Guess you’d better not work for a bank then.”
    It took a second to register the meaning of her father’s words. He’d said it in such a matter-of-fact tone, with a straight face.
Did
he just crack a joke at Mom’s funeral?
She blinked at him. As horrible as it was, she giggled―and couldn’t stop laughing.
    He lowered himself to sit next to her, put an arm around