Swish

.35

My black dress was chafing the skin under my armpits, my 'conservative' heels were giving me a liberal blister, and I was wearing non-waterproof mascara, because despite attending my own father's funeral, I hardly foresaw myself crying over his body being lain to rest far away from my mother's grave, but I kept my oversized black sunglasses perched atop my nose and covering half of my face to keep any prying eyes from realizing that my eyes were drier than the Sahara.

I stuck to the back of the crowd, in all actuality, and didn't even take the seat reserved for me during the outside service, opting for a thick pine tree shedding brown needles to the ground below my feet instead of the plush cushions of a black fold up chair in the dirt.

Sure, there was a faux weird carpet type of turf colored a vibrant green meant to look like grass that was used as the stage for the funeral, and my heels wouldn't have sunk into the wet soil underfoot had I been where I was supposed to be, but I just couldn't do it.

The funeral home service had been enough. I had paid my respects then, and played the doting, grieving daughter, but out here in the open, in view of my mother's headstone and final resting place?

That would've been a slap in the face to my mother's spirit had I shown him anymore respect than he ever even deserved. He didn't deserve any respect in death, not after what he'd done to my mother, but I wasn't doing this for my father.

I was doing it for me.

I deserved closure. I deserved to see his body be put in the ground, six feet under, never able to hurt me or anyone else ever again.

I'd noticed Sara and Jared in the middle rows of the outside ceremony, but they hadn't been in attendance inside the funeral home, like my aunt Kara had been. My grandmother offered to come with me, but I had told her that this was something that I needed to do on my own. I told her she was free to come, but that I would sit alone when the time came.

She told me she would come and visit her daughter's grave at another time, though, because there was no reason for her to come to Mike's funeral.

Despite his acclaim and massive amount of fans in the basketball community, not many of his high profile 'friends' had attended his public memorial service, or the private one that they had been invited to.

Maybe the truth coming out had affected his image more than I had assumed in the beginning. People were starting to put two and two together concerning his actions and attitudes, I supposed.

After the funeral, I was to go back to my childhood home and instruct the moving company as to what I was keeping and what I was donating or selling. No matter the bad blood between us, I would most likely ask Sara to come with me and have her tell me what she wanted to keep, because I had more things and money than I knew what to do with, certainly more than I needed.

The casket suddenly lurched, and I stepped forward, ignoring all of the sets of eyes on me as I walked forward on leaded feet.

Bending down, fingers curling around a clump of gravelly dirt, I straightened and said my final goodbyes to my father.

I wanted to say something harsh, hurtful, something that could encompass everything that I felt about him when he was living, but those words flowed out of me as I dropped that clump of dirt on his cherry oak casket, and I couldn't help imagining a decaying, rotted corpse on the inside even though I had seen him at his open casket and he looked just as he had before, only sleeping thanks to the embalming process.

No, he would need luck where he was going, because it wasn't anywhere good.

"Goodbye."

It was more than he deserved, but it wasn't for him. It was all for me, and it was time that I let go. It was time that I let go of all the hurt, all the pain, all the anguish. I couldn't hold onto it, not when he was dead and I had no one to direct all of that angst onto besides myself.