The People in the Rickety House (novel preview)

Chapter Two

                                                                       Chapter 2 

                The pictures may as well have had razor edges and the flower arrangements massive thorns, for everything was pain.  Leah sat on the front pew of the church, draped in traditional black with damp hair and no makeup, and she did not hear a word of her father’s eulogy.  She was hurting, cut by the splinters and rubble of her world’s collapse, but there was also a sense of numbness coating her nerves.  Two days had passed since she had found her father’s body – Swinging. Swinging back and forth… – and she did not cry for his death.  There was one thing on her mind that served as a diversion to uplift her.

                 Now that dad’s gone, mom will have to come back to get us.  How could she not?

                 Leah would not embrace what she knew.  Arrangements had been made for the girls to go live with their father’s sister, Claire, who lived two hours away outside a small town called Temple.  All of their grandparents were gone by now, and their aunt had been eager to accept the responsibility of taking them on.  Claire had not shown her face at the funeral, but the sisters were to be taken to her directly afterward.  Their belongings were packed and, in fact, many of them had probably been transported to Claire’s already.  Still, Leah ignored these things.  She expected her mother to show up, and the desperate teenager had continually been combing the crowd for her.  She had to come rescue them.  If she still loved them at all, she would come.

                 Once again, Leah tried to glance around the church full of weeping people coated in black, but she was drawn away from it when she felt a hand on her own.  Mrs. Lowery was beside her and thought she sensed distress.  Though she was probably the one adult in the whole room that they were most familiar with since she showed up daily to cook and do laundry, the older woman was not quite the emotional support she hoped to be.  Instead, Leah was taken aback by the effort.  How dare this woman impose herself?  Leah did not need her sympathy.  She withdrew her own hand promptly.

                 Leah dismissed the woman from her mind and looked over to her sister instead, at Tabitha, who was sitting there dry-eyed, staring forcefully at a portrait near the casket.  It was of their family – the two girls, their father and their mother.  They were all smiling, looking so happy.  Leah tried to remember if they had ever truly been that way, or if they had always been just posing, as they had for the photo.  Whatever the truth was, they had not even bothered to pose in a long time.  Now, they would never be that way again, as if there had been hope before the finality of death.

                 Tabitha was not a sensitive girl; Leah knew this.  She was tough, never crying through many a sprain and bruise.  In fact, Leah could only remember once that Tabitha’s cries had shaken the house, but she had expected at least a few tears from her sister today.  Daddy’s little girl.  Leah had always known that their father had favored Tabitha – even before the accident.  When he came home, he would always open his arms to his youngest daughter first, and Leah had to suppose that the athletic and active tomboy was the closest he’d ever gotten to having the son he’d wanted.  Odd, since Leah was his more perceptive and literary child.

                 At certain moments during the funeral, when Tabitha’s eyes seemed to be growing a little too red and damp, she would shift her gaze to the stained-glass window overhead which depicted Jesus the Christ.  His arms were open and welcoming, his gaze averted and humble.  He certainly appeared as a majestic image with the rays of morning light shining through his visage, but when Tabitha glanced up at it, it was with a sullen lip and a harsh breath.  Leah guessed that the girl had come too close to crying, so she would look up at God because, in order to keep the tears away, she needed to be angry.  Leah had also lent her eyes to the image many times on this day, but her feelings were different from her sister’s.  She was made angry by the portrait of her selfish father, and she looked up toward the Christian savior when she needed to ask why.