The Funeral

Lacey's already here when I pull up, chatting with Momma on the front porch with mason jars of sweet tea. Her son Riker is sat on her lap, cooing at some birds or trees or whatever it is kids see. The dogs bark at me, and I don't blame them. It's been about 10 years since I've been home, and almost as long since I've seen them.

Momma stands and opens her arms for me to walk into, while Lacey flattens out her skirt and gives me one of those awkward tight-lipped smiles. So thats how it's gonna be. Fine. Two can play at that game.

Momma brings me inside and shows me the new addition they added to the house- well, not really new anymore. They did it just after I left after graduation, which Momma is sure to remond me of over and over again. I knew this weekend would be unbearable, and just as I expected, the empty kitchen is an empty heart, and Daddy's cooking doesn't fill the house with warmth. Momma wastes no time in telling me how sad he was when I left, and how I left him brokenhearted. She never explicitly states it, but I'm sure she blames me for weakening his heart, and Lacey too.

Without Daddy to do the cooking, we eat burnt grilled cheese sandwiches in silence at lunch, and the tension between the three of us is so palpable that you could cut it with a knife. I feel Lacey's glare on the side of my head, and to the best of my power, I don't respond.

I go to my old room, which hasn't changed much except that the dresser has been replaced with a desk with ten years of my dad's work documents piles up, falling onto the floor and between the desk and the wall. He was awful at organizing things. Bills moxed in with application letters mixed in with birthday cards. I sigh and roll my eyes and flop down on my old creaky bed. How I ever managed to sneak boys home with this thing is beyond me. A grey cloud of dust wafts up and suffocates me, and for a moment, it forms a figure.

I watch the dust figure settle back to the ground and sigh. When we were kids, Lacey used to sleep in here with me when Momma and Daddy had a fight and they didn't wanna sleep in the same bed.

And now we can't even look at each other.

Our pride can be our biggest downfall sometimes. She's almost as stubborn as I am, and as much as it pains me, I want my sister back. I can't gi through this alone. This grief is beyond anything I've ever experienced, and I'm not ready to do it alone yet.

Lacey should know all about grief. She divorced her husband last winter. They were high school sweethearts. I had never seen two people so in love, and after her son was born, they grew apart, as people so often do.

I won't leave her alone in this grief like I left her alone with that grief.

I stand and go out into the living room, rehearsing what I'm gonna say to her. "Momma," I say. She's sitting on the floor in the living area, playing with a giggling Riker, but Lacey isn't there. "Where is she?"

"Your sister? She's gone to the tree house, I guess. Said she wanted to think." Momma's attention has been away from Riker for far too long, and he's started to scream and tug on her hair.

I will never understand people who like babies.

I pull on my boots and make my way through our muddy field toward the treeline in the distance. Our house sits on about 10 acres, and although they always wanted to own farm animals, I know Momma hates getting dirty, and Daddy was just far too busy with work to tend to animals.

They did build a treehouse for us when we were little, complete with a tire swing that had many-an-accident with it. We didn't treat it how it should have been used. We spun it, we swung it in every direction, we crashed it into everything in a ten feet radius. Lacey still has a scar above her eyebrow from where I "pushed" her into a tree. She's still mad about it too.

Just like she's still mad that I didn't go to her baby shower.

And just like she's still mad that I won't babysit Riker.

And just like she's still mad that I didn't visit Dad in his last years of life.

I get it, I understand what a failure of a sister and a daughter I am. I don't really want her to remind me of it.

I reach the tire swing and stop as a familiar sound pulls me from my self loathing. Crying.

Lacey's crying.

My empathetic heart tugs me toward her, and I climb the ladder to the treehouse.

Lacey: perfect, wonderful, smart Lacey, is sat in the center of the floor, hunched over with her face in her hands. She covers her mouth to stifle her sobs and lets out a deeply rooted wail that only comes from a truly broken person.

All this time I thought she was perfect and unbreakable. Here I was, trying to fill my gaps with a career and avoidance, trying to make myself as fulfilled as her, and she's just as sad and lonely as I am.

"Lacey?" I ask. I push open the door and step all the way in.

She looks at me with puffy eyes and looks as though she may scream at me, but instead, she pulls me to her and cries into my shoulder.

"Riker won't get to know him! He won't know how wonderful he was!"

Our dad was an amazing man. A genius, master at dad jokes. Master at Wheel of Fortune. He loved to golf and fish and his favorite celebrity was Dwayne the Rock Johnson. You don't find someone of his caliber everywhere, they come once in a lifetime, and Riker, my nephew, will have missed out on it.

Feeling my sister's pain, I hug her and fonally let myself cry about the loss. I feel it all, and we just hug each other, forgetting anytime we've pissed the other off. We're just sisters.

We're just the other half to a broken individual.