Blind Faith

Chapter One The funeral was almost over. Mom and I had both gotten up from our front-row folding chairs to place single red roses on the casket as it hovered over the excavated hole in the earth. After days of thinking about nothing but this, I was grateful to finally feel a little numb. I flopped back down onto the chair next to my dad and stared at the granite headstone, which, along with my grandfather's name, Joseph McCoy, would soon be inscribed with my grandmother's: Elizabeth Kimball McCoy. Really, it ought to just say "Bunny" on the headstone -- that's what everybody called her. Even me. Elizabeth Kimball McCoy sounded like a woman who invited people over for tea and crossed her stockinged legs at the ankles. Bunny was black coffee to go -- a jeans-and-sneakers kind of person. But if there was an opening at her gallery, she'd tie a silk scarf around her neck and wear earrings that dangled to her shoulders. Bunny was a person you noticed. I'd just realized that my mother was still standing up, staring at her tossed rose, when she suddenly launched herself onto the casket, her arms outstretched to embrace the big silver bullet. A moaning sound turned within seconds to wailing. "Oh, my God, I can't stand it! Don't leave me, Bunny! You can't leave me!" she screamed. The wind was blowing up the skirt of her hurriedly purchased, badly fitting black dress so that the backs of her pale thighs gleamed in the sun. I closed my eyes and pretended I was invisible. Dad was on his feet immediately, grabbing her around the waist, pulling her off the casket lid. "No, no! Don't take her away!" Mom yelled, sobbing, hitting at Dad's arm as if he were responsible for Bunny's burial. "I'm not ready!" Dad stood there, holding her tightly until she slumped against him and the sobbing turned back into regular crying. That's the kind of thing he's good at -- being there when you need him. He might not always know the right thing to say, but he's there. I felt a single tear trickle down my cheek and calmly brushed it away. I was tired of crying. I wanted this funeral to be over already so we could all go home and try to figure out how to be normal people again, if that was possible. I could hear mumbling behind me, and I turned halfway around in my seat to look at the other so-called mourners. There were people I didn't even recognize staring at Mom as if she had a third eye. Roxanne and her mother were in the back of the crowd, and they were looking at Mom too. Everybody seemed sort of embarrassed, which made me mad, even though I was totally humiliated myself. What did they expect? Didn't they understand how different everything was now? That nobody could ever take Bunny's place? People always said how unusual it was that Mom and Bunny were so close, more like sisters or best friends than mother and daughter. Christine and Bunny are so lucky, they'd say. I wish I had such a wonderful relationship with my mother! Which always made me feel a little strange -- like, how come I wasn't part of this chain of mother-daughter best friends too? But I just wasn't. Oh, Bunny loved me, that I knew for sure, but my mother -- well, she was certainly not my best friend. Sometimes she didn't even act like my mother, at least not like most mothers. No How was school today? or Let's go shopping together. Bunny was the one who supplied me with that stuff. Dad always said Mom had her mind on other things because she was an artist. She was supposedly thinking all the time. Not about me, though. I guess Mom named me after her mother so I'd be like her, but I'm not. I'm just Liz. Nobody is like Bunny. Or rather, nobody was. A few years ago Bunny took me shopping for back-to-school clothes at the end of the summer. We were at the mall in Waverly, and we kept runnWittlinger, Ellen is the author of 'Blind Faith' with ISBN 9781416902737 and ISBN 1416902732.