Now his dad was gone too, and Ty didn’t know what made him angrier—that he’d had to come back here for this or that he’d never get to tell the old man to fuck himself.
Not unless he wanted to make a scene, anyway, and Ty… didn’t have the energy to make another scene today. He’d embarrassed himself enough.
Eliza Kent and the funeral-home director met Ty at the door. The director shook his hand, and Eliza took his arm like he was a frail old lady, or maybe like she’d taken one look at him and calculated how much he drank last night. “Come on,” she said in a bracing voice that reminded Ty of his mom. “We’ll get you through this.”
Ty was installed at the front of the room, near the casket, which was closed. “The accident…,” Eliza had told him when she’d come to the station to find him. “It wasn’t pretty.”
The funeral director had asked if Ty wanted to see his father, assured him they’d reconstructed his face as much as possible. Part of Ty had thought maybe looking would make it final, make it real, and the other half was pissed off that even if he did look, he wouldn’t get to tell his father to go to hell.
It was too late to change his mind now.
Ty shook hands with a hundred of his father’s nearest and dearest, who offered hollow condolences to his face when he knew for a fact they’d spent his adolescence gossiping about him. Even when Alan Chiu not-so-surreptitiously wiped his hand after shaking Ty’s, Ty didn’t have the energy to give a shit. He could just about manage to stand upright, and even that he had to credit to a guy he’d literally never met before this morning and who he’d initially assumed was a product of his imagination.
Finally the parade of mourners ended and Ty got to sit down at the front row of the chapel, where everyone was staring at his back as the local preacher talked about his father’s impact on thecommunity.
Ty kind of wished he were still drunk.
Instead he sat ramrod straight next to Eliza and kept his eyes fixed forward. He did his best to let the eulogy wash through him without leaving anything behind. It was easier than it should’ve been.
After the service, professional pallbearers lowered his father’s casket into the ground. The well-dressed crowd waited for Ty to throw a handful of dirt onto the coffin, or maybe to spit on it. Ty did the former and then wiped his hand on his suit pants like a five-year-old and immediately felt stupid and self-conscious.
At least the old man himself wasn’t here anymore to look at him with that perennially disappointed sneer.
The fog didn’t clear from Ty’s vision until the crowd dispersed and suddenly he found himself standing with his father’s lawyer and…
… and Ty’s high school football and baseball coach?
Now that he was looking at the guy, Ty vaguely remembered him coming through the condolences line, but he’d been too out of it then to pay attention. But now he was standing next to Eliza in a—areally nicesuit, which was maybe why Ty hadn’t recognized him. He’d never seen the guy in anything other than a track suit or a school polo.
“Uh. Coach Tate?”
Coach put a hand on his shoulder. “How you holding up, Ty?”
“I have had better days.”
Coach squeezed, and Ty swallowed an unexpected lump in his throat.
“We have some things to discuss,” Eliza said gently. “Why don’t you come back to our place for a chat? Henry can make us lunch.”
Our place?Ty wondered.Henry?The last Ty knew, Eliza was married to a guy named David. He was about to ask, but then Coach Tate put his arm around Eliza’s shoulders and the penny dropped. “Wait,” Ty said, “you two aremarried?”
“Six years now,” Coach Tate said.
“There’ve been a few changes around here since you left.” Eliza put her hand on Ty’s arm. He couldn’t help but feel like he was being… handled… but it had been a long time since anyone cared enough about him to try it. “Come on.”
He spent the ride from the funeral home looking out the window of Eliza’s slick SUV. Winter was receding, leaving mud and damp brown-green grass. The trees had started to bud, though nothing had leafed out yet. In Eliza’s neighborhood, daffodils were blooming in the garden beds and the tulips had started to come up, though it was a crapshoot on whether they’d get to flower. Ty’s mom had always complained about the deer eating the tops off before they opened.
“Kind of dreary,” Coach Tate commented as Eliza pulled into the driveway. “What do you think, sandwiches and chicken soup? Homemade. My specialty.”
Coach Tate had been a bachelor when Ty knew him. This sudden turn for the domestic threw him for a loop. “Uh, yeah. Sounds great, Coach. Thanks.”
Moments later the door to Eliza’s home office closed behind them. Ty expected something like his father’s study—heavy dark wood and leather furniture, something that felt stifling in its attempt to convey luxury and importance. Instead it was a bright room with a bay windowfacing the back garden. It was decorated with a menagerie of potted plants and midcentury furnishings. Eliza motioned Ty to one of the two armchairs in front of her desk. He expected her to sit facing him, but she took the one next to his instead.
“How are you doing, Ty? Really. I know this is a lot, and you and your daddy never did get along….”
Ty snorted before he could control himself. “That’s a hell of an understatement.”
“I know.” She patted his arm. It was wild. Ty had never considered her the maternal type. “And I’m sorry. But it’s better that we sort out what we can now.”
