And then my second thought, which was worse:
Something happened between them.
I decided, inside of about six seconds, that there must have been a fight. Something at the end that nobody told me. Something ugly, some falling-out in the last weeks that I’d been too wrecked to notice, and this was Theo’s way of saying something about it.
I leaned over to two of Jack’s school friends in the row behind me — Priya and a boy named Mbeki, both of whom had been at our house a hundred times — and I said, quietly:
“Did something happen between them? At the end?”
And they both shook their heads, and Priya said:
“No, Mrs. Harris. Nothing happened.”
And I didn’t fully believe her.
That’s the part I have to sit with. A grieving mother interrogating two teenagers in a pew about whether her dead son had been betrayed, forty minutes before his funeral, based on a dress.
He Sat Alone Near the Aisle With His Hands Locked Together So Tight His Knuckles Were White
