I Joined My Dead Sister's Curling Team, and Her Widower Joined Me novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: I'll Throw Her Stones
At her sister's funeral lunch, Britt volunteers for the dead woman's curling seat in front of the whole church basement, and takes the widower's tie in her fist.
I put my coffee down on the dessert table.
Then I told a church basement full of Lutherans that I would take my dead sister's place on her curling team.
"I'll throw her stones," I said.
Nobody moved.
Eighty people stopped chewing at once.
A woman at the coffee urn had just told my sister's husband that the team had no one to throw lead now.
She had said it softly, to his sleeve, because the bonspiel was in February and somebody had to say it.
I had heard every word from across the room.
The funeral had ended an hour before, and the lunch was still going.
There was hotdish in steel pans and lemon bars on paper doilies and coffee in a hundred paper cups.
For that whole hour, the church ladies had been telling me that my sister was an angel.
"A true angel, hon," the woman in the purple cardigan had said, and patted my arm.
"She held your whole family together."
My mother had stood beside me in her good black coat and agreed with every one of them.
I am twenty-seven, and I have been the second Bakken girl for every year of it.
Annika was the pretty one and the kind one and the one who remembered birthdays.
I was the one who stayed in the kitchen and did the dishes.
She died last Saturday on Highway 61, on black ice, driving home from our mother's house in Duluth.
She was thirty-one.
Her husband stood by the urn in a black suit with his hands hanging at his sides.
Gunnar Thorsrud is six foot three and wears a red-brown beard, and that afternoon he looked lost.
I had slept on his couch for a week, and I had not once seen him sleep.
"Britt," my mother said.
Her voice was low and sharp, the one she used on me in church when I was nine.
"Sit down. Not today."
"I'm not sitting," I said.
"Annika threw lead for that team every Thursday for six years," I said to the room.
"Somebody should keep throwing it."
"Don't make a scene at your sister's funeral lunch," my mother said.
"You always do this. Everything has to be about you."
The purple cardigan took a step back from me, and so did two more.
I had never in my life made a scene in front of my mother, and the whole room could feel it.
Gunnar turned around.
He looked at me across the whole basement, and his face went white.
Three men in dark suits stood close around him by the urn.
They had carried the casket with him that morning, and they had not left his side since.
The oldest had a gray crew cut and a calm, level face.
"Practice is Thursday," he said.
His voice was quiet, and it carried to every table.
The lean one beside him gave me a crooked grin, the first I had seen on anyone all day.
"She'll need shoes," he said.
The third, a big blond man, looked at the floor and went red to the ears.
None of them looked at my mother.
"Britt Bakken," my mother said.
"You can't even make it through a church supper without crying in the pantry."
"I know," I said.
"I've done it every year."
It was true, and a few people laughed, and then stopped, because the laugh was in the wrong room.
I picked my way between the folding tables toward the coffee urn.
The ladies drew their chairs in as I went by.
Nobody stopped me.
Gunnar watched me come, and he did not step back.
He was a finish carpenter, and he stood with his weight even and his big hands still.
There were gray hollows under his blue eyes.
He had not shaved well, and a patch beside his ear had been missed.
I wanted to put my thumb on it.
I reached up and took his black tie in my fist, just under the knot, and held on.
The silk was warm from his skin, and under it his chest rose once, hard, against my knuckles.
He did not pull away.
Behind me, my mother said my name again, and I did not turn around.
I pulled the tie down until his face was level with mine.
He smelled like cedar and coffee and the soap I had been using on his shower shelf for a week.
"I'll need a ride home first," I said.
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