Chapter 20: The Dedication

The emergency department lobby had been cleared and filled with folding chairs.

There were three hundred of them, and every one was taken.

Nurses stood along the walls in purple scrubs, because someone had decided that was Patsy's color.

On the far wall, under a white cloth, hung something about the size of a door.

Beside it, a flat screen stood on a cart, dark and left off the printed program.

I sat in the third row in the one black dress that still zipped.

Ansel sat beside me in a suit I had never seen.

He had said he would take the second row, and he had lied, because the second row belonged to the family.

My father sat in it with his cap on his knee.

Darla sat next to him with her baby on her chest and her eyes on the floor.

Nobody sat on my father's other side.

At two o'clock sharp, my mother walked to the lectern.

She wore the navy cardigan and the pearl pin, and she carried a folded sheet of paper in both hands.

She did not look at the third row.

"Thank you all for coming," she said.

Her voice was steady and clear, the same voice that had gotten four hundred middle schoolers through a fire drill.

"My daughter Patsy was twenty-six years old."

It was the first time I had heard my mother say her name since January.

"She wanted to be a nurse from the age of nine, when she took care of a bird with a broken wing."

"It died, and she buried it in the garden, and she cried for two days."

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