A Song for the Road

hoc group of volunteers who sang for funerals awaited her leadership. Miriam gathered her scattered wits and started bookmarking her accompaniment books. Like Becky said, it was just another Mass. She could do this. She’d been doing it since high school. She could do it in her sleep. She’d be fine.
Naturally, that was the moment the flowers arrived.
“Excuse me, I’m looking for—”
“Just find a place on the stairs,” Miriam told the delivery guy, waving toward the bower around the altar.
“Um, actually, they’re not for the funeral.” He looked embarrassed. “I’m looking for Miriam … Teddy … skoo?”
The choir went abruptly silent.
And Miriam knew. She didn’t need to look; she could smell them. Mock orange and larkspur. The same arrangement Teo had presented her with nineteen years ago on the way into the courthouse—and every anniversary and birthday since.
How could she have forgotten? Talia had set up the auto-delivery on her father’s behalf, right in front of Miriam, at the dinner table two years ago last night. They’d all gotten such a laugh out of it.
Becky, trim in her polyester suit, set her hymnal aside and went over to the delivery man. “I’ll take those, thank you.” She turned to Miriam, who stared at the clumps of rounded white blossoms pierced by pink and blue and purple spears.
“They’re so pretty,” said an alto who’d joined the choir only a few weeks ago. “Who are they from?”
A moment of dead silence. Miriam didn’t have the energy to explain the nuances. “Teo,” she said. “They’re from Teo.”
At the sound of her dead husband’s name, silence fell. “But—” the alto said.
“Yes. Teo’s dead. My whole family is dead. I know.” Miriam shoved her freak-out into a deep, dark corner of her mind she never visited during daylight hours. Or at night, if she could help it. But the niggling thought stuck its foot in the door, preventing her from slamming it shut: If she’d forgotten this, what else might be lurking on the calendar, waiting to ambush her?
It’s been a year, she told herself. If there was anything else, it should have happened by now.
Still. It wouldn’t hurt to get into Talia’s computer and poke around. Just to be safe.
Having a plan eased the tightness in her chest, but she wasn’t going anywhere near those flowers. “Just put them on the organ, would you, Bec?”
Becky complied briskly, as if there were nothing freakish about a floral delivery from a dead man, and returned to her seat in the alto section.
Time to redirect. For all their sakes. “So,” she said. “I hear we have a change in the opening song.”
Several people exchanged glances. She could see them asking each other: “Are we really going to just pretend that didn’t happen?”
Miriam made eye contact with John Merrick, a bass who’d been singing with them since the day she and Teo arrived at St. Greg’s. Like Becky, he got things done. She gave him her best beseeching eyes.
John sat forward. “Y’know,” he drawled, “I don’t know why we bother havin’ a music list if we’re just gonna change it anyway.”
Anemic laughter rippled through the choir as the joke spread. “Oh, come on, you know the list is more like—”
“Guidelines than actual rules!”
The laughter fizzled. That had been Teo’s joke. Usually delivered in a hilariously lousy Captain Barbosa imitation. In John’s mouth, it just underscored how everything had changed.
The smell of mock orange teased her nostrils. Miriam gripped the music stand as the choir eyed her nervously. What would they do if she stood up and screamed, “Do this without me. I hate this damn job, and I hate all of you!”
Keep it together. That’s not true and you know it.
It felt true, though. Eighteen years ago, she and Teo had come here with twin babies in tow. The parish hadn’t been expecting to hire a young married couple to fill a single staff position, but they’d risen to the occasion. They’d offered the family a shabby but solid house two doors down from the church, recently bequeathed by a parishioner, as part of their compensation. Miriam and Teo had been more than codirectors of music here. This parish had been their home, a place where she could shake off the scorn with which her family had always viewed her passion for music. A place where she’d blossomed.
If she couldn’t handle this work anymore, where would she go? What would she do?
The sound of footsteps in the back of church signaled the arrival of the dead congressman’s family. It was time to work. Miriam sat on the piano bench and nodded to Becky to announce the opening song.
Don’t think, just play.
She put her fingers to the keys and began. After so many years in ministry, playing “Amazing Grace” was nearly automatic. Which was great, except it left more space to think.
Teo had been so conflicted about that floral delivery. He almost canceled it—he only left it in place because he didn’t want to hurt Talia’s feelings. But it had felt wrong to him because he loved giving gifts. He wanted to do it himself.
He was good at it too. Every year she thought she was impervious to surprise, and every year he’d managed it anyway—often with the help of the twins. Three years ago, he’d planned a scavenger hunt that covered half the metro area. Miriam ended up at the nicest restaurant in Atlanta, the one that was supposed to be impossible to get a reservation for and that they couldn’t possibly afford. He’d met her there, holding a duplicate of the bouquet now perched on the organ.
It had never occurred to her he might be able to surprise her from beyond the grave.
He’d always loved her better than she’d loved him.
The funeral went on: music, prayers, Scriptures, more music. So many people. So unlike the average funeral, where the mourners barely occupied a quarter of the church. St. Gregory seated a thousand, and today every pew was crammed elbow to elbow. People standing in the back, as