So when he walked into the funeral wearing a red dress, I didn’t understand.
It was bright red. Knee-length. Short sleeves. Simple, but impossible to miss in a room full of black and navy and gray.
He came in late, through the side door, just as the organ started. He walked fast, with his head down, the way you walk into a classroom when you’re late and hope nobody notices.
Everybody noticed.
People turned. Some openly stared. A woman two rows in front of us actually stood up halfway to get a better look, then sat back down.
He was wearing black dress shoes and black socks. His hair, which had grown back thick after he shaved it for Jack, was combed neatly. He had a white shirt collar showing at the neck, like he’d tried to wear the dress over a dress shirt and given up halfway.
His face was pale. His hands were empty.
One of Daniel’s brothers, Rick, leaned forward from the pew behind us.
“What the hell?” he whispered.
Not quietly enough.
My first thought embarrasses me now.
I thought Theo was trying to make the funeral about himself.
That’s what I thought. About that boy. About the boy who shaved his own head in my bathroom.
I thought, Not today. Not Jack’s day. How could you?
Then I thought maybe he and Jack had fought before Jack died. Something I didn’t know about. Something secret. Something ugly. Maybe this was some kind of revenge.
It didn’t make any sense. I knew it didn’t make sense. But grief doesn’t care about sense.
I leaned across the aisle toward two of Jack’s school friends. Marcus and Devin. They’d come to the hospital almost every week those last two months.
“Did something happen between them?” I whispered.
Both boys shook their heads immediately.
“No, Mrs. Harris,” Marcus whispered back. His eyes were wide. “Nothing. I swear.”
Devin looked over at Theo. Then back at me. Then down at his hands.
I don’t think he knew either.
Theo sat alone, near the aisle, about four rows behind us.
Nobody sat next to him. The pew was half-empty, and the people on the other end slid a little further away.
He didn’t look up. His hands were clenched together in his lap so tightly that his knuckles had gone white against the red fabric.
Daniel saw him a few minutes later.
I felt him go stiff beside me. I felt it through his whole body.
“What is he doing?” he whispered.
“I don’t know.”
“This is Jack’s funeral.”
“I know.”
He started to stand.
I grabbed his sleeve.
“Don’t.”
“He’s wearing a dress, Laura.”
“I can see that.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
Daniel looked at me.
His face was raw from seventeen days of barely sleeping. His eyes were red. He’d cut himself shaving that morning and there was still a tiny piece of tissue stuck to his jaw. I hadn’t had the heart to tell him.
Mine probably looked the same.
Grief makes you less patient with mystery. Everything feels like one more insult. You don’t have any room left inside you to absorb one more strange thing. Not one.
Daniel sat back down. But his hand was gripping the edge of the pew so hard I thought the wood might crack.
I need to tell you about those seventeen days. Because they explain Daniel’s face, and mine.
Jack turned eighteen in the hospital. We brought a cake to his room. Chocolate, with blue frosting. Theo brought eighteen candles and a lighter, and a nurse named Glenda pretended not to see.
Jack was too tired to blow them all out. He got about six. Theo and I did the rest.
“Make a wish,” Daniel said.
Jack closed his eyes for a long time.
“Done,” he said.
“What’d you wish for?”
“If I tell you, it won’t come true,” Jack said. “Everyone knows that. Honestly, Dad.”
Three days later, he couldn’t sit up without help.
Ten days later, the doctors stopped talking about next steps.
On the seventeenth day, early in the morning, with the sky going gray outside the window and Daniel asleep in the chair and my hand on his chest, my son stopped breathing.
It was very quiet.
I always thought it would be louder.
Then Theo’s name was announced for the eulogy.
I’d forgotten.
I’d completely forgotten he was supposed to speak. Months ago, during one of the good weeks, Jack had told us. “If, you know. If. Theo’s doing the speech. Not Uncle Rick. Uncle Rick will talk about fishing for an hour.”
I’d said, “Don’t talk like that.”
And Jack had said, “Okay,” and changed the subject. And I’d let him. And I’d written Theo’s name down on the funeral director’s form last week without even thinking about it.
Now the pastor said it out loud.
“Jack’s best friend, Theo Moreno, will now share a few words.”
Theo stood up.
The whispers followed him all the way down the aisle to the front of the church. I heard them. What is he wearing? Is this a joke? Somebody should say something. His poor mother.
His poor mother.
They meant me.
Daniel started to rise again. Half up off the pew. I don’t know what he was going to do. I don’t think he knew either.
I held on to his sleeve.
And Theo reached the microphone, and turned around, and saw all of us looking at him.
And that’s when he said it.
I know half of you want me out of here right now.
Now he was staring at the coffin.
It was a simple wooden one. Pine. Jack had wanted it that way, though I didn’t know at the time how much he’d wanted it.
Theo pulled the microphone closer. His hand was shaking.
“About six months ago,” he said, “Jack and I were watching this terrible movie in his room.”
A tiny smile appeared on his face. Just a flicker.
“He said it was a classic.” Theo shook his head. “It was not.”
A few of Jack’s friends laughed softly. Marcus wiped his eyes.
Theo kept going.
“He’d just gotten back from another scan. His parents weren’t home yet.”
I looked at Daniel.
I remembered that scan.
I remembered the day exactly. A Tuesday in March. Daniel had driven Jack to the hospital and back because I had a shift I couldn’t miss. He’d dropped Jack off at home and gone straight to the store.
The results came that evening, by phone.
They were bad.
Not hopeless. Not officially. Nobody used that word.
But bad enough that the oncologist had started using new phrases. Phrases like next-line treatment. Phrases like managing expectations.
I remember standing in the kitchen with the phone against my ear, staring at a burned pan Jack had left in the sink, nodding at things she said.
I remember thinking, We just won’t tell him how bad it is yet. Not until we know more.
Jack had been upstairs. With Theo. Watching a terrible movie.
“Jack asked me if I’d speak at his funeral,” Theo said.
The air left my chest.
Daniel sat down. Hard. Like his legs had stopped working.
Theo looked straight at us.
“I told him to shut up.”
His eyes filled.
“I was mad at him. For even saying it. I threw a pillow at his head.”
Then, somehow, he laughed through his tears.
“So then he kept going. Because he was Jack. And I said, ‘Fine. I’ll speak at your funeral when you show up to mine wearing a dress.’”
Several people smiled. Somebody near the back actually chuckled.
I didn’t.
I already knew where this was going. I could feel it, the way you feel a wave coming before it reaches you.
Theo went on.
“And Jack said, ‘Fine. Then you have to wear one to mine.’”
Theo looked down at the red fabric.
“I told him absolutely not.”
He paused.
“Then he said, ‘Red.’”
My hands began to shake.
“Specifically red,” Theo said. “Because he said black makes me look like an undertaker.”
Someone behind me laughed out loud. And then, in the same breath, started crying. I heard the two sounds come out of the same throat, one right after the other.
Theo’s voice weakened.
“I told him there wasn’t going to be a funeral.”
He stopped again. He looked down at the podium for a long time.
This time he couldn’t hide the tears. They just came. He didn’t wipe them.
“I said he was going to get better.”
The church was completely silent. I could hear the old radiator clanking along the wall. I could hear a car pass by outside.
“He said, ‘Probably.’”
Theo wiped his face with the back of his hand.
“But then he made me promise.”