My name is Booker King, I’m seventy-two years old, and the day I buried my wife of forty-five years, my own son showed up forty minutes late wearing a cream-colored suit that looked like something you’d wear to a nightclub, not your mother’s funeral. He didn’t look at the casket. He didn’t squeeze my hand. He pulled out his phone and started texting while the pastor was still speaking about the woman who’d given him life.
I sat in the front pew of St. Jude’s Baptist Church staring at the mahogany casket that held Esther—my Esther, the small woman with work-roughened hands and a heart vast enough to hold the world. The sanctuary smelled of lilies and lemon oil and old hymnals, and the organ music vibrated low in my chest like a second heartbeat. An American flag stood near the pulpit, a silent witness to promises made and kept.
I spent forty years managing logistics in a Dallas warehouse, but before that I carried a rifle for this country in a jungle halfway across the world. I know how to read a room. I know when a storm is coming. But nothing prepared me for the storm that walked into that church and sat down beside me with the audacity of blood relation and the morality of a snake.
My son Terrence slid into the pew without acknowledging me, his fingers flying across his phone screen, his jaw tight with the kind of tension that comes from owing money to dangerous people. Beside him was Tiffany, his wife, a woman who’d grown up in a middle-class suburb but presented herself like she’d been born in a penthouse. She wore enormous black sunglasses inside the church and a dress too short and too tight for the occasion, fanning herself with the funeral program like she was at a garden party instead of her mother-in-law’s homegoing.
“This place is a sauna,” she whispered, loud enough for the choir to hear. “Didn’t they have money for air conditioning?”
I gripped my hickory cane—the one I’d carved myself one summer while Esther drank sweet tea on our porch—and felt my knuckles go white. I wanted to tell them to leave. I wanted to tell them to show some respect for the woman who’d paid for Terrence’s college, who’d paid for their wedding, who’d bailed them out more times than I could count. But I said nothing. I was a man of discipline. I would not cause a scene at Esther’s funeral.
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