Excerpt from What Comes After by JoAnne Tompkins, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"We need to get you out of that," he said, nodding toward the wool sweater I wore. I was drenched. Apparently it had rained my entire way there.

"No," I said, jerking back.

He studied me. With his cropped dark hair, the shoulders of a bull, and a pronounced jaw, Peter was an imposing man. I must have swayed under his gaze, because he grabbed my arm as if to right me. And then he did something he had never done. He pulled me to him, held me in a painful crush. Only for a moment before pressing back. "You going to make it? Because you don't have to. I can take you home."

"I asked for this memorial."

"Doesn't matter."

He was right. I could leave or I could stay. Nothing would return to me what I had lost.

"I'm staying."

"All right," he said. "As long as you know you stink. You know that, right?"

So like him to be blunt even here. He was the same with students and parents, presenting notice of suspensions, even expulsions, with nonjudgmental candor.

"What were you thinking, walking here without a coat?"

I stood silent, the sweater releasing the barnyard scents of wet wool and grass. And something more potent. Buried deep in its fibers was the musky adolescent-boy smell of Daniel. Three years back, when my son was fourteen, when he still wanted to emulate his father, he had often borrowed it.

"People are waiting," Peter said.

Not being Quaker, he didn't understand that communal silence was its own form of honoring a life. Friends were not waiting. They had started the memorial the second they took their seats.

When I offered no response, Peter slid off his dark suit jacket and held it up. It was too formal and somber for a Quaker meeting, especially a memorial. But I let him put it on me, let him cover the sweater I wore. I can only imagine how I must have looked: my scraggly gray hair dripping down my cheeks and neck, wearing a jacket with sleeves cropped inches above my wrists, its short, boxy body making me appear taller and gaunter than I already was.

Though ten years my junior, Peter patted my back with tender severity, as if he were my father, and in allowing him to dress me, I had made him proud or sad or both.

 

On entering the meeting room, I saw Katherine seated on the far side, my usual spot opposite, waiting. Though all the benches faced the empty center, Friends had saved a place for me where the angles of light might feel familiar.

But this day, nothing felt familiar. The only comfort came from my damp sweater. Pressed to my skin by Peter's jacket, it created the sensation of weighted warmth, like a newborn nuzzled against me, and I had flashes of my son as a baby, newly burst into this world, his life unbounded. As the silence was broken, as Friend after Friend rose and spoke of my son, I half expected Daniel to appear in my arms or scamper in at the end of meeting, a five-year-old fresh from First Day School. I almost laughed remembering how, as a small boy, he'd convert his urge to make noise into motion, would flop backward over my knees, open and close his mouth like a fish. More than once, I'd taken a kick to the jaw during my son's acrobatic attempts at silence.

Perhaps forty minutes into the service, I saw Daniel on one of the front benches, fourteen and proud, wearing the very sweater that clung to me now. His eyes swept the room as if searching for something. He seemed so present, so thoroughly alive, that I glanced at Katherine across the emptiness. Surely, she felt him too. We could share this, couldn't we? One final moment together. Whole.

If she was aware of my eyes on her, if she felt Daniel in the room, I saw no evidence. Her focus was half lidded and still. Her "friend" sat next to her. Thick necked and dark suited, he took one of her hands in his and stroked it with his thumb. She lifted her face to him, and then, as if remembering, she flicked a glance my way. On seeing me, she slipped her hand out of his grasp, set it alone in her lap. An act of kindness. Or maybe one of shame.

Excerpted from What Comes After by JoAnne Tompkins. Copyright © 2021 by JoAnne Tompkins. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.