They had the same laugh.

They had the same pattern of going quiet when they were hurt rather than saying so, which meant they spent a lot of years going quiet at each other without ever quite resolving what the quiet was about.

After Eric’s divorce five years ago — a painful one, the kind that required everyone in the family to take positions they didn’t want to take — he and my father had a falling-out of the kind that has a specific cause that both people can identify but that is really about the accumulation of twenty years of smaller failures of communication. They spoke at Christmas and birthdays. They were polite. They were not close.

I know my father grieved this.

He did not say so in words. But I watched him for six months of illness and I saw the way he looked when Eric’s name came up, and I saw the phone calls he made that were shorter than he would have wanted them to be, and I saw him one evening sitting at the kitchen table with a sheet of paper in front of him, writing something in his careful engineer’s print, stopping, starting again.

I did not ask what he was writing.

I have thought about that a great deal since the day of the funeral.

---

The morning of my father’s funeral was cold and clear.

October in our part of the state has a particular quality — the light comes in sideways in a way that makes everything look more significant than it would in July, and the air has the specific smell of things ending and things beginning simultaneously, and you feel slightly more alive in it than you do in gentler weather, which is either a gift or an irony depending on why you’re outside.

I had driven to the funeral home early.

I was there when they opened the doors, in the black dress I had bought specifically for this occasion and the shoes my father had given me for my birthday two years ago, which felt right, wearing something he had given me to the day we said goodbye to him.

Eric arrived late.

Not dramatically late, not missed-the-beginning late, but late enough that people had found their seats and the room had settled into its particular quiet and then the door opened and Eric walked in.

And every person in the room, in the peripheral way that people do, registered his entrance.

Because he was wearing red.

Not burgundy. Not wine. Not the deep, forgivable red that could be mistaken for dark in bad lighting. Red. Bright, confident, unambiguous red, a suit that fit him well and that he carried with the exhausted dignity of a man who had made a decision he was standing behind.

I watched him walk to the front of the chapel.

I watched him stand in front of our father’s casket and look down at it with an expression I could not read from where I was sitting.

Then he came and sat beside me.

I leaned in.

What the hell are you wearing?

He kept his eyes forward.

Not now, Sarah.

Dad would have hated this.

He turned to look at me then, and what was in his expression stopped me — not anger, not defensiveness. Something tired and certain and private.

No, he said quietly. He wouldn’t.

And then the service began.