Page 1 of Justice & Liberty

1

The daythey put my mother in the ground was gray.

It wasn’t a shock. March in Iowa, most days were gray. One year in my youth, the sun hadn’t come out once for the entire month. By the time April had rolled around, everyone had been in a terrible mood, a seething mass of humanity, ready to explode in anger at the slightest inconvenience.

Still, it always seemed like funerals should happen in the rain, whether they were in March or July.

Mom hadn’t wanted a big thing, so I hadn’t invited the whole town out. Hadn’t had any announcements published about it.

The town doctor, September Arthur, was there, because she’d been Mom’s best friend. She had come straight from the office, still in scrubs, stethoscope tucked into a pocket, and carrying Mom’s cat Hex.

Hex, who meowed piteously and threw herself on the ground next to the place where we were burying Mom.

Like she knew exactly what was happening.

I was torn between scooping her up and holding her close to me, and leaving her to her misery, because I understood it.Part of me wanted to throw myself on the ground next to her. Part of me didn’t want to be touched by anyone, maybe ever again.

Still, when September wrapped an arm around my waist and held on, I thought maybe more for herself than me, I didn’t mind that so much.

“She wanted to call you,” she whispered to me. “But she thought she had more time. It was so fucking fast, we just...”

I leaned into her, willing myself not to start sobbing like a baby. Once it started, it wasn’t going to stop.

“I understand,” I managed to whisper, even though...I didn’t, really. But that wasn’t their fault. It was because the whole world suddenly didn’t make sense.

My mother, pillar of life and health and common sense, had died. She’d gotten cancer and she’d died, and she hadn’t so much as called to give me a warning.

How was that even possible?

I would never truly understand why they hadn’t told me, other than maybe some misguided notion of protecting me like I was still a child. But how do you protect someone from a thing that’s inevitably going to crush them? You can’t stop it. A warning might be mitigating. But they’d left me to find out this way, with the call from the hospital to tell me that she was gone.

No chance to say goodbye.

I’d had to book plane tickets from Los Angeles to Iowa, pack a bag, and get on a plane while processing this truth, instead of having a chance to even consider the possibility of it all beforehand.

Footsteps thumped behind us, and I didn’t look around. September had been the only person I’d known Mom would want there, so I hadn’t even told anyone else what was happening.

September craned her head around to look, then gave a thin, wan smile. “Timothy. Nice of you to come, even though Maggie wasn’t one of your people.”

“We’re all part of the same flock in the end, no matter what god we worship or don’t,” a smooth masculine voice said. “All human. And Ms. Abernathy was one of the best of us.”

The local minister, I realized when I looked up to find a handsome young man in all black. Despite the fact that Mom wasn’t, had never been, Christian of any flavor. I didn’t know him at all, since he’d come to replace the ancient town minister from my childhood.

At least, I assumed he was handsome. He had a square jaw and dimples, like all those action hero guys everyone swooned over.

Me? I was more interested in the woman who had come up alongside him.

She was nearly, if not actually, six feet tall, but not willowy and slender like most of the tall women I knew. Also, though, not built like a bull, like my girlfriend Tanya was—like someone who’d played years of college softball. She was more like a swimmer, substantial and strong-looking, with wide shoulders, but “broad” wasn’t the right term.

She was also the best dressed person in the graveyard. Or...in town. Maybe in the whole damn state. She was wearing a three-piece suit in all black, down to the black-on-black paisley-embroidered waistcoat, black patent boots that were somehow unsmudged even in the dirt and rain, and a silver-headed black cane.

A cane? That was unusual in a person under sixty, and she was definitely that. Forty at most, and I suspected less.

Her burnished gold hair, cut short and neat, was the only thing that lessened the stark figure she cut, standing therelooking like an actor playing an especially hot incarnation of Death on a TV show.

“Doctor Arthur,” she said to September, her voice smooth and mellow, like dark golden honey.

You will not lust after hot strangers at your mother’s funeral, I admonished myself. But the fact was that I’d never once in my life imagined anyone like this setting foot inside the tiny Iowa town I’d grown up in.

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