High Noon

forward and embraced Phoebe. “Thank you for coming here,” she said quietly. “Thank you for not forgetting.”
    Emotion flooded Phoebe’s throat, stung her eyes, ached in her heart. “I won’t ever forget.”
    “Would you come with me, please?” Clutching Phoebe’s hand, Opal turned. The man who’d spoken stood barring the way. “Don’t you shame me. Don’t you shame me so that this is the last time I look at your face.”
    “Your sons are dead, Opal.”
    “My sons are dead. And I have something to say.” She walked through the crowd of mourners to the front door.
    Her fingers twined in Phoebe’s trembling ones. “Opal—”
    “I’ve been afraid of so many things,” Opal said. “Most all my life. Maybe, I’d been braver things’d be different. I don’t know, and it’s hard not to question God’s will. But I’m going to do this one thing, this one thing. And maybe, maybe, I won’t be so afraid.”
    When she stepped out the front door with Phoebe, reporters shouted out, cameras whirled. Priority one, she thought, had been thoroughly breached. But there was a woman who’d lost her sons, who was clinging to her, who didn’t give a damn about protocol.
    “I got something to say.” Opal’s voice cracked, and her hand tightened like a vise on Phoebe’s.
    “Y’all been calling my home, and my mother’s home. Calling where I work. I told you I wanted my privacy, but you won’t give it. I got such sorrow in me, and I asked you to respect my grief. But you come ’round my house, my mama’s, you call on the telephone. Say you want me to tell you what I got inside me, what I think, what I feel. And some of you? You offer me money to talk to you.”
    Questions boomed out. Did you…Have you…How did you… Opal’s arm shook as if with a spasm as she turned those dark, sunken eyes on Phoebe. “Lieutenant Mac Namara.”
    “Let’s go back inside, Opal,” Phoebe murmured. “I’ll take you back inside, to your family.”
    “Stand here with me, please. Would you stand here with me so I can do this?”
    Opal closed her eyes, then lifted her voice over the storm. “I’ve got something to say here, something to say for free, and you’ll just hush if you want to hear it. My sons are dead.”
    In the silence that followed, Phoebe heard Opal’s indrawn sob. “My boys are dead. Both killed. Guns and bullets took their bodies, but it was something else took ’em before that. They had no hope. They had a fever of anger and hate and blame, but no hope to cool it. I wish I could’ve given them that, but I couldn’t get it into them.
    “You want me to blame somebody. You want to see me point my finger, to scream and cry and curse. You won’t. You want me to blame the gangs? They got part of it. The police? They got part. Then so do I got part, and my own dead babies, they got part. There’s plenty of blame to spread around. I don’t care for that. Doesn’t matter about that.”
    She pulled a tissue from her pocket to mop her tears. “I know this woman standing beside me talked to my boy, and listened to my boy. For hours. And when that terrible thing happened that took my boy away so I can’t ever have him again? She ran toward him. Didn’t matter to her who was to blame. She ran to him to try to help. And when I could see again, when I could see, what I saw was her holding my son. And that’s what matters.
    “Now I got nothing more to say.”
    Ignoring the hurled questions, Opal turned for the door. Her body shook lightly as Phoebe put a protective arm around her shoulders.
    “I’m going to take you to see my Charlie now.”
    “Okay, Opal.” Taking Opal’s weight, Phoebe walked toward the viewing room. “Let’s go see Charlie.”
     
    Phoebe’s knees felt a little weak by the time she returned to the car. It was funny, she thought, how joints often took the brunt of emotional upheavals.
    Duncan merely ran a hand down her arm, then started the ignition.
    “I need to make a call,” she said, and pulled out her phone. Impulse again, she reminded herself. She seemed to be doing a lot on impulse these days. “Mama? I’m going to be going out awhile if you don’t need me back. Yes, all right. Tell Carly I’ll come in and kiss her good night when I get home. I will. Bye.”
    She drew in a deep breath. “All right?”
    “Sure. Where do you want to go?”
    “I think your place would be just fine. Then you can fix me a nice cold drink of an alcoholic nature. And after