Jazz Funeral

wanted to win her over, he’d certainly begun on the right foot: “Melody, I want to do everything I can to help with your music. I know I haven’t been very supportive, and I regret that.”
    It was stiff and his delivery was a little pompous, almost seemed to contain a note of belligerence, but she put that down to embarrassment. She heard what he was saying—he was saying he was taking her seriously in a way he never had before.
    He hadn’t ever had the least interest in her music, hadn’t even gone to her piano recitals, and later, when she’d started singing, his disinterest had been more like disdain. He’d stopped a hair short of ridicule.
    “I want to be a different person from now on.”
    She couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
    “When you disappeared, I knew how much—” He couldn’t finish. Was he going to say that he loved her? He didn’t know how. And yet her chest fluttered in a way that said something important was going on. If he’d just glibly said “how much I love you,” in a meaningless monotone, without affect, it wouldn’t have been nearly so moving, she thought.
    “I know, Dad.”
    He looked relieved. “Will you sit down?” He led her into the living room, where they’d probably never sat together in their lives.
    He sat on a sofa, legs crossed formally, she on a chair, feeling awkward in her shorts. “Ham died; you ran away. I saw what I’d been missing and I knew that I was the cause of it. I saw that I really wasn’t a good father, either to you or to Ham, and I wasn’t a good husband. Patty is the way she is because of me.”
    “No, she isn’t, Dad. She picked you because she couldn’t really … couldn’t do it either.” She noticed that she too had shied from the L word. “Dr. Richard told me that.”
    “You discuss us in there?”
    In spite of everything, Melody had laughed. “Daaaad! What do you think therapy’s all about?”
    “I guess I thought she’d just tell you not to be such a brat and that’d be that.”
    Could this be her father? Making a joke?
    “Look, Melody, remember when you were a little girl? We were close then, weren’t we?”
    “I think so. I can’t remember that well.”
    “I do better with little kids than big kids. And a lot better than I do with adults.”
    “Sure. You can control them. People with minds of their own are too threatening.”
    Now, in the limousine, the memory of it made her laugh. You could have knocked him over with a feather. He had no idea she’d know things like that.
    That was fun. It was the first good thing she’d gotten out of knowing what she knew. Just because you knew it didn’t mean you could change it. Richard said she could only change herself, and she’d tried; she’d wanted to be a person who didn’t have to live with these people. And now she didn’t; her mother was going to jail and her father was metamorphosing right before her eyes. Richard didn’t know every damn thing.
    Her dad had said, “So that makes me a control freak, huh?”
    She’d said, “Just a wimp, Daddy.” And they’d laughed together like they were used to it.
    After the cemetery service, suffering the hugs and murmurings of dozens of powdered, sweaty, perfumed adults she didn’t care about, she thought she’d faint; only the memory of how unpleasant that was kept her upright.
    She wanted to be alone, she told herself, but at the same time she was thrilled that these people were here for Ham—the mayor, everyone from Uptown, every music figure in town, and that meant plenty of nationwide importance. And lots and lots of people she didn’t know, and that Ham probably hadn’t known. People who appreciated his work, probably. She was proud of her brother.
    People were there for her too—Joel; Dr. Richard; Flip and Blair; even that nice cop, that Skip. She knew the cop was there for her, she sensed it, and she felt loved, protected by her presence, though they didn’t really know each other and probably never would.
    The band for the funeral had probably been assembled from lots of bands—that was her guess anyway. The Olympia Brass Band, the Magnificent Seven Brass Band, Dejan’s, Pin Stripe, the Young Tuxedos; some of the Boucrees were marching in it, and she knew they were there for her too.
    As they left the cemetery, the band played “The Saints,” and when they got warmed up, they swung into “Didn’t He Ramble,” and for the first time that day Melody cried. She thought it ironic that