My son-in-law walked into my daughter’s funeral with another woman holding his arm and sat her in the front pew, in the seat with my name taped to it. When I stood, he said, “Second row, Patty. She’s with me now.” My daughter was seven months pregnant when she fell. Then her lawyer stood up in the back.
Deja was thirty-one. The baby was a boy, and she’d already named him Nico.
Brent said she went up the pull-down ladder in the garage to get the bassinet off the rafters.
Said she must have gotten lightheaded.
Said he was asleep on the couch and woke up to the noise.
He told it to me four times that week, and every time he stopped in the same place, right before the word “noise,” like he was checking it.
Deja had been scared of that ladder since she was nine.
She wouldn’t climb it for the Christmas lights.
The service was at Hartley Chapel in Grand Island, a Saturday at eleven.
Maurice drove in from Hastings and sat next to me without saying much, which is the most useful thing he’s done since 2004.
Then the double doors at the back opened.
Brent came up the aisle in a charcoal suit. There was still a little plastic tag hanging off the left cuff.
The woman holding his arm was maybe twenty-eight.
Blonde, long black dress, sunglasses she didn’t take off indoors.
Her hand was flat on his chest the whole way up.
Maurice leaned over. “Who the hell is that?”
I knew.
Lindsey. From the gym where Brent worked late.
In August Deja had shown me that name on his phone, the two of us sitting in my car outside the Super Saver with the engine running.
“It’s probably nothing, Mom,” she said. “She trains people. That’s all.”
She cried the whole way home anyway.
And in July, Brent had raised the life insurance on her to $650,000.
“For Nico,” he told everybody at the shower. People clapped.
Now Lindsey was walking toward my daughter’s casket like she was the one who’d lost something.
They stopped at the front pew.
There were three paper cards taped to it. Brent. Maurice. Me.
Brent peeled mine off with his thumbnail and held it out.
“Second row, Patty,” he said. “She’s with me now.”
I didn’t take it.
Maurice got his hand around my wrist. “Patty. NOT today,” he said. “Let her have today.”
So I took the card and sat behind the man who’d been asleep on the couch when my daughter hit the concrete.
The pastor talked about Deja’s laugh.
The softball team she coached, eleven girls in green shirts, all of them in the fourth row.
The yellow crib she painted twice because the first coat streaked.
Then he said Nico’s name.
Lindsey put her head on Brent’s shoulder.
He let her. He LET her.
He touched a folded tissue to the corner of one eye, and it came away exactly as crisp as it went up.
During the last hymn the organist dropped a whole line and just kept going like nobody would notice.
People started reaching for their coats.
I thought that was the worst of it.
A woman stood up in the back row.
Fifties. Navy blazer. Reading glasses on a beaded chain. A brown accordion folder under one arm.
“I’m sorry to keep everyone,” she said. “I’m Shalini Fong. I was Deja’s attorney.”
Brent turned all the way around in the pew.
“Deja didn’t have an attorney,” he said.
“She has since September,” Shalini said.
Somebody’s phone buzzed and nobody reached for it.
“She left written instructions for today. She asked that a letter be read out loud, in this room, with her husband and her mother both present.”
Brent got up.
“That is NOT happening,” he said. “Not at her FUNERAL.”
Shalini didn’t look up from the folder.
“She said you’d say that,” she said. “She wrote it down, word for word.”
Lindsey pushed her sunglasses up into her hair.
She looked at the casket then. Really looked at it.
Maurice’s fingers found mine and stayed there.
Shalini unfolded two sheets of lined paper.
Deja’s handwriting. Those fat round g’s she never grew out of.
“It’s dated the eleventh of September,” Shalini said. “She told me that if she died BEFORE THE BABY CAME, this was the first thing anybody in her family heard.”
Brent stepped into the aisle.
“Shalini,” he said. “I’m asking you nicely.”
“Sit down, Mr. Kraus.”
He didn’t.
She read it anyway.
“Mom. If Brent is telling you I fell off the garage ladder, ask him WHY WOULD I CLIMB IT.”
Lindsey’s hand came off his chest.
MOM ONLY
Shalini didn’t stop.
“I’m not going up there. I told him in July and I told him again Sunday. He put the bassinet on the rafters himself the day of the shower, and he’s asked me to go get it down four times now. He says it’ll be good for me. If I’m found at the bottom of that ladder, I didn’t go up it on my own. I want that said out loud, with Mom in the room. That’s all I want. Deja.”
She lowered the page.
Nobody in Hartley Chapel moved except Brent, who laughed once, through his nose.
“She was seven months,” he said. “She cried at car commercials. You want to read the note she left me about the dishwasher?”
A couple of the softball moms looked at their laps.
I got up out of the second row.
I went past the end of the front pew and past Lindsey, who was still standing in the aisle with her sunglasses in her hair, and past the casket and the white carnations. I went up the side aisle to the back row and held out my hand.
Shalini put the first sheet in it.
Then she took a second one out of the folder, folded in thirds, and held it until I looked at her.
“She wanted you to have this one by yourself,” she said.
On the outside, in those fat round letters, it said MOM ONLY. NOT IN FRONT OF HIM.
The bassinet
The bassinet was mine before it was hers.
White wicker, a hood that folds back, one leg a quarter inch short so it rocks whether you want it to or not. Deja slept in it in 1995 in the back bedroom of the house in Hastings. After that it sat in my basement under a bedsheet for thirty years.
I brought it to the shower in July.
The shower was in their backyard on a Sunday, ninety-one degrees, a folding table of deviled eggs going bad in the sun. Deja pulled the bedsheet off and cried. Brent hugged me and called me Mom, which he had never done before and hasn’t since.
That was the afternoon he raised his plastic cup about the policy. “For Nico.” Everybody clapped. Me too.
Then he picked up the bassinet and carried it into the garage, and I went after him because I wanted to see where my daughter’s bed was going.
He pulled the cord on the attic ladder. It came down with that long spring noise they make, a creak and then a twang. He went up eight steps with the bassinet over his head and slid it onto the plywood across the rafters, back behind the Christmas tubs.
“Out of the way till the crib’s done,” he said.
Deja was standing in the door to the kitchen with a paper plate.
“Well,” she said. “That’s up there till Christmas, then.”
Everybody laughed. Brent laughed the hardest.
She was nine when the ladder in the Hastings house let go. She’d gone up after a kitten that had gotten into the insulation, and the bottom section folded with her on it. She rode it down to the concrete and broke her wrist in two places. Maurice drove us to Good Samaritan with her in my lap. The kitten was still up in the attic when we got home.
After that she wouldn’t stand under one. She’d walk around the garage the long way.
Joe Lazzaro rang my doorbell at twenty after one on a Saturday morning, eight days before the service. He was in uniform with his hat in his hand. His girl Zofia plays second base for Deja. Played.
He sat at my kitchen table and read out of a little notebook. Call came in at 11:52. Husband asleep on the couch, heard a noise, found her at the bottom of the attic ladder. Ambulance. St. Francis.
“I’m so sorry, Patty,” he said. He left his card under my salt shaker.
After he went I picked my phone up off the counter. It had been charging there all night with the ringer off, because I turn it off at ten.
There was a voicemail from Deja. 11:44 p.m. Forty-one seconds.
I didn’t play it. Not that night and not any night that week. I’d open it and look at the little gray line and turn the phone face down on the table. I knew how she’d sound. I didn’t want that to be the last time she sounded like anything.
In the fourth row of Hartley Chapel, Joe Lazzaro was standing up between two girls in green shirts.
“Brent,” he said. “Sit down.”
Brent sat. Lindsey stayed in the aisle.
Joe looked at me with his hat in his hand, the same way he’d looked at my kitchen table.
“Patty,” he said. “I was in that garage. The ladder was down and she was under it.”
Ham on rye
The fellowship hall at Hartley is down a half flight of stairs, with a drop ceiling and a coffee urn that ticks. The burial was at two, out on Capital Avenue. Until then there were ham sandwiches on rye, cut in triangles, and a sheet cake nobody touched.
Brent worked the room.
He went table to table with Lindsey a step behind him. He told it a fifth time to the softball parents, and stopped before “noise” again.
Then he added things.
Deja had been “not herself since the summer.” She’d been “talking to somebody, a counselor or whatever.” The lawyer was “some woman she found online,” and he’d “be looking into that.” The death certificate had come Wednesday and it said accidental, and he said it twice, like a man reading off a receipt.
Maurice got me a coffee I didn’t ask for.
“He’s going to tell it his way, Pat,” he said. “You go after him today, in front of these people, and you’re the crazy mother-in-law for the rest of your life. Let the county do its job.”
“The county did its job,” I said. “On Wednesday.”
I took my purse into the ladies’ room and sat on the little bench by the sink and unfolded the second sheet.
Mom. I’m sorry about the Super Saver. I said it was probably nothing because I knew you’d drive straight to that gym, and I didn’t want you to. You can now. I’m leaving him after Nico’s here and I haven’t told anybody but Shalini. If something happens, don’t let him be the one who tells it. You know I’d never go up there. And don’t you sit in the second row for him. You never sat in the second row for anybody. Love you. Dej.
The g’s again. The two in “nobody” and “anybody” didn’t have any, and I don’t know why I looked for them.
I folded it back the way she’d folded it.
Joe was at the coffee urn when I came out. I gave him the first sheet and stood there while he read it.
“Patty,” he said. “This is how she felt. I believe she felt it.”
“She wasn’t going to climb it, Joe.”
“The county attorney closed it Tuesday. I can’t go to him with a letter from September and say open it back up. He’ll say she was pregnant and scared and then one night she wasn’t.” He handed it back. “If you had something that put Brent in that garage awake, that’s different. I don’t have that. I’m sorry.”
Brent was already on his way across the room. He’d seen the paper go from my hand to the uniform.
“Are you kidding me?” he said, loud enough that the table of softball parents stopped chewing. “At her lunch? You’re doing this over ham sandwiches?”
“Brent,” Joe said.
“No. She’s been on me since the day I met her daughter, Joe, ask anybody.” He pointed at me with his whole hand. “Deja’s gone. The paper’s signed. You can sit wherever you want now, Patty. It doesn’t matter.”
I went up the half flight and out the side door with my purse and both sheets.
Shalini Fong was in the parking lot, leaning on a gray Camry, waiting for me.
The gray Camry
She had her reading glasses folded on the chain and the accordion folder on the hood of the car.
“I’m sorry I did that to you in there,” she said. “She was very clear about the room.”
“She was always clear,” I said.
She told me Deja had walked into her office on the ninth of September with her softball bag on her shoulder and asked what it would cost to have divorce papers drawn up and held. Not filed. Held until Nico was here and she was out of the hospital. Shalini told her what it would cost. Deja paid it in cash out of an envelope.
The letter came two days later. She’d sat in the parking lot of Shalini’s building and written it on paper torn out of a scorebook.
“There’s one more thing you should know,” Shalini said. “And I’d like you to know it from me.”
She opened the folder and took out a phone message slip, the pink kind, with a date written at the top. Wednesday, the fourteenth of October.
“She called me that afternoon. Brent had found my business card in the side pocket of her softball bag. He asked her who I was.”
“What did she tell him?”
“The truth. That I was her lawyer.” Shalini put the slip back. “She said he didn’t yell. She said he went out to the garage and stayed out there a long time.”
Two days later Deja was at the bottom of that ladder.
And this morning, with his wife in a casket ten feet from him, Brent had turned around in the pew and told a full chapel she didn’t have an attorney.
“Is there anything from that night?” Shalini said. “Anything at all. A text. She texted me like a teenager, I’d get eleven in a row.”
The phone was in my purse. I could feel the corner of it against my hip.
“She left me a message,” I said.
Shalini didn’t say anything. She waited, the way she’d waited in the chapel.
“I haven’t listened to it.”
Behind me the side door opened and shut. Maurice came across the lot with his tie pulled loose and stood next to my car like he’d been told to guard it.
I unlocked the Buick and got in, and he got in the other side.
I set the phone on the dashboard and pressed play.
11:44 p.m.
At first it’s the TV. Some game show in another room, people clapping.
Then a door, and the hum of the fluorescent light in their garage. I know that hum. I stood under it in July holding a paper plate.
“Mom, hi. Sorry, it’s late. You’re asleep.” Deja’s voice, a little out of breath, the way she’d been since August. “He wants the bassinet down tonight. He says he’s sick of me bringing it up. So.”
Then the cord. Then the long spring noise, a creak and then a twang.
Maurice put his hand flat on the dashboard.
“Dej.” Brent’s voice, close to the phone. Not sleepy. “It’s eight steps. I’ve got the bottom.”
“You’ve got it?”
“I’ve got it. Go.”
She breathed into the phone, in and out, the way she did at nine in the back of Maurice’s truck with her wrist in a dish towel.
“Okay, Mom, call me in the morning, okay? Call me first thing. I’m going up. I’m going.”
A rustle, like the phone went into a pocket. Then nothing, and the woman’s voice that says the message is over and to press seven to delete.
Forty-one seconds.
I didn’t press anything.
11:44. Joe’s notebook said the call to 911 came in at 11:52.
Maurice reached over and played it again. He held the phone in both hands and listened to all of it with his eyes shut, his mouth moving on “I’ve got the bottom” like he was trying to get the words to come out different. When it ended he set it in my lap.
He’d said three words to me in the chapel and about ten all week.
He opened his door and got out and leaned back in.
“Where’s Joe,” he said.
The hearse
At twenty to two the hearse was backed up to the chapel’s side door with the rear hatch open. A tall kid from Hartley with a name tag that said FINN was steadying the cart while the pallbearers walked her out. Four men from Brent’s gym and two of the softball dads.
Brent was standing by the family car in his charcoal suit. Lindsey was next to him, holding her own elbows.
Joe came out the side door behind Maurice, putting his hat on.
I held out the phone. I didn’t say what it was. Joe took it and put it to his ear and turned away from all of us toward the dumpsters, and listened. Then he played it again.
Brent came across the lot fast.
“What is that? What is she playing you?”
Joe didn’t answer him.
“Is that Deja? Joe, she called her mother every night of her life, that could be from anytime, that could be from the summer—”
“It says October sixteenth, 11:44 p.m.,” Joe said.
Brent stopped walking.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. So I was out there. She was scared, I held it for her, she was fine, she was all the way up. I said holler when you’ve got it and I went in. I lay down on the couch. I was on the couch, Joe. I was on the couch, and then I heard the…”
He stopped right there. Right where he always stopped.
The softball girls had come up the half flight and were standing inside the glass doors in their green shirts. One of them was Zofia.
“You want to do this?” Brent said to me. “Today? She’s in the car, Patty. She’s going in the ground at two o’clock. You’re going to stand in a parking lot and stop your own daughter’s funeral over forty seconds of her being scared of a ladder?”
I didn’t say anything.
“I’m her husband. That’s my wife. I decide what happens to her.” He turned around. “Finn. Close it up, we’re going.”
Finn looked at Joe.
“You called me.”
It was Lindsey. She hadn’t moved from the family car. She had her phone out, and she was holding it up in front of her like a ticket.
“Lindsey,” Brent said. “Not now.”
“That night. You called me before you called anybody.” She walked over and turned the screen to Joe. “Brent. 11:46. Four minutes. You said she fell and I should stay off my phone. You said give it a week and you’d explain it.”
“Get in the car.”
“I don’t have a car here, Brent. I came with you.”
She put the phone in Joe’s hand next to mine.
Brent pulled at the plastic tag on his cuff until the thread broke, and then he just stood there holding it.
Joe walked over to Finn and said something low, and Finn let go of the cart.
Then Joe came back to me. He had both phones in one hand.
“The county attorney’s going to want her looked at, Patty. Properly. That’s Omaha. It’ll be a week, maybe longer, before you can bury her.” He held up my phone. “And I have to take this. I’ll get it back to you. I can’t tell you when.”
Everything I had left of her voice was in his hand.
“Take it,” I said.
Finn shut the rear hatch.
The hearse pulled out of the lot and turned left, away from Capital Avenue, toward the interstate.
Capital Avenue
We buried her on the nineteenth of November, a Thursday, under a green tent in a wind that kept trying to take it.
Finn had set out folding chairs in two rows. There were paper cards taped to the front row. Maurice. Me.
There wasn’t a card for Brent. There’s a paper in a file at the Hall County courthouse that says he can’t come within five hundred feet of me, and so far he hasn’t.
The eleven girls stood in the back in green shirts with their coats on over them. Joe stood with Zofia. Shalini came in her navy blazer and stood off to one side by a tree, holding the accordion folder against the wind.
I got my phone back the Tuesday before. The voicemail is still on it. Some days I drive to the Super Saver and sit in the lot with the engine running and play it once.
Before anybody sat down I took the old card out of my coat pocket. The one Brent peeled off the pew. It was creased down the middle and the tape on the back had gone fuzzy.
I laid it over the new one on the front chair and pressed the tape down with my thumbnail.
Then I sat in the front row, and Maurice sat down next to me.
If this one stayed with you, pass it to somebody who still has a voicemail they can’t bring themselves to play.
For more family secrets and the unexpected ways grief reshapes a life, read the promise Mom made Dad keep about Rhoda and the woman who visited two little graves every Sunday. There’s also an old cook’s strange ritual at the laundromat – and the story behind it.
