Jazz Funeral

shrimp.”
    Steve whistled. “Boy, do I feel sorry for that kid.”
    It was raining, but the front windows were up because the roof of the balcony protected it. Skip got up and walked over. She didn’t know why, just knew the thought of Melody made her want to feel the wet warmth, smell the ozone.
    She had been born a pawn in a game, born to a mother forever locked in a dance of wills with her father—one desperate to be loved, the other determined to withhold love. Skip didn’t know why, and wondered. Patty had been so desperate, she’d forgotten Melody, forgotten she had a daughter to love, or perhaps she was simply so self-involved she couldn’t have been much of a mother anyway.
    That was bad enough, but it happened to lots of kids. What Melody had suffered seemed unbearable. Skip wondered how she would get through. Whether she could recover.
    Steve came up behind her, held her against his chest. “What are you thinking?”
    “It’s funny, I’ve only seen Melody once, but I feel close to her. I wish I could—you know …”
    “Be friends with her?”
    “I guess.”
    “That’s the down side of the job.”
    “A million stories in the naked city.”
    “Ships that pass in the night.”
    “Another day, another case.”
    They were trying to be brave, to cheer each other up, but it wasn’t going to work. Tonight they’d feel sad. And make love and wake up feeling better. She was glad to have Steve with her.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
    On the way to the cemetery, the band playing “Just a Closer Walk With Thee,” George was grappling once again with the alien idea that he had lost a son.
    Sometimes I wonder if I ever knew I had one.
    Now he felt the loss in his chest, in his gut, in his temples. And the feeling was almost too much, as if his body was stretched to the limit, a balloon inflated past capacity. It started to come out his eyes, then his throat. He was crying. He, George Brocato, was crying in public.
    But it wasn’t in public. It was in a limousine with his daughter. Still, he was the father, he wasn’t supposed to cry. He turned his face to the window, hoping no one could see in. But he was making noise; he couldn’t stop that. He was almost as panicked at the thought Melody would know as he was sad. And then he felt her hand take his and intertwine her fingers. She didn’t say a word.
    When he had regained control, he looked at her, wondering how she was. There were only three options: terrible, worse, and on the verge of collapse. Yet she looked all right. Her jaw worked, and she had on sunglasses, so he couldn’t see her eyes, but otherwise she seemed almost stony. She was holding it in.
    How terrible, he thought, to be sixteen and go through this and not even be able to cry. He said, “Darlin’, you can cry if you want. Daddy’s here.” He never referred to himself in the third person; everything was different today.
    She shook her head. “It’s okay, Daddy. It doesn’t feel real. It’s like a dream.”
    It was shock. He’d been through it too, days ago, when Ham died. He felt like a different person now. Certainly he belonged to a different family, and in a way it was better. He had lost his son, he had lost his wife, it was hard to imagine anything worse—except, he thought, the way he’d been living most of his life: as if those people didn’t matter, as if Melody didn’t, George himself didn’t.
    He felt as if he’d found some lost part of himself that could be with Melody now in a way he’d never been able to before. The saddest, most pathetic part of it all was that he had been responsible for everything. For being a drunk, for letting Patty down when they were first married, for treating her like a piece of property, creating an atmosphere in which she had to do something to protect herself; and the thing she’d done was have a child with his son. It was monstrous, and yet he knew, it was so clear to him now, that this was his monster. The enormity of it made him feel shriveled and impotent, a spider in a flame.
    But worse, so much worse, was Patty’s killing Ham—also his doing, to George’s way of thinking, this new, strange, weight-of-the-world way that had him looking back practically to childhood at the ways he’d botched his life. His doing because he hadn’t loved Patty, because her whole life had been devoted to winning him: her husband of seventeen years.
    He had tried to tell Melody. He wanted her to know what he had become. Her reply shocked