Apple Brown Betty by Phillip Thomas Duck

remembered about that day was George getting her pink cotton candy afterward and her making Slay throw a tantrum when she told him she didn’t feel like playing catch football with him.
    Cydney came to what amounted to a small ballroom. Slay was standing by the door closest to the urn stand at the front. He looked more subdued than she had expected, sad, off someplace else. Cydney’s mother sat in the front row. George’s supervisor sat behind her mother, a cheap dress jacket that didn’t match his pants draped across the back of his chair. One of George’s daughters sat on the other side, silent tears streaming down her face. They were arranged to fill the place out a bit. A few of George’s coworkers stood in a group along the far wall, talking amongst themselves in whispers. George’s ex-wife, Mildred, whom Cydney had only met once or twice, was standing by the urn, an overdone hat on her head, waving a church fan furiously as she sang some tune out loud.
    Cydney looked at her mother again.
    Slump shouldered, with most of her weight gone, she was wearing a black dress that looked as if she had picked it up from a pile in the corner of her bedroom and stepped into without ironing. Her eyes were closed and she appeared to be sleeping.
    Cydney stood in place at the back of the room. Shammond nodded for her to come forward. She took a deep breath and then obeyed his command, taking small steps down the center aisle. She stopped at the end, gazed at the urn with the light shining on it, the picture of George from when he was younger. That picture had to have been thirty years old. Cydney never remembered him looking like that. She looked into the eyes of the enlarged photo, could see the decency in his pupils. She started to sob.
    â€œNo use crying, chile,” George’s ex, Mildred, said.
    â€œHe was a good man, a decent man,” Cydney told her.
    Mildred harrumphed. “I would have agreed with you up until the day he came home and told me he was leaving me, and his two daughters, for some tramp and her snotty-nosed younguns.”
    Cydney closed her eyes. For a moment she’d forgotten the demons of the past—that George had indeed run out on his first family for a second one. “I’m sorry,” she said to the matriarch of that first family as she reopened her eyes.
    Mildred waved her off, turned toward Nancy. “A gat-damned toothless crack ho.” George’s daughter moved forward and tried to gather her mother’s arm, which Mildred brushed away. “Get off me, Georgette. I’m speaking the truth up in here.”
    â€œNo, Mama,” Georgette said. “This isn’t the time or the place.”
    Mildred grabbed Cydney’s shoulders and wheeled her to face her mother. Nancy rocked back and forth in her chair, her head bowed, unmoved by the commotion happening just feet from her. “Look at her!” Mildred shouted to Cydney. “And tell me you see something other than a toothless crack ho.”
    Everyone in the room directed their attention to Cydney. Cydney looked at her brother in the far corner, turned and looked at the other folks in the room, and then turned back to Mildred. “You’re right,” Cydney acknowledged, tears dropping in heavy clumps from her eyes.
    Mildred raised her chin high, snorted in a pompous manner and turned back to the urn, singing that unknown tune again.
    Cydney looked toward Slay; he sighed and looked away.

CHAPTER 7
    C ydney walked through the doors of her apartment and immediately fell to the couch. Her brother stepped in behind her, closed the door and latched the locks. He eased his way into the living room, found a spot next to the bookshelf and CD tower.
    Cydney was exhausted from the wake. Exhausted from the mental strain of dealing with the loss of the only man she’d ever recognized as a father. Exhausted from the mental strain of dealing with the loss of the woman she called