Everyday People by Stewart O’Nan Page B

remembered playing Bruce Lee with him, seeing how high they could leave a sneaker print on his bedroom wall. He had a poster signed by Willie Stargell and a model of Battlestar Galactica hanging from the ceiling on nylon fishing line. Long summer days they walked the train tracks, peeking in boxcars, pretending they were riding the rails, heading down south, home. That’s where he’d be now, Eugene thought, a better place. He bowed his head and said a prayer and went back to the pew.
    Fats and Leon and Smooth were bored, folding their programs, scratching the back of their necks, looking toward the door. Didn’t look like B-Mo was going to show. Eugene settled himself and looked back at the casket. It was a smallchapel and there was hardly anyone there. Above the minister, Jesus gazed down sorrowfully from his cross, and he thought of his mother dragging him to church as a boy, how when his attention wandered he’d flip through the prayer book, searching for the good parts. The Burial of the Dead was a favorite, and the Psalms. Lately he’d found them again, all the complaints to God by the lost, the trials and tribulations of faith. Maybe he was supposed to find them as a child so he could appreciate them now, try to live his life by them.
    He looked over at Fats leafing through his program, Smooth picking his nails. They hadn’t mentioned his getting religion, but he knew what they thought—that he’d gone crazy, that he’d been brainwashed. It was what Chris thought, and Pops. Only Moms thought it was a good thing, and even she wanted to know what happened, how he’d changed so completely.
    Had he?
    Yes, for the better.
    He remembered the last time he and Nene were together, a late night at his crib when he still had a crib, beamin’. They’d smoked up everything and didn’t have enough to get any more. They’d been chopping the rock on the coffee table. First they scraped the top with a razor blade, then they got down on their knees and leaned in over it to see if they’d missed a piece. They licked their fingers and then their palms, trying to swab up some dust. They got down on all fours, pushing the furniture out of the way, their fingers going over the carpet, reading it like a blind man, feeling for any little bump, any crumb, rooting around the room like hound dogs—total ghostbusting.
    He shook his head, smiling, trying not to laugh. But it wasn’t funny, it wasn’t funny at all. Not then and not now, and if no one understood the changes he was going through, that was fine with him. He knew.
    The organist switched tunes, James Cleveland’s “Peace Be Still,” one of his mother’s favorites. Little Nene and his Granmoms went up to see Nene, to say good-bye one last time. He gave her his arm, and she leaned into him for support, every step an effort. Like Fats, she seemed smaller to Eugene, as if she’d withered. She had to be in her seventies, her hair one of those superglue jobs, stiff as a wig under her bonnet. Still with that big old Godzilla butt. Used to take the back of a hairbrush to Nene’s behind, make the two of them fresh blackberry cobbler. She’d buried Nene’s grandfather before Eugene was born, and then her daughter, Nene’s Moms, when he and Nene were in first grade. Now she was burying Nene.
    He’d pictured his own Moms leaning over him, imagined her tears, her screaming. Oh Lord, don’t take him now. Throwing herself on the coffin so all those biddies from the choir would have something to chew on at coffee hour. It wouldn’t be like Miss Fisk standing pinch-faced over Bean for just a second, stunned, still in shock from the news. He was ready for Nene’s Granmoms to go off, to fill the empty chapel with her beseeching. It wouldn’t embarrass him the way it would Fats or Smooth or Leon. No, Eugene thought, she’d earned it.
    Nene’s Granmoms leaned down—to kiss