How to Bury Your Brother by Lindsey Rogers Cook

Author:Lindsey Rogers Cook
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2020-02-12T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

She pulled into a small driveway, and her headlights shined on the sign for “Woodland Cemetery.” She checked the address again. It was right. What could that mean?

Alice thought about going in, but the gates looked locked. She glanced behind her. Robbie slept in the back seat with his headphones on. She already felt guilty for bringing her tired child to a cemetery at night (and feeding him fast food), so she wasn’t about to leave him in the car while she checked out a creepy graveyard in the dark. As she drove home, she listened to Robbie’s soft snores from the back.

When she arrived home, Alice carried Robbie to his room and lay down in her own, the bed now empty with Walker out of town. Instead of searching “Christopher Smith” as she had earlier that day, she tried his name and “Woodland Cemetery.” It was a hit, on the records for who was buried on the grounds. So he was in the cemetery after all. And had been since 1997.

Alice went out to get the letter. She opened it carefully, without ripping the paper. It was different though. While on the same type of paper as the other letters, it unfolded to the size of a poster instead of the letter size of the others. A huge decorative cross, done in fountain pen ink like the others, dominated the page.

“What the hell, Rob?” Alice said to no one.

She leaned in to look at it more closely. The strong pen marks without any wispy lines reminded her of the sketches he’d do as a teenager, always without the aid of a pencil. By age twelve, he’d filled an entire book with drawings of Jamie, the only person who’d sit for him more than once. Even Alice had grown tired of constantly being accused of moving, even though she was holding her breath.

She went to her jewelry box and pulled a paper from its bottom drawer, the only relic she had left of Rob, which had escaped her mother’s Rob cleanse because it was in Alice’s school locker at the time. She liked to look at it in class, instead of paying attention, flipping back and forth between her textbook and Rob’s paper.

The drawing looked like her. Even as a child, she knew it did, but something was different in the face, harder. The Alice in Rob’s drawing was strong, defiant; her lips full of a skeptical pout, her eyes narrowed.

Looking at it now, it was her expression she noticed. She hadn’t looked at the drawing since his funeral, and before that, since leaving UGA for Duke. The remembering always hurt her. But now she wondered why she hadn’t taken it out, hadn’t framed it, hadn’t kept it near always. For Rob had drawn that strength so clearly, reflected back at her, the strength she always thought belonged to him alone. Was it possible he felt the same way, that it belonged to her alone? Or did he draw

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