Free Blind Spot by B A Shapiro

seated on an aisle close to the front of the church. His wife Carol was beside him, Devin beside her. She didn’t see Brendan or Sam.
    Ellery had composed his face in an appropriate expression of solemnity and sadness, and he held his head high, making eye contact and nodding with the agility of a seasoned politician. Devin stared straight ahead, but he too kept his chin forward. Suki thought for a moment she might be sick and turned her attention to the priest.
    Father Francis was not a young man, and his gravelly voice cracked as he spoke of Jonah. About what a terrific athlete he had been. A fine boy. A promising future. When he told of a prank Jonah had pulled as an altar boy with his friends Nicholas and Maxwell, he reached his arms out to where Nick and Max sat with their families, as if offering his story to them as consolation. “Jonah possessed a happy soul,” he said. “Jubilant and rich with life. That we were allowed to share in his few short years on this earth was a gift from God.” Amidst the sniffles, a full sob broke out from a woman Suki didn’t recognize.
    Suki bowed her head and did not look up again until Warren Blanchard, Jonah’s uncle, had replaced Father Francis at the pulpit. Although he was close to her age, Warren was a graduate student at MIT and lived with his sister and her family. He had been the high school gym teacher for years, but quit suddenly, deciding he needed a change. He still continued as the boys’ soccer coach, and, as Kyle had been playing since first grade, Suki knew him fairly well.
    Warren ran his finger around the edge of his collar and played with the cuff of his jacket. She was more accustomed to seeing him in a sweat suit on the playing field, or in shorts and a T-shirt when their paths crossed on their early morning jogs, and was surprised at how different he looked: somehow younger, more handsome, and heartbreakingly vulnerable. As he continued to pull at his clothes, it was obvious that he, too, was unaccustomed to himself in a suit.
    Warren Blanchard was a real iconoclast, a sixties throwback with his longish hair, liberal notions and acute sense of morality. He had angered many football parents at the high school when he reallocated football program money into the soccer budget, declaring it a far less violent, and therefore more worthy, sport. Then, to keep things fair, he angered the soccer parents by refusing to accept the Middlesex Tournament trophy, claiming the final game had been won on a bad call against the opposing team. But no one was angry with Warren Blanchard today.
    He cleared his throat. “I, ah, I don’t think I’m going to be able to last up here for too long,” Warren began, his deep voice shaking with emotion. “I … I know I can’t talk about Jonah, or what this means to me, or to my sister, or to our …” His voice trailed off into a whisper as he struggled to regain his composure. He had lost his wife to breast cancer just a few years ago. And now this. Warren raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “I just wanted to thank you all for caring,” he said, then stumbled back to his seat.
    Suki closed her eyes against Warren’s pain, against Darcy’s, and against her own, but they flew open when she recognized the voice of Ellery McKinna. The man had no shame. He stood at the pulpit, his gold watch chain smiling tightly across his taut stomach, the flat planes of his face accentuated by the light from the side window. She could almost feel the crowd responding to him: their guy, Mr. Rec Center, Mr. Skating Rink. Speaking from the heart. For all of them.
    McKinna did not twitch or pull at his clothes as Warren had. He placed his hand under his jacket, over his heart, in an Napoleonic gesture, and began to speak. After a short opening of appropriate platitudes, he turned to the issues of violence and divisiveness and the crumbling of family and community ties. Of how everyone had failed Jonah and God and each other. Of how