Free Beneath the Weight of Sadness by Gerald L. Dodge

eat their meals and watch their TVs, and fuck in their beds while our Truman is not in his own house, his own bed. How dare you, Ethan Engroff.”
    We were in our bedroom together for the first time since the morning the police had arrived to tell me our son had been murdered. She’d come upstairs soundlessly. I was standing by my desk looking out the window overlooking the lawns behind our house. I was thinking of a time when Truman and I had been out near our patio, and I was teaching him to catch and throw a baseball. He was such a gifted athlete. It only took a few times for him to get the rhythm of it: watching the ball fall into his glove and then taking it out and throwing it to me, his arm swiveling back over his shoulder, his feet set properly. But like everything with Truman, only part of him was there, only part of him interested in the fact that he was mastering something so easily. Other kids would’ve swelled with pride.
    I must’ve been deep in thought, because I didn’t hear Amy until she was standing beside me at the window.
    The clouds had already rolled in and I knew the day was going to bring rain. We stood together for the longest time without touching or saying a word to each other. It was the fourth day—Wednesday—and I’d only seen her passing in the house from room to room and then at the memorial service the night before. My brother had driven us there in his Lexus SUV and we had sat in the back in silence. I don’t think either of us knew what to say. Our only conversation that day had been hours before when I’d begged her not to wear a flowered dress to the service. I remembered I’d cried.
    I’ll change then, Ethan. I’ll change to black if it will satisfy your desire to follow this morbid fucking protocol.
    I’d smelled liquor on her breath, and she’d looked at me as if she were looking at someone she’d never met before. Now she was here in the bedroom staring at the gray day with me as if gray was the only thing we still shared together, and I again I smelled liquor and again she had on a flowered dress.
    “Don’t worry, Ethan, I’m wearing black. Don’t you worry yourself about that. But let me ask you something.”
    I didn’t say anything. I felt like I was in a black hole and the only light left had been extinguished by the disappearance of Truman.
    “Why would you want strangers to help us watch our boy go into a hole from which he will never return? I thought I knew you. I thought you knew who Truman is.”
    “I can’t explain it, Amy. It has something to do with…”
    “It has something to do with making Truman normal. Finally he’s normal for you, Ethan. He’s not a fag anymore. Now he’s just a seventeen-year-old boy being put into the ground. Just a normal, dead boy!”
    “Please don’t, Amy.”
    “Please don’t what? Please don’t what? Please don’t speak the truth?” she yelled. “Please don’t have the people come into our house who don’t belong here? Who is that man to come in here and ask me questions about Truman? Who is he to sit in our living room and ask me if there’s anyone I know who hated my son enough to kill him? You allowed that to happen. You were up here looking out this fucking window at our fucking lawns, the lawns Truman once walked on, while I was downstairs with a stranger who asked me about this fucking town and this fucking life you and I have led with our son. Our son! And while I was answering his inane fucking questions I should have been paying attention for Truman. I can’t allow him to leave because if he does I will float away never ever to return! Fuck you, Ethan!”
    I put my hands to my face and began to cry. I didn’t know why I had allowed the funeral to be open. It wasn’t just to avenge this son. I think it had something to do with me having the chance to look at faces, to see if I could find one face that had enough hate in its eyes to do what had been done to Truman. But it wasn’t fair for Amy to