Chapter Text
It isn't raining and it should be.
Shouldn't it? Everyone should have a rainy funeral, to set the mood, to hide all the tears because some people are intensely uncomfortable crying, but they should be able to at a time like this. Without having to hide, without having to pretend, for once.
But it isn't raining at all, it's terribly sunny. Ostentatiously, overbearingly sunny, as they prepare to lower my husband's coffin into the ground. No one is crying. They sweat instead, as they peel themselves from the metal seats sat graveside, to toss flower after wilting flower onto the morbid bouquet that will be the last gift Dexter receives on this earth.
Dexter Allen Penney. By all accounts, a heck of a guy. Everyone has said so. Taken too soon. Gone to be with the Lord...a Lord who works in mysterious ways. A good Lord, Heavenly Father, that I'm not meant to question, only trust. Only trust. Forever and ever, Amen.
I'm supposed to agree but I can't bring myself to say it. I can't even bring myself to nod. As the sunburn collects on the back of my neck I wonder what kind of pastor that makes me. I'm not crying either. My eyes are tired from swinging back and forth, forming an exit strategy through a graveyard blitzed by southern summer. The pastor from Dexter's home church, that baptized him three times, counseled him countless others, and married us once "and forever", is choking on his words now. Never thought it would be this way, he says, but God had other plans.
Plans for forever to not be long at all.
I almost feel for this man. He's sweating like a whore in church and wailing like he does when the collection plate is light. He could be a regular Benny Hinn if he bought a better wig, blow the COVID right off your granny through the TV set for five dollars only, maybe dance with a few snakes like in a Britney video if he only got a spray tan. I know well enough that a lot of what we do is pageantry, but he's making it so obvious the only thing righteous about it is how righteously pissed off he's got me.
I've been picking at my mint green Easter sermon outfit so hard and for so long, I'm afraid to get up for fear it will come undone and fall right off me. But it's time for my white pumps to carry me to the grave now, to throw in a fistfull of earth. Throw a dirt clod on my beloved and call it done. I don't remember them lowering him down. Would I like to say a few words?
What is there to say?
I loved him more than anything and now I still do but he isn't here to love me back? I'll go on loving him while that sweet and handsome face I used to press soft kisses to molders in the earth until one day I'll die too and then it won't matter at all that I loved him and he loved me? We had no time to have children and he had no siblings so that's the end of the line for the Penneys?
I say none of this. I drop the dirt, turn around, and run. I run past the parsonage, where he carried me over the threshold on our wedding day, where we pretended our wedding night was the first time we'd ever "known" each other, where we turned the office into a nursery in an all consuming fit of hopeful preparedness, and straight to the chapel...heaving the solid oak door open with the last bit of energy I might ever have. God and I were going to have a chat about how none of this was right.
Pulling the door closed, I turned around...smack into a wall of plaid flannel with a mop of light brown hair on top.
Sam Winchester.
Son of a bitch...