Part One - Death

This was the funeral they had been waiting for, the one that cancer had predicted eight months ago. The last funeral, the one they had two weeks before, had been a surprise. Though not really a shock.
    Sophia feels no grief. She works in a nursing home, so illness and death don't faze her. She numbed herself to grief years ago. She has always felt parentless, so actually to be so is more a validation of dormant feelings than a stunning onslaught of new ones. Everyone else is emoting. They are outside on the back patio, talking, sharing, laughing, and sometimes crying, though most of that was done over the last eight months. Sophia's younger sister Janet, as always, is the center of attention. Right now she's joking about how the minister's fly was open through the whole ceremony. So typical. If there's any prurience in a room, Janet will find and exploit it. Janet is exactly what the girls' grandmother was afraid Sophia would grow up to be: unladylike.
    "Oh, now!" A laughing admonishment from Mrs. Bennington, the next-door neighbor, who is out there with the rest of them, listening mostly, and not making them stop degrading the dead. She has one arm around Janet's shoulder and with the other she is dabbing the corners of her eyes with a Kleenex. She is smiling.
    Grandmother died when Sophia was 12, around the time her mother married Hank. Sophia was 13 when Janet was born, old enough to understand the baby as a kind of prize the two of them shared, a cementing of their bond. Because of the age difference Sophia was more Janet's nanny than her sister. Everything she knew about women's work she learned from her grandmother, who raised her while her mother worked and went to school to learn stenography, to work as a secretary.
    "Don't ever depend on a man," her grandmother told her. "They all leave you eventually, one way or another." The men in Sophia's family abandoned their women by dying young.  Her grandfather in the Second World War, her father in Vietnam. Sophia did not consciously hate war; she mistrusted men. She did as she was told, took her grandmother at every word.
    "Keep your knees together and your feet on the floor," her grandmother would say. "And you'll escape the problems your mother had." The only two sins Sophia could commit in her grandmother's eyes were to fall behind in school and take an interest in boys. Playing with "the wrong kind" was a near second; there were certain people her grandmother warned her against and because she seemed to be right about everything else, Sophia trusted her on that too. Soon enough she wasn't bringing any girlfriends home and by the time Janet was born Sophia didn't have any girlfriends to bring home, so when grandmother died Sophia assumed her role, played grandmother to Janet. Tried to teach her the ways. But the little sister was wiser than she, and not nearly the willing student Sophia had been.