Chapter Twenty-Eight

At the interment at the funeral Debbie stood beside her brother and father. Her warden had left her behind to be back at about three, she had said. It was now one thirty.

As they lowered the coffin she felt that she new all about who he was, that Peter Ebanes, who had her in bed and manipulated her. Somehow he was the man that she and all women or girls around him wanted to manipulate, but couldn't. Somehow he knew, thereby, knew also how to manipulate them.

It seemed ironic to her that there seemed to be a reciprocity in what he had been doing. But somehow even her brother had had a reciprocity about her so-called blackmail. It wasn't fair, but it began with some reciprocity, she figured.

As the coffin was sunk into the grave, a priest or something did some mumbling, and a few other bystanders did some of their own. She watched and felt that the spirit of her mother knew that she was caring about her. ... But what she didn't know, or her spirit, seemed to her daughter to be why she had been so despised by her family. ... It was not in her, her mother, to actually take care of caring when it wasn't up to her of everyone to decide when there should be caring or not.

The preacher or whatever held the sermon that there was supposed to be at funerals. She stood there and cried, as did her parents, her own grandparents that is. She saw now that even her own father was crying, and so was even her brother. Her mothers only sibling, a sister was there, crying, too.