gen

no one cried when she died. except for paulbaby but he was a wimp anyway and everyone knew it, even if he liked to pretend he wasn't a wimp by talking about guns and war all the time. momma said (because i asked her) that the reason no one cried was because it was hard to miss someone who spent their entire time here on earth feeling sorry and sad for themselves and i had to agree with her but it still felt wrong to think it because i felt for some reason like i should miss her and i should have cried at some point between the time i found out and when we buried her. but i couldn't.

momma and i sat up front where we could see the body because we were her closest relatives and paulbaby sat to the side with all the men because they needed an extra person to help carry the casket up the hill. part of me thinks the reason they picked paulbaby was because they wanted him to feel like a man and they knew he'd get his feelings hurt if they didn't pick him. he was thirteen and his voice still hadn't changed but he was getting muscles and walked around all the time like he had to pretend he wasn't a little boy anymore, which was pretty annoying but no one said anything, myself included, because it's hard to tell someone they aren't what they think they are.

there weren't too many people who showed up to the funeral. plenty of relatives showed up. but no one i hadn't seen before. and i think most of them showed up because they felt like they had to--which is a really pathetic reason to do something.

i told momma the night before that i didn't want to go because i could give a goddam about aunt rosie and she slapped me and told me to watch my language and that aunt rosie had her faults but we had to go because she was family and it wouldn't be right not to go. i said: but you never even liked aunt rosie, momma. you used to tell me how much of a burden it was talking to her when she called us on the phone every saturday. she told me it didn't matter, though, and that she really didn't mean what she said and that even if she got annoyed with aunt rosie sometimes that's not how she felt about her all the time and that she still loved her regardless. i told her that i still thought it was dumb and i wasn't going to go to bed early that night like she wanted me to because i didn't care how well-rested i was for the funeral. i told her it was fake to pretend like all of the sudden i cared about aunt rosie now that she was dead when i didn't like her at all when she was alive and calling us on the phone every saturday. i said: at the very least that we should go and instead of acting all sad and grieving like i knew everyone would we should act like we would if she were still alive and we still hated her just the same.