No Dark Valley by Jamie Langston Turner Page B

drive a car. The children were gone by then. There had been two boys, uncles Celia never really knew, and one girl, Celia’s mother.
    Everyone talked about how strange and sad it was that her grandmother had outlived not only her husband, whom Celia barely remembered, but also all three of her children. One son had died at the age of twenty-three in Vietnam, the same year Celia was born, and the other had died of cancer when Celia was in junior high. He had been only forty-seven. And in between the two boys, of course, Celia’s mother had gone out with her husband one day to buy a clothes dryer.
    There was a sudden metallic clanking in the rear of the chapel, and Al turned around to look. “They’re setting up folding chairs in back,” he whispered to Celia. “People are still standing.”
    Celia marveled again at the crowd that had come out on a cold January afternoon in the middle of the week. Church friends and neighbors—those had been her grandmother’s main contacts. Now that she thought about it, though, Celia supposed that there would be enough of them to account for most of the people here at the funeral. After all, it wasn’t a terribly big chapel, not as large as the auditorium of Bethany Hills Bible Tabernacle, for example.
    Grandmother had never been what you’d call “a people person,” though, so it was curious to Celia that so many would come to her funeral. She wasn’t the kind of woman to talk on the telephone a lot or pay visits just to pass the time of day. For her, the time of day was not to be frittered away but spent profitably, which always meant some kind of work.
    Her grandmother wasn’t a leader at church, though she attended faithfully and served wherever she was needed. It had become one of Celia’s frequent criticisms during that last year of high school, however, that her grandmother’s service was so rigidly and sternly rendered, almost by rote. “You’re just following a bunch of stupid rules somebody made up centuries ago!” Celia had said more than once. “They don’t even have anything to do with now . I’d hate to live my life like you! You’ve never even known what it’s like to have a good time!”
    â€œDoesn’t she ever smile?”—the first time Ansell had asked that question was when he had come to pick Celia up for a party at Renee’s house. She had told Grandmother they were going to the library to work on some research for a debate they were having the next week in economics class. Ansell thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. “And she believed you?” he asked. Celia said yes, though she wasn’t at all sure about that. Grandmother had a way of looking through what a person said and knowing things intuitively.
    It was early in Celia’s friendship with Ansell and the others, and he pulled up in their gravel driveway in his red souped-up Camaro and honked the horn one long toot. Grandmother had been trimming some bushes at the other side of the house and, at the sound of the horn, came charging around to the driveway frowning and holding the long clippers in front of her with both hands as if ready to whack off somebody’s head. She walked up to the car, according to Ansell’s report, and said, “The only thing I can figure out, young mister, is that your hand must’ve slipped and landed on the horn by accident.”
    Celia flew out of the house about then and headed for the car. Ansell was looking at Grandmother with his mouth hanging open, as if she had posed a riddle he couldn’t figure out. He had caught her meaning, of course, which was “Surely you wouldn’t drive up to my house and sit in your car and honk for my granddaughter to come out instead of going up to the door like a gentleman.” But Grandmother would have no way of knowing that one of Ansell’s favorite ways to show his disdain for