"Are you the daughter?" a voice asks.

It is the priest. His skin looks pale against his long purple vestments and his back is severely hunched beneath his overcoat. It is as if years of ministering to the people of this town have buffeted him into the humble pose, the way a tree can be permanently bent by the wind.

"Yes," I say. "Yes, I am. I'm sorry I--"

"No matter. You're here now," he says, with the firm manner of a doctor rather than the kind or careful demeanor usually ascribed to a priest. That may be the very reason my mother chose him to perform her service. "You made it." Martin hugs me roughly. In that brief embrace, I can smell the liquor on him.

"I'm glad you're here," he says.

His eyes linger on my face for a moment, a flicker of grateful recollection, then he pulls away, uncomfortable being so close. I know better than to ask him how he's been. It will only invite an argument about how I haven't called or written or visited, about how I have abandoned my old life, this town and him. It is neither the time nor the place for a conversation about my failings. To spare him the silence, I ask softly, "Who are these people?"

"Couldn't say for sure. All from the church, I s'pose."

We are my mother's only living relatives, the only remnants of her family.

"Priest's about to start," Martin says, ending the conversation before either one of us can say something that might make us feel more than we have to. What I know about my brother's life now is scant, almost cryptic, like the bottom of a page torn out of a long, inscrutable book. He hasn't worked in years and has never married. For him, home is a room in a boardinghouse and the only regular thing about his life is the welfare checks he receives monthly in the mail. Decades of heavy drinking have taken their toll. It is as though the liquor has literally diluted my brother's blood, leaving his spirit limp, like a bedsheet on a clothesline in a gale. He is not the person I once knew nor, I doubt, will he ever be again.

The priest clears his throat and bows his head ceremoniously. Martin drops his eyes, then buries his hands in his pockets, hiding them from the chill of the rising wind. It appears to be an effort for him to stand straight. I can't be sure if he is drunk or if it is true sorrow that has rendered him unsteady. When he was a child, my brother was precocious, eager, resolute. He was the child I would have liked to be. But since that one spring in our childhood, when everything in our small world unhinged itself from what we knew it to be, my brother has never been the same. From then on, Martin was a ship setadrift, never able to maintain course. Years later, his drinking served only to snap the few sails he had onboard. I fear that with my mother's death Martin's ship will run aground and become hopelessly moored on shore, never to set sail again. It is a fear that stings my heart ...