My mom sobbed loudly as they brought my sister and father out in coffins and towards the real gravesite. I chuckled slightly at the sight; there was no priest, no prayer, and no eulogy to be read. The only people who attended were me, my mother, my sister's lesbian lover and my father's whore of a mistress.
Needless to say we weren't the perfect family. My sister was eighteen, but she's been out of the house since sixteen, claimed God told her to go and preach in Europe. My mother and I knew it was bullshit, but let her go anyways once my sister wrapped her head around something there was no stopping her, she was stubborn like that.
I looked over to my mother to see if she was still crying, she was but silently now. It was now time for the whore my father called a lover to cry loudly.
Even though my mother knew my father was a cheater she always had some respect for the whore of a mistress my father went down on every other weekend. For reasons I never understood my mother never told him anything, not when he had to make "business calls", not when he said he had to go on "business trips", or even when he said he was going to stay at a friends house. She, the mistress, had four kids each by a different man, neither by my father and worked two jobs. I believe, that, that is what kept my mother from saying anything.
The whore of a lover placed a red rose on my father's coffin and cried, and cried, and cried some more. It was at that point, that I realized that she wasn't crying for the loss of a lover. As the tears rolled down her cheek I realized that it was all the regrets she made all the 'what ifs' and 'should haves' in her life. All the babydaddy's and one-night stands, the loss of a semi-stable man in her childern's lives. The loss of someone who showed up every weekend and not when they felt like it, the loss of someone the kids probably looked up to.
In the end my mother invited them all to dinner. The whore of a mistress whom my father called a lover, my sister's current lesbian lover, and my mother all sat down at the table reminscing.
My mother laughed at the right time, cooed at the right moments, and slowly gained the trust of the two women. Neither bothering to question on why exactly her husband and daughter died at the same time or how.
She did this every five years, a new family, a new start.
