HINGES GRAHAM SWIFT

One morning in April, their father, Ted Holroyd, suddenly died and a few days afterward Annie and her older brother, Ian, both still a little dazed, went to see the minister who, as Annie put it, was going to do” their father’s funeral.

There was surely some better word than do,” but Annie couldn't, for the moment, think of it.

“Conduct,” Ian suggested in his bigbrotherly way, though with a touch of tongue-in-cheek. Would that make him a conductor, then, Annie thought, not a minister? And she imagined this man they were about to meet turning up at the funeral with a baton or with one of those strap-on machines with which bus conductors used to issue tickets.

Both ideas strangely pleased her, though she didn’t share them with Ian. Sitting beside him while he drove, she reached out and touched his shoulder, just a light scuffing with her knuckles. Tan almost flinched.

For Annie, one of the effects of losing her father was that she also lost words. They suddenly went missing. Even the words that did present themselves could seem odd and unreliable. Minister,” for example, was an odd word.

Their meeting with the minister was itself about words, since the main purpose of it was to tell the minister things about their father so that the minister, in his address at the funeral, could, in turn, say things about him. This, they both felt, was essentially, as Ian had put it, a scam.” The minister had never known their father, and they now had to prime this man, whom they themselves didn’t know, so that he could speak about their father as if he'd been a bosom pal. So a better word than minister,” Annie thought, might be impostor.” Obviously, it was not a better word. This thing, the funeral of their father, would be a pretense. Yet they had to pretend that it wasnt a pretense. Was there a word for that?

In any case, their meeting with the minister posed a basic difficulty: what to tell him about their father? They were already coping with the greatest of difficulties: their father had died. And this difficulty had confronted them with an equally great difficulty, which they hadn't exactly discussed