En Suite
an excerpt

Caitlin had seen Doug sitting in a chair by the wall, his lanky teenage body doubled over like a grasshopper folded the wrong way, all awkward limbs and sharp angles. She had watched as he was approached by their uncle Jerry, who placed a ruddy thick-fingered hand on Doug’s back as he leaned down to speak in low tones over Doug’s ear. With a dismissive roll of one bony shoulder, Doug divested his back of the weight of Jerry’s hand. Loudly enough for most occupants of the small banquet room that were not elderly to hear, Doug admonished his uncle, “Just leave me alone.”
Jerry rose slowly, gave Doug’s shoulder a final, defeated pat and slunk away. The minister who had made the long speeches and read Bible verses over the caskets before they were lowered into the ground later approached Doug, only to receive the same brush-off verbatim, though perhaps with a bit more hostility than was aimed at Uncle Jerry. Even their big sister Lana, when she came over and put one hand on the back of Doug’s neck while continuing to use the other to dab at her streaming eyes with a rapidly disintegrating tissue, was asked to leave him be. The only difference was that to Lana he prefaced his request with “Please.”
Caitlin was only 5 at the time, however, and did not yet know how to calculate the odds of being similarly dismissed based on the response given to the three advances preceding hers. She simply saw her brother across a room full of strange people in dark clothing and went to him for reassurance.
“Dougie?”
His head had been drooping like the fading bloom of a wilting flower, but he lifted it at the sound of her voice. She lifted her arms in supplication. A glance of weary relief passed across his face as he unfolded his arms and wrapped them around her, and suffered hers to encircle his neck. They embraced for a moment, and then he simply straightened his back and drew her into his lap on the chair. He arranged her legs across his knees, and she settled back against his chest. With one doll-like hand she grabbed his silk tie and held on, as if it were the string of a balloon that she wanted to make sure did not get away.
The light pressure of her hand pulling his tie was the first thing that had felt real to him that whole day. It brought him back to himself. The warm weight of Caitlin’s presence began to penetrate the frost that had been encrusting on his surface since Lana got the first phone call from the hospital. The deepening chill at the graveside service had only served to crystallize his sensation of being encased in a layer of ice that only he could feel. As Caitlin relaxed against his arm, he felt the ice begin to crack and splinter. He inclined his neck and lightly kissed the top of her corn-silk head.