color.
Into my silence, he said, “Christopher, I’m so distressed by this,
seeing You in this pain, knowing I could have helped.”
In my odd life, I have had much experience of some things and little of
others. Although I am a foreigner to the day, I know the night as no
one else can know it. Although I have been the object on which
ignorant fools have sometimes spent their cruelty, most of my
understanding of the human heart comes from my relationships with my
parents and with those good friends who, like me, live primarily
between sunset and dawn; consequently, I have seldom encountered
hurtful deception.
I was embarrassed by Sandy’s deceit, as though it shamed not merely him
but also me, and I couldn’t meet his obsidian stare any longer. I
lowered my head and gazed at the porch floor.
Mistaking my embarrassment for tongue-binding grief, he stepped onto
the porch and put one hand on my shoulder.
I managed not to recoil.
“My business is comforting folks, Christopher, and I’m good at it. But
truthfully! I have no words that make sense of death or make it easier
to bear.”
I wanted to kick his ass.
“I’ll be okay,” I said, realizing that I had to get away from him
before I did something rash.
“What I hear myself saying to most folks is all the platitudes You’d
never find in the poetry your dad loved, so I’m not going to repeat
them to You, not to You of all people.”
Keeping my head down, nodding, I eased backward, out from under his
hand. “Thanks, Mr. Kirk. I’m sorry to’ve bothered You.”
“You didn’t bother me. Of course You didn’t. I only wish You’d called
ahead. I’d have been able to . . . delay.”
“Not your fault. It’s all right. Really.”
Having backed off the stepless brick porch onto the blacktop under the
portico, I turned away from Sandy.
Retreating once more to that doorway between two darknesses, he said,
“Have You given any thought to the service-when You want to hold it,
how You want it conducted?”
“No. No, not yet. I’ll let You know tomorrow.”
As I walked away, Sandy said, “Christopher, are You all right’,” FAcing
him from a little distance this time, I spoke in a numb, inflectionless
voice that was only half calculated: “Yeah. I’m all right. I’ll be
okay. Thanks, Mr. Kirk.”
“I wish You had called ahead.”
Shrugging, I jammed my hands in my jacket pockets, turned from the
house once more, and walked past the Madona.
Flecks of mica were in the mix from which the replica had been poured,
and the big moon glimmered in those tiny chips, so that tears appeared
to shimmer on the cheeks of Our Lady of Cast Concrete.
I resisted the urge to glance back at the undertaker. I was certain he
was still watching me.
I continued down the lane between the forlorn, whispering trees. The
temperature had fallen only into the low sixties. The onshore breeze
was pure after its journey across thousands of miles of ocean, bearing
nothing but the faintest whiff of brine.
Long after the slope of the driveway had taken me out of Sandy’s line
of sight, I looked back. I could see just the steeply pitched roof and
chimneys, somber forms against the star-salted sky.
I moved off the blacktop onto grass, and I headed uphill again, this
time in the sheltering shadows of foliage. The pepper trees braided
the moon in their long tresses.
The funeral-home turnaround came into sight again. The Pietd.
The portico.
Sandy had gone inside. The front door was closed.
Staying on the lawn, using trees and shrubs for cover, I circled to the
back of the house. A deep porch stepped down to a seventyfoot lap
pool, an enormous brick patio, and formal rose gardensnone of which
could be seen from the public rooms of the funeral home.
A town the size of ours welcomes nearly two hundred newborns each year
while losing a hundred citizens to death. There were only two funeral
homes, and Kirk’s probably received over 70 percent of this
business-plus half that from the smaller towns in the county. Death