They left the church by the side door, into a wind that took the warmth out of the stained-glass story and replaced it with the ordinary October of a town that still had to pick up dry cleaning. Guests were trickling toward their cars in the careful way of people who want to stare and have been asked not to. A few lifted a hand. Naomi lifted one back, a diplomat. David kept Emma against his side. The phone was in Emma's pocket now, a weight she checked with her fingers every few steps, as if it might evaporate the way her mother had, not all at once but by appointments.
Lauren walked to her own car, a gray sedan with a garment bag already in the back from the morning's optimism. She did not kiss David. She did not say she loved him, although she did, in a form that had survived worse rooms than this one and might not survive the kitchen. She said, "I'll be twenty minutes behind you," and got in, and sat with her hands on the wheel until the lot emptied enough that driving would not require her to nod at anyone.
In the front seat of David's car, Emma buckled herself in. The navy dress bunched under the hoodie. She watched the church recede in the side mirror: white doors, a wreath someone had hung early for a season that was not yet, a banner for a food drive. Her father started the engine. Neither of them turned on the radio. The town slid by in its Saturday costume. A boy bounced a basketball in a driveway. A woman shook a rug. The hardware store had its seasonal display of rakes, orange-handled, cheerful as if leaves were only leaves.
"Are you mad?" Emma asked.
"I'm a lot of things," David said. "Mad is in there. Not at the top."