"I didn't see him in church. Peg told me afterward he was there in the back. But after the luncheon I couldn't stand it in that hall, all those casseroles, so I had Paul drive me back to Holy Cross, by myself, to sit with your father before they — before. And he was there. Standing at the grave in the snow in a suit too short in the arms, with no hat, no gloves, crying like a little boy. I knew him right away. Eighteen years old again, standing in my driveway in that terrible jean jacket." She looked down at the Walkman. "And I walked up to him and I said, you took enough of his time. Go home. You're not family. And he went. He didn't say one word. He just went."
The tree lights blinked, red, green, blue.
"I had to put it somewhere, honey," Rosemary said. "Your father did a thing that killed him and I couldn't be angry at him, he was dead. And I couldn't be angry at myself, though God knows I could have made him see the doctor, I could have seen it in him, I was married to him for thirty-three years. So I pointed. Like Joey. That boy was standing right there." Her voice broke at last. "It's easier when it's somebody else's fault."
Lena put her arms around her mother, and her mother let her, and they sat like that until Joey came to the doorway and said, in a voice of great urgency, "Aunt Lena. The wagon's gone."
* * *
Peg Rourke answered the door in her housecoat with a cigarette, and told Lena that Danny had taken the car an hour ago and said he had one more stop before they left in the morning, and no, he didn't say where, and honey, why are you crying, come in, come in out of the cold. But Lena already knew where. She ran back across the street to her little Honda hatchback, the color of a Band-Aid, and it would not start, of course, because nothing on God's earth started in Ohio on Christmas Day, and she was standing in the driveway swearing at it in words her father had taught her by accident when Theresa came out with Paul's car keys and pressed them into her hand without a word.
Holy Cross Cemetery lay on a long slope at the edge of town, behind a black iron fence, with the steeple of the chapel at the top of the hill and the stones running down in rows under the snow like the white keys of an enormous piano. The gates were open. The station wagon was parked on the lane near the bottom, its wood paneling dark in the dusk, and she could see the line of footprints going up between the rows, and at the top of them, beside a gray granite stone with a little wreath leaning against it, a tall figure in a long black coat.