The snow that lay on the fields grew thicker—the left-hand pages of a novel—as we drove north. The highway was a shoelace. The radio was silent.
A storm was coming from the south, and we just had time to drive up, proceed with the small service, and get home before the juggernaut. The ultramarine was withdrawing from the sky like a refugee. Salt blotched the macadam.
In town, the funeral home sat aloof from the corner of a busy intersection, its boxy additions and hasty portico all but obscuring a fine old manse somewhere in the center of the expansion. Only the gingerbread dormers were visible, peering out as if above a lid.
I slipped on invisible ice and—abandoning my fear of people—embraced the opportunity to tell the greeter. She asked me to show her precisely which spot—here? or here?—and we busied ourselves in a lively, polite exchange as I admired her slender, Neiman Marcus triumph over age.
Thus I delayed going into the room with all the lights. I held back, waiting for Gary to burst like a pierced golf ball, to surrender his civility—his amiable, efficient, sportsmanlike thing—into the arms of someone deeper in his history than me.
