there at “Grandma’s prison,” then pass the phone to Maureen.
AT THE WEST END OF the property, I tramped around in what had once been our cornfields. They were a fallow, neglected mess now, blanketed with dead leaves, weeds, and junk-food wrappers. I walked all the way back to the gravel pit, trying to pinpoint where, exactly, the maze had been. And in the middle of figuring it out, I was clobbered by the sudden remembrance of what, earlier that day, had eluded me: my father’s wake….
It had been at McKenna’s Funeral Home: closed-casket, pitifully attended, and me standing there, wearing that itchy woolen suit they’d bought me for the occasion. I’d held my breath each time Mr. McKenna swung open the vestibule door, afraid that the next mourner might be someone from my school—someone who had connected me to that drunk in the newspaper—the fucking missing-toothed failure of a man who hadn’t even managed to get himself out of the way of a moving train.
Then someone from school had come: Mr. Cyr, my freshman cross-country coach. He offered condolences to my mother, aunt, and grandfather. Then he put his hand on my shoulder and said he was sorry for my loss, and that he knew how it felt because he had lost his father when he was in high school, too. I nodded, mumbling uh-huhs and thank-yous without looking at him. His kindness filled me with contempt: for him, for my father, for myself. I quit cross-country the following week, although not in any aboveboard way. I just stopped showing up for practice. And when Mr. Cyr stopped me in the hall to ask me why, I lied. Told him my grandfather was shorthanded and needed me for farm chores.
And I remembered something else about my father’s wake—that weird disturbance near the end. I’d gone to the restroom, and when I opened the door to return to the viewing room, there she was: the kerchief woman. She was shaking badly, I remember. She said my name and reached toward me, like someone groping for something in the dark. And then my mother, in a voice louder than I had ever heard her use in public before, said, “Oh, good God Almighty! This isn’t hard enough without her showing up here?” She rushed toward us, shouting, “Get away from my son! Don’t you dare touch him! You get out of here! Now!”
Lolly and Hennie hurried Mother out of the room, and Grandpa and Mr. McKenna approached the kerchief woman, coaxing her away from me and out of the building. And then I was standing there, alone, looking back and forth between my father’s coffin and the door through which the kerchief woman had just been given the bum’s rush….
What had ever become of that woman? I wondered.
Who had she been?
Chapter Six
I LIKED VICTOR GAMBOA, WHO was sympathetic without being smarmy. Cradling Lolly’s file, he told me how much he’d enjoyed working with her when they were both second-shift COs. “She was always fair with the ladies, but she didn’t put up with any of their monkey business either. What do they call it now? Tough love? I think your aunt invented it.”
“Or inherited it,” I said. “From what I’ve heard, that was her grandmother’s style, too.”
“Oh, the old lady? Yeah, she’s a legend at that place. Or was, I should say. Different story over there these days.”
“Tough love minus the love, right?”
He nodded. “We get a lot of the suicides.”
Victor had photocopied Lolly’s preference form, and we reviewed it together. She’d requested a nondenominational service, a cut-rate casket, and cremation. Her ashes were to be mixed with Hennie’s (“blue jar in our bedroom”) and spread on the farm. No obituary. (“You have to pay the paper for it now. Nuts to that!”) No flowers. If people wanted, they could buy a book and donate it to the prison library. In the margin, she’d written, “The girls like murder mysteries, movie star biographies, and romance novels.” Under “Music,” she’d written, “Amazing Grace (my grandma’s favorite hymn.)” We scheduled the wake for Wednesday evening, the funeral for Thursday morning.
The form had six slots for pallbearers. Lolly had written:
| Caelum Quirk (nephew) | Ulysses Pappanikou (employee) | ||
| Grace Fletcher (friend) | Hilda Malinowski (friend) | ||
| Lena LoVecchio (lawyer) | Carl Yastrzemski (ha ha ha) |
“Women pallbearers?” I said. “Is that okay?”
“Don’t see why not, if that’s what she wanted,” Gamboa said. “You may have to get a stand-in for Yaz, though.” As far as “Amazing Grace” was concerned, he said he had a recorded version he could pipe in, or he could call the soloist he sometimes used. “Or—” he said. He stopped himself.
“Or what?”
“Department of Correction’s got bagpipers. They hire out, but they’ll usually play gratis if it’s one of their own. Of course, it’d have to be cleared by the higher-ups, which might be a problem. I know that, toward the end, there was no love lost between your aunt and the department.”
“She had good reason to be bitter,” I said. He nodded in agreement. I said the canned music would be fine.
He asked me if I’d bring over an outfit that Lolly could wear to her wake—that day, if possible, or the next morning. I could bring pictures, too, if I liked. Some families liked to display framed photos, or put together a collage of candids. “Celebrate the person’s life,” he said.
I nodded, my mind on something else. “You know what?” I said. “She gave them almost forty years. What the hell. Try for the bagpipes.”
ULYSSES’S PHONE RANG AND RANG, unanswered.
Hilda Malinowski cried when I told her. Lolly and she had been friends since 1964, she said. She’d never been a pallbearer before, but if there was anyone she’d give it a try for, it was Lolly. She just hoped she was strong enough. She’d call Grace Fletcher for me, she said; Gracie was big-boned and she went to Curves, so she should be able to handle pallbearing.
Alice Levesque told me she knew something was up; Lolly hadn’t looked right the last time at bridge club. “She played lousy, too. She was my partner, and I gave her the devil about it. Now I wish I’d kept my big mouth shut.”
Millie Monk volunteered to make lemon squares, if we were having a get-together at the house after the funeral, which people would more or less expect, so she suggested I should. Lolly had always loved her lemon squares, she said. “She asked me for the recipe once, and I said, ‘Who are you kidding? You wouldn’t even know how to turn on the oven.’ We always kidded each other like that, her and me. Jeepers creepers, I just can’t believe she’s gone.”
Now that she thought about it, Millie said, maybe she’d come over to the house on Tuesday and tidy up a little. Run the vacuum. “Lolly was a sweetie pie, but she was never too zippedy-doo-da on the housecleaning.”
“Caelum Quirk! Long time no talk to,” Lena LoVecchio said. “You haven’t been swinging any more wrenches, have you?” I quieted her horsy laugh with the news about my aunt. “Jesus Christ! You’re kidding me,” she said. Lena told me she’d be honored to help carry Lolly’s casket, and she’d
