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.Cary, who had lived next to the family Stone all those years of their growing up.“I still use that lovely silver tea service I got from your mother’s yard sale,” Mrs.Cary said.She had puffed her way up the grassy hill to Thelma Stone’s grave site.Frederick had thought Mrs.Cary might also be among the dead, but he had looked in the phone book anyway, and there she was.He decided it was only fitting to let her know about Thelma Stone.After all, they had been friends for years.In fact, she had been Thelma Stone’s only friend.He was glad he had called and to see her in attendance.Her son, Mrs.Cary announced with pride, was waiting for her in a car by the front gate.Then Maggie Stone appeared, creating a fivesome.She looked good for a woman who spent every hour of her day harassing Herbert, plotting outrages against him.At least this was Herbert’s assessment of how Maggie passed her time.She gave Frederick a quick hug, which surprised him.“Maggie never liked you,” Herbert had told him weeks earlier.She had cut her hair short and now it was frosted a soft blond.She wore a neat cotton suit, the skirt quite short, at least for Maggie.She looked darn good, just as Chandra had looked good.Was this what a few weeks away from Stone men could do for one’s constitution?“Is Chandra coming?” Maggie asked, and Frederick shook his head.He had for a fleeting moment considered phoning Lillian and asking that she pass the news of his mother’s death on to her daughter.But he had changed his mind.And he doubted that Chandra read the Portland obituaries these days.She was too busy reading marriage dissolution papers.“Freddy’s gonna say a few words,” Herbert told the priest who had come at Herbert’s bidding.Thelma Stone had been a Catholic the last time anyone could remember her going to church.The priest nodded.He appeared relieved.It was the first time Frederick had heard anything about his delivering a eulogy.“Herb,” he said.“I didn’t prepare anything.”“That’s okay,” said Herbert.“Just wing it.” It was their mother’s funeral.Wing it?“But what should I say?” Frederick asked.“Why didn’t you tell me about this earlier?”“Just say a poem,” said Herbert.Frederick stared at his brother.He had a sudden urge to push Herbert into the gaping grave before them and cover him up with six feet of dirt.He would make sure that his cell phone did not get buried with him.He imagined irritating, late-night phone calls from Herbert.You better get down here, Freddy.This place is crawling with nubility.“That’s so like him,” Maggie leaned toward Frederick and whispered.“I know, believe me.”Frederick looked down at the coffin before him.What could he say? “This is a life sale?” The aroma of the flowers sent over by Herbert’s clinic rose up to meet him and he imagined the smell of lilac.Could he say, “She was one who tried to make the world smell better because the world stinks”? He ran through the index file in his head of poems he had loved.This was not a time for Yeats’s shuddering wall, so he decided upon something from the early work, although he could not remember the title or the entire poem.He remembered only the refrain, and that became his mother’s eulogy.“‘Come away, O human child,’” Frederick said, “‘to the waters and the wild, with a fairy hand in hand, for the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.’”His legs swayed beneath him and he felt as though he were standing on stilts.He heard Herbert sob and then Maggie consoling her ex-husband.He wished he had called Chandra.But how could he have known it would be this difficult? How could he have known he was still not ready to let his mother go, this sleepy woman who wanted nothing more than that her sons be seen, not heard, and preferably neither.Now Maggie was comforting him, her hand warm on his arm, the soft, sweet touch of a woman.He had missed this nurturing element which Chandra had once provided, even if it was only to allow him, in bed, to hold her sleeping body.This kind of nourishment couldn’t be supplied by Doris Bowen’s touch, or her money, or her cool white pants that never seemed to dirty.Frederick took Maggie’s hand in his.He brought it up to his face and held its warmth against his cheek as though the hand were a pulsating bird.He saw tears rush into Maggie Stone’s eyes.“Forgive me,” Frederick whispered.He could see by Maggie’s face that she was puzzled.“For all those years of ignoring you.” He remembered family gatherings when he may not have spoken more than a single word to her, a quick hello.He had never imagined that she possessed a mind he could find interesting.Now he saw in the cut of her hair, the style of the new cotton suit, a woman determined to change old patterns and get on with the new.He saw someone strong, and strong is what he himself wanted so desperately to be.“Let’s go for coffee,” Maggie said.Herbert had dried his eyes on the tissue she had given him and was now staring off at other graves, other human children who have gone to the waters and the wild.“You two go,” Frederick said.“I have to clean the attic today.”He watched as they weaved their way among the gravestones, the priest in the lead and old Mrs.Cary bringing up the rear, their four heads disappearing finally below the horizon of headstone and hill.Vanishing, it seemed, into the very earth.On the opposite edge of the cemetery, a blue pickup sat waiting, sunlight glinting from its rearview mirror.Frederick could see cigarette smoke wafting from a side glass.The grave diggers were waiting for him to leave so that they could finish their job.He looked down at the huge hole near his feet, a bigger hole than she would ever need, the casket towering above it.“Come away, O human child,” Frederick said again.He kicked his toe at the ridge of the grave and a small rivulet of ground and pebbles rolled down into it.“For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”• • •He had left the grave site and was almost home when another wave, a swell of loneliness, gripped him.He felt left out, abandoned, the way he had felt for every football game that Portland High ever played, with guys like Richard Hamel sweating and virile and envied in their grass-soiled uniforms, the cheerleaders going wild, their hormones tossing them farther into the air than they’d ever imagined, pure leaps and bounds of estrogen
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