"Do you know what time it is?" he said, like I was the one who'd been sawing away.
"It's late."
"What do you want, Jerome?"
"You think I should put up another headstone out there?"
"What?"
"You know, out there."
"There are stones out at the cemetery."
"I mean one for Daisy."
"Oh," he said, scratching at himself down low. "I was wondering why there was that space in between your mother and Theresa."
"I think it all looks pretty good. But Daisy's spot just seemed kind of lonely."
"Maybe to you."
"Still. I should put another one up."
Pop rolled back away from me, onto his side. "Well, I thought that from the day she died. So did your mother."
"Really? Why didn't you say something?"
"She was your wife."
"But you both loved her. You had a say."
"You think you would have listened to us?"
"Yeah," I said. "I probably would have."
"Well, maybe that's why we didn't say anything. Now let's get some shut-eye."
I thought about that for a while, as Pop almost immediately started rattling the windowpanes with his two-stroke, how in fact after what happened Pop didn't seem to bother much with me as he'd always bothered before, instruct me to do exactly this or that with the customers or the business or the kids. He just kind of re-ceded in an un-Pop-like way, which I attributed to my mother telling him to back off for a while and just lend me whatever hand I might need. Which they both did, my mother especially helpful around the house and Pop, too, at the garage, where he came by a couple of times a week to keep the mechanics in line by replenishing their dented metal cooler with cold beer and sandwiches.
It never occurred to me back then as a presumably long-minted adult that he might have finally decided it was time to let me stew in a holding tank of my own, be it eye-high with shit or honey, and not, as was his wont (born out of ego-fied generosity and expedience), to keep giving me things anymore, foremost opinions and advice. I suppose this would normally be my moment to be expressing gratitude to him, for the usual. (if tardy, extra-subtle) parental relinquishment, but I still wish he'd naturally intruded and called me a cowardly coldhearted fool and went ahead and ordered up a customary funeral and headstone for Daisy, as I wouldn't now be staring at an oddly unbalanced plot of sod whenever I visit the cemetery with Paul, following a day at St. Jude's.
At the gathering at our house after Theresa's funeral, in fact, among the countless other miserable happenings of that day, Sal Mondello (who is officially retired now, after the bankruptcy filing) came up to me afterward and extended his condolences and then added, "It's a shame her mother can't be with her." If the randy old geezer hadn't actually looked so brittle about the chops I'd have busted him one solid and wrung his neck with his own Major Johnson. But I didn't, and just nodded and accepted his old-country gesture of an envelope, then received the scores of her friends and relatives and other sundry people who came out, some of whom I didn't even recognize. But of course her high school friends, Alice Woo and ladle Srinivasan, were there, in black-on-black dresses and hose, clinging to each other like there was a fierce ill wind blowing, crying their eyes out from the pew to the grave, and then those who obviously came out for us be-reaved, like Richie and his associates, and Kelly Stearns and Miles Quintana, who despite showing no such indication were clearly there together (the Movietone story of how this happened I later learned from Miles, and it involved a final Parade parking lot altercation with Jimbo and the subsequent mutual realization by a maturing white Southern woman and her young brown urban knight that they had more in common than simply a love of enabling their respective constituencies to temporarily exit the dreariness of life through mid-budget holidays). The supporting presence of these friends and associates didn't comfort so much as reveal for me a surprisingly pernicious secondary gloom over the already near-suffocating pall of woe, the knowledge of collective mourning initially soothing but soon enough all the more depressing, such is the idea that no one completely escapes.
Paul, to his credit, didn't try to keep it together for anybody's sake. He lost it at the house that morning, and on the car ride to the church, and literally a few words into his remarks at the pulpit he simply stopped and stepped down and sat down next to us and bawled as loudly as he could. I was proud of him. At the lowering of the casket Jack had to hold him up, lest he stumble and fall into the hole, and back at the house afterward he had an attack of sharp pains in his belly and chest, which Rita and one of our doctor friends attended to, successfully treating with a dose of Pop's antigas tablets. That night, after everyone else had gone to sleep, while sharing the last $150 bottle of a boutique cabernet that Jack had brought over and opened unbidden and somewhat oddly insisted the two of us drink, Paul thanked me for getting up and finishing his eulogy.
I said it was no problem, an honor and a privilege. So we drank to those, and to a few other puffed up et ceteras, even chuckling a bit, and soon thereafter we polished off the plump, inky wine.
Because he naturally couldn't handle it and was completely grief-exhausted besides, I had to walk him to his bed, where I'm sure for the first time in days — certainly then and perhaps since — he slept an intractable, unfettered sleep.
I didn't, quite, and lay in bed for a long while staring up at the ceiling, tracing paths along the mottles and cracks, of course only inviting a dreadful circularity. I began to feel as if I were lying in a box and naturally didn't want to continue on that line and so I stepped outside onto the patio in the cooling night air and sat slumped in a deck chair beneath the moonlit sky, the distant, big-hearted-river sound of the Expressway filtering through the dry leaves of the trees. The sky, despite the half-moon, was still brilliant with celestial lights, and when I looked back over the roof I thought I saw a glinting streak fall 36.0 to the horizon. There was another, and another, though appearing lower in the sky each time, and to see the next ones better I went around to the side yard, where I kept the gutter-cleaning ladder, and quietly leaned it against the gutter. Then I climbed up onto the roof, walked atop the house back over the kitchen, and sat down and waited.
There was nothing then. And I was trying my best not to remember the day but kept thinking anyway how I had finished up reading Paul's speech, which came right after Pop's, and then Jack's. It was beautifully somber, serious, elegantly lyrical stuff, and not just heady with its quotations from Heine and the Bible and the I Ching and Blake but also marked by earthy and detailed remembrances of her and their life, and even though they knew it had been written by Paul a number of people complimented me on the moving, heartrending words.
Though I'd told him he could take a pass, Pop insisted he was fine, and was clearly bent on saying a few words; but he only spoke off the cuff for a minute or two at most, coughing between words to suppress any burgeoning gasping or tears, and talked respectfully of her tough spirit and independent views, though he ended somewhat gruffly and inappropriately, mumbling that he hadn't seen her much of late at "the home." Jack, on the other hand, left little unmentioned in his sheaf of prepared remarks, moving quite slowly and for some reason nonchronologically through this or that scene from their childhood and teen years, noting in most every instance how his brawn had been neatly trumped by her brains. At one point he had to pause for an awkwardly long time because he was physically shuddering at what seemed surely the end of his talk, but then held it together and continued some more and didn't quite arrive to any concerted finish but instead mostly just stopped.