Next morning she says to Glen “Again, another one of those deadly daddy dreams, what gives with them? last night there might have been two, maybe three — you know, I really can’t take it anymore, I mean I can probably take it so long as I don’t lose a lot of sleep over it, but I don’t want to take it anymore, goddamn guy won’t leave me alone and I think I know what it all means, not ‘goddamn,’ that’s just what was in my last dream or one I remember as last, the goddamn cursing, but you know what I mean, and it’s not, I swear — how do you like that? ‘swear,’ ‘cursing’—but it’s not that I believe in spirits or anything like that, and I’m aware that cementarians or something — that’s from another dream about graveyards, the made-up word I mean if it is made up — don’t stick much of the cremated person’s dust into those soup cans, maybe a tenth of it someone in the know once said, so for me perhaps one fifth for two cans, but I almost feel that his ashes are talking to me in their way, or his spirit’s doing the talking for his ashes, or it’s neither of those, which is probably the case, for things like that can’t be, can they? and it’s just my mind which I don’t think will be normally composed for months unless I get his ashes and dust and bone fragments and eyeballs, for christsake, and whatever back together again, two cans, I don’t plan to mix them and put them in one, that’d be too complicated and messy and probably smelly and not something I’d ask anyone to do and I certainly won’t, but one on top of the other or side by side but at least as close as two cans can be in the same burying place,” and he says “So you have to do something about it, what else can I say?” and she says “Good advertisement for plane travel and what I was thinking myself, you think you can handle the boys for up to two days?” and calls work and says she won’t be in today and possibly the next and drives to the cemetery, at the office there asks if she may dig the can up herself, she knows exactly where it is and she brought a garden trowel for the work, and the person in charge says they’d get into all sorts of difficulties with the gravediggers’ union if they let her do anything with the trowel but fluff up the earth a little around the privets or dig up some weeds and she says “Good, so a professional digger will have to do it, I don’t care what the charge so long as it’s done in the next hour though I hope you’ll be fair, this isn’t a casket I’m asking you to unearth but a small can which is maybe at the most, or was when we put it there, a foot and a half underground,” gravedigger’s taken off another job and can’s dug up and she takes it home in the shoebox she came with, wraps it in several layers of aluminum foil and plastic produce bags, phones her father’s cemetery and tells them what she’s coming for and they say it’s all right though of course there’ll have to be some costs, phones her travel agent, arranges for a friend to be home when the kids get there and calls Glen to say she’s leaving now, “I’ve been thinking,” he says and she says “My mind’s made up so don’t try to change it,” “It’s not that but can’t it wait till the weekend when I’ll be freer to take care of the kids and your leaving won’t be such a shock to them and you also might have had more time to think about it, because for all you know your bad dreams might end for good here tonight,” “I’ve already made all the arrangements, not that anything like that can’t be changed, but I don’t want to keep the can around the house for that long, it wouldn’t be right for the kids or good for me, I also don’t see myself bringing it back to the cemetery and asking them to rebury it, so I just want to get the whole thing done with and if all goes well I’ll be home tomorrow around midafternoon,” drives to the airport, flies east with the wrapped can in her carry-on bag, stays at a hotel near the airport, the can in the bathtub behind the drawn shower curtain while she sleeps, gets up early and doesn’t remember having any dreams about her father or Julie or graves or holes or anything alluding to them, breakfasts and cabs to the cemetery and tells one of the owners she doesn’t know where the other can’s buried except that it’s around her sister’s grave so if they don’t have any record of the exact location, which isn’t to say the can couldn’t have shifted underground, they’ll probably have to go get a gravedigger to search for it, something, she said, they probably would have done anyway what with the possible labor trouble with the gravediggers’ union, while two men poke around Julie’s grave with poles she thinks of her and closes her eyes and says very low “You know, I don’t pray, I mean, never, I’m telling you, maybe not since I was a little girl and was afraid of God and thought he’d kill me if I didn’t pray so I felt forced to, but I’m doing it now for you, my darling sister, so if you’re near and you hear me please know I love you and have always loved you more than I can say or can express in any kind of way and feel you got the rawest deal anyone could get in this world and I only hope it never hurt and that things where you are now are all right for you, and I’m sorry I haven’t been out to see you since I don’t know how many years ago, when I was still a teen, I think, the last time, but I live far away and it isn’t easy but that’s no excuse for all those years, and I miss you too, meaning I miss you much the way Dad always used to say he did, said it in words and letters to me and also in my dreams since he died how he missed me but especially you, Mom you must know how much she loves you for I know how often she visits you even though she lives a few hundred miles away, and of course you know what I’m doing today and if you don’t it’s that now all of his remains or what’s left of them and I’m hoping his spirit too if there is one will be beside you, and I also think so much of what it might have been for me if you had lived, this I’ve been thinking since a little after you were killed and have never really stopped thinking it since, been for us both, really, both, so, that’s enough, there could be more but I don’t think I can go on any further, I hope you heard if you’re there or the essence of the message got through to you or just got to you or just eventually does in some way, essence or the whole,” cries, someone pats her shoulder but she doesn’t see who, breaks down, walks off by herself to be alone, wishes she’d brought flowers for Julie and her father and grandparents whom she never knew, thinks she saw a flower stall about a half-mile down the road from the cemetery but too late for that and she picks some flowers bordering another burial place out of view of Julie’s grave, there are lots of them around this plot and they seem like fast-growing and abundant healthy flowers so she doesn’t think the grave owners would mind, goes back to her family’s gravesite, “Found it,” one of the grave diggers says while she’s arranging some flowers on her grandmother’s grave and he holds up a rusting can, same size and kind as the one she has in her handbag, she says “Think it’d be all right if I do the honors? — it’s what I came for,” “Your privilege, I guess, I’ve no objections, and hole’s not so wide or deep as for you to fall in,” she asks him to make the hole a bit wider, unwraps her can, switches around the cans behind her back till she doesn’t know which one is which, doesn’t look at them till she sees just their tops in the ground, buries them side by side and touching each other, pushes the dirt over them till the hole’s filled, tamps the earth around it till it’s flat and says “Okay, Dad, now rest in peace,” and goes back to the cemetery office and asks the receptionist there to call a cab to take her to the airport.