think it looked nice.
Love,
Laurel
At the burial, Nana sprinkled dirt into the graves with her hands shaking, walking gingerly around them like a garden she’d just planted. The rabbi offered me the shovel, but I shook my head no.
That was when I saw David.
He was hanging back, hovering near some stranger’s headstone, wearing a black blazer over a black T-shirt and black jeans. People kept turning around to look at him and whisper. Almost gawking, like some rock star had made an appearance at my family’s funeral. But he didn’t look back at them. He just watched the three caskets intently and ignored anyone who was alive.
Earlier, I’d heard someone say that they were leaving the tent up and just moving it down the hill a bit, because Mrs. Kaufman’s funeral was the next day.
When it was time for us to stand up and leave, I glanced back to where I’d seen David, but he was gone.
Mr. Kaufman was in a coma. He was in ICU, and the hospital was making a very special exception by letting David stay there in an empty room.
That’s what I heard at the reception back at the house. I was planted in a chair in the den, a great spot for hearing snippets of conversation as they floated by me. Megan sat next to me, eating a sesame bagel, not talking but occasionally rubbing my back.
Some people came to me. They’d lean in to talk closer to my ear or squat down so they were looking up at my face. At times I felt like a queen on her throne, and at others like a four-year-old kid. I knew they were just trying to be nice, the neighbors and friends and classmates and all the rest. They were just doing what they thought they were supposed to, which was exactly what I was doing too.
I was in the bathroom when I heard Mrs. Dill and the Dills’ next-door neighbor, Mrs. Franco, talking in low tones on the other side of the door.
“Do they know anything more about what happened?” asked Mrs. Franco.
“I don’t think so,” said Mrs. Dill. “They might be putting out a call for witnesses, to see if other drivers may have seen something.”
“What do you think it was?”
A pause. I sat still on the toilet, leaning in.
“Probably Gabe,” whispered Mrs. Dill. “I bet he had a little too much to drink at dinner. Don’t you remember the Christmas party last year?”
“I remember,” said Mrs. Franco sadly. “Betsy had to force him to let her drive them home.”
I thought of Mr. Kaufman on his cell phone that night, with his drink in his hands. And then I thought of wrapping my fingers around his throat and squeezing hard, which was not something I wanted to be thinking in the bathroom at my family’s funeral with a house full of people on the other side of the door. I wiped the image away, out of my head with a mental eraser.
I waited three minutes and then peeked my head out of the bathroom. Mrs. Franco and Mrs. Dill were gone, and the coast was clear.
My grandmother, June Meisner, had class. Everyone said so. She wore crisp linen skirt-suits and well-made pumps and never left the house without makeup. She got her hair done twice a week at Marcella’s Salon and kept it dyed dark brown. Nana volunteered at a local nursing home filled with what she called her “old ladies,” even though many of them were younger than she was.
I guess it was because she had so much class that she made me get back into my mother’s black dress and go to Mrs. Kaufman’s funeral the next day.
Nana looked so small in the big, boxy driver’s seat of our Volvo station wagon, her hands correctly positioned at ten o’clock and two o’clock on the steering wheel, her nails perfectly manicured. As we drove to the cemetery she turned to look at me, her eyes still red from the crying she did at night when she thought I couldn’t hear her.
“I thank God every hour that you weren’t in that car.”
I pressed my nose to the window, not able to look back. “Nana, don’t.”
“You know me. I like to count the blessings I have.”
“If you need to thank something, thank all the French homework Mrs. Messing gave us.” I looked at my grandmother now, to let her know I wasn’t just being a smart-ass.
“What if you’d gone with them and I’d lost all of