a Downs palm, over and over. The weight was reassuring in his hand.
His wife’s name was on a sheet of paper beside the door at the far end of the corridor. He walked into the Chapel of Rest. Shadow knew most of the people in the room: Laura’s family, her workmates at the travel agency, several of her friends.
They all recognized him. He could see it in their faces. There were no smiles, though, no hellos.
At the end of the room was a small dais, and, on it, a cream-colored casket with several displays of flowers arranged about it: scarlets and yellows and whites and deep, bloody purples. He took a step forward. He could see Laura’s body from where he was standing. He did not want to walk forward; he did not dare to walk away.
A man in a dark suit—Shadow guessed he worked at the funeral home—said, “Sir? Would you like to sign the condolence and remembrance book?” and pointed him to a leather-bound book, open on a small lectern.
He wrote SHADOW and the date in his precise handwriting, then, slowly, he wrote (PUPPY) beside it, putting off walking toward the end of the room, where the people were, and the casket, and the thing in the cream casket that was no longer Laura.
A small woman walked in from the corridor, and hesitated. Her hair was a coppery red, and her clothes were expensive and very black. Widow’s weeds, thought Shadow, who knew her well: Audrey Burton, Robbie’s wife.
Audrey was holding a sprig of violets, wrapped at the base with silver foil. It was the kind of thing a child would make in June, thought Shadow. But violets were out of season.
Audrey looked directly at Shadow, and there was no recognition in her eyes. Then she walked across the room, to Laura’s casket. Shadow followed her.
Laura lay with her eyes closed, and her arms folded across her chest. She wore a conservative blue suit he did not recognize. Her long brown hair was out of her eyes. It was his Laura and it was not: her repose, he realized, was what was unnatural. Laura was always such a restless sleeper.
Audrey placed her sprig of summer violets on Laura’s chest. Then she pursed her blackberry-colored lips, worked her mouth for a moment and spat, hard, onto Laura’s dead face.
The spit caught Laura on the cheek, and began to drip down toward her ear.
Audrey was already walking toward the door. Shadow hurried after her. “Audrey?” he said. This time she recognized him. He wondered if she was taking tranquilizers. Her voice was distant and detached.
“Shadow? Did you escape? Or did they let you out?”
“Let me out yesterday. I’m a free man,” said Shadow. “What the hell was that all about?”
She stopped in the dark corridor. “The violets? They were always her favorite flower. When we were girls we used to pick them together.”
“Not the violets.”
“Oh, that,” she said. She wiped a speck of something invisible from the corner of her mouth. “Well, I would have thought that was obvious.”
“Not to me, Audrey.”
“They didn’t tell you?” Her voice was calm, emotionless. “Your wife died with my husband’s cock in her mouth, Shadow.”
She turned away, walked out into the parking lot, and Shadow watched her leave.
He went back into the funeral home. Someone had already wiped away the spit.
None of the people at the viewing were able to meet Shadow’s eye. Those who came over and talked to him did so as little as they could, mumbled awkward commiserations and fled.
After lunch—Shadow ate at the Burger King—was the burial. Laura’s cream-colored coffin was interred in the small non-denominational cemetery on the edge of town: unfenced, a hilly woodland meadow filled with black granite and white marble headstones.
He rode to the cemetery in the Wendell’s hearse, with Laura’s mother. Mrs. McCabe seemed to feel that Laura’s death was Shadow’s fault. “If you’d been here,” she said, “this would never have happened. I don’t know why she married you. I told her. Time and again, I told her. But they don’t listen to their mothers, do they?” She stopped, looked more closely at Shadow’s face. “Have you been fighting?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Barbarian,” she said, then she set her mouth, raised her head so her chins quivered, and stared straight ahead of her.
To Shadow’s surprise Audrey Burton was also at the funeral, standing toward the back. The short service ended, the casket was lowered into the cold ground. The people went away.
Shadow did not leave. He