Oakland Cemetery, a beautiful old place on the south side. It wasn’t in her plot. There were so many bodies to be buried that a trench had been prepared. Like most of the others, Nora was wrapped in a sheet. Mortuaries had shut down because of the fear of infection and the dearth of caskets. The bodies arrived in rental trucks. Few of the corpses had even been awarded a shroud. Some were in night clothes, others were naked. Attendants wearing Tyvek suits loaded the bodies onto pallets and a forklift lowered them into the trench. There were only a handful of mourners. This was a ceremony not meant to be seen.
For a moment, Jill’s thoughts were carried away by a mockingbird’s song. He was in a magnolia tree, trilling his various joyous tunes. Life, Jill thought, it’s majestic, it’s continuous, with or without us. And then she convulsed into sobs.
Suddenly she felt a hand on her elbow. It took a moment to recognize the face behind the mask: it was Vicky, the mother of K’Neisha, Jill’s favorite student. No words were exchanged. Jill watched as one of the men in Tyvek took a small bundle from the trunk of Vicky’s Nissan and placed it on top of the pallet with the other bodies.
* * *
—
JILL’S FINGERS TURNED into sausages. She was dropping everything. She spilled lentils all over the stove. “Mom, didn’t we have this last night?” Helen asked. Jill stopped herself from snapping at her. “Tonight it’s different,” she said lightly. “Tonight we have lentils and hot sauce.”
“Oh, great.”
Jill looked in the pantry. There must be something else she could put with the lentils. She worried that she wasn’t feeding the children enough, but she also felt the need to ration their supplies until the plague exhausted itself, the stores reopened, the cash machines worked, and everyone went back to their ordinary lives. There were some extra canned goods in the pantry and a few items in the freezer—popsicles, a bag of frozen peas, a trout of undetermined vintage—but not enough to sustain them more than a few days.
In the back of the fridge Jill spotted a bag of flour. Her mother had always insisted on keeping flour in the refrigerator to avoid the boll weevils, an old southern habit. There was just enough Crisco to make biscuits. How many times, as little girls, had Jill and Maggie stood on stools to help Nora roll out dough for cookies and pies and especially biscuits—hot and flaky and filling the kitchen with a rich aroma that Jill could still smell vividly in her memory. Her knees went so weak that she had to grab the counter for support.
“There’s no milk,” she said hollowly.
“Mom, are you okay?” asked Helen, constantly vigilant about her mother’s moods.
“I was going to make biscuits, but we’re out of milk.”
“Do you have to have milk?” Teddy asked guiltily. He had drunk the last of it.
“If you want Grandma’s biscuits, you do.”
Helen made a dreaded suggestion. “Maybe ask Mrs. Hernández upstairs to see if she’ll trade some milk for some biscuits.” Helen and Teddy privately regarded Mrs. Hernández as a witch.
“Why do you think she’s got milk?” Jill asked.
“She’s got cats, so she’s got milk.”
Jill handed a measuring cup to Helen. “Take Teddy with you. See if she’ll part with three-fourths of a cup.”
Helen hadn’t counted on doing it herself, but Jill’s distracted movements unsettled her. She was desperate to cheer her mother up. Something serious but unspoken was in the air.
As soon as the kids left the room, Jill sat at the kitchen table and wept.
* * *
—
EVERYONE CALLED HER Mrs. Hernández, but no one in the family knew if she had ever been married. Jill supposed she lived off Social Security and a modest pension, which—judging by the bottles and tins in her recycle bin—went largely to alcohol and cat food. The television blared at all hours. Groceries and pizza were often delivered, or used to be. She drove a little Ford Focus that rarely left the garage. Jill suspected she was agoraphobic.
Teddy reached for Helen’s hand as they walked up the dark stairway. Mrs. Hernández wasn’t good about replacing the bulbs. The children had only been upstairs twice, both times on Halloween, when Mrs. Hernández gave them Mars bars. There was a glass-paneled door at the top of the stairway. Helen knocked. They could hear the floorboards creak as Mrs. Hernández walked across the room and opened the door, a plump, white-haired woman