she does, holding him to her and shuddering with soft sobs.
When she’s all cried out, she gives Jack a peck on the temple. He takes her hand, kisses her creamy white palm, and tastes that spicy-sweet geranium soap. After she’s gone, the taste remains, as lovely as a trace of cake frosting on his lips.
3.
They bury his mother on a windy day in early March on their own land, out beyond the orchard. Jack is not sure this is legal. His father says who is going to stop us, and Jack supposes the answer is no one.
Bloom doesn’t have a coffin, and she hasn’t been embalmed. Hank says embalming people is a waste of time. “You don’t need to poison someone after they’re already dead. God knows she had enough poison in her when she was alive.”
She’s wound up in a dingy white sheet with a few old stains on it that look like coffee spills. Jack’s father has wrapped loops of silver duct tape around her ankles and throat, to draw the sheet tight to her body. He digs the hole with some of his friends, Separatists like him.
They have come from all over the state to honor Hank’s loss. They are a crowd of ten-gallon hats and cowboy mustaches and blank stares. Some of them stand at the graveside with their AR-15s over their shoulders, as if a twenty-one-gun salute might be called for. One man, fleshy, sunburnt, with goggling eyes and a shaved head, wears crossed bandoliers and chaps, like he is on his way to a weekend engagement at the Alamo.
When the hole is deep enough, Connor and some of the others hand the body down. Hank kneels in the grave with his wife’s shrouded head in his lap, gently stroking her brow. Perhaps he whispers to her. Once he glances up and meets Jack’s gaze. Behind his John Lennon spectacles, his father’s eyes are bright and brimming with tears, although they do not spill over.
Jack has the terrible idea his mother’s eyes are open, too, and she is staring at him through the taut white cotton. He can see how her lips are parted. The sheet has sunk a little into the pit of her gaping mouth. At any moment he expects her to groan—or shriek.
Beth clutches Jack to her side, as if to comfort him, although she is the one who is crying. His head knocks against her big soft breasts.
Connor offers a hand, but Jack’s father ignores it and lifts himself out of the grave under his own power. He dusts his palms off, walks to Jack’s side, and puts a hand on his shoulder.
“Do you want to throw dirt on her?”
“Why would I want to do that?”
Hank’s head jerks, and he stares down to see if Jack is giving him lip. He seems to decide his son is genuinely curious, and his face softens.
“To honor her memory,” Hank says.
“Oh,” Jack says. He picks up a handful of soil but then just lets it trickle out of his fist. He doesn’t feel like honoring her with a faceful of dirt.
“That’s all right,” Hank says. “Maybe you’d like to bring her some flowers one of these days.”
Beth is the first to grab a clump of earth and toss it in. She almost seems angry, the way she flings it at the body. The dirt makes a resonant thwock falling on the tight sheet, like a child’s hand slapping a toy drum. Others join her. The man with the crossed bandoliers finds a shovel and begins to fill in the hole. Some of the cowboys fire their six-guns and wahoo mournfully. A bottle of Bulleit Bourbon begins to go around.
In less than a half hour, she has been planted like a seed.
4.
Five weeks after they plant his mother in the soil, Jack is on his way into town with Beth and Connor. His father has loaned them the F-150. Connor has farm business at Cordia Agricultural Supply, and Beth tells Jack he has to come along to protect her. She says she’s trying to take care of her teeth, and she’s worried about the candy machine in the lobby. She never can control herself around SweeTarts. But if Jack comes with them, he can eat most of her tarts for her, and her teeth will stay white and bright and straight, and Connor will still want to kiss her.
“Mmmmmmaybe,” Connor says, squinting at her with one eye, like a man contemplating a challenging assignment.