although she couldn’t explain why, she felt that the worst was over. Down in the kitchen, she had watched her mother making macaroni and cheese, to be heated in between visits to the funeral home, and she realized that it was the first proper meal Connie had made in weeks. Maggie wondered if that meant that Connie had come back to them.
The next three days had passed in a welter of small details: the boxes of tissues on every table at the funeral home, the black mantillas laid on the chair in the hallway at her grandmother’s house, the holy card with the Sacred Heart on one side and her grandfather’s name and the prayer of resurrection on the other. “Accept our prayer that the Gates of Paradise might be opened for your servant,” it said. Her grandmother kept changing her mind about whether her husband should wear his blue or his gray suit, as though he was going to a communion breakfast. “For Christ’s sakes, Mother,” Tommy finally said, “if it matters so much to you we’ll dress him in the gray the first night and the blue the next. Can we drop it now?” Mary Frances had started to cry, and been helped up to her room by Margaret. Looking back over her shoulder, Margaret had said quietly to her brother, “Displacement, Tom honey. Thinking about the small things so you won’t have to think about the big ones.” Maggie had watched with a great full feeling in her throat as tears rose in her father’s eyes. For three days, she thought, they were all displacing. She had learned a new word. The only time any of it felt like real life was driving home in the car from the funeral home one night, stretched out on the back seat, her hot cheek against the cool vinyl of the seats. Frank Sinatra was on the radio, and her father was singing while her mother hummed and beat time with the toe of one patent-leather pump. “No, no, they can’t take that away from me,” Tommy roared happily. When the last few notes died away, he reached across for Connie’s hand. Maggie could see their twined fingers in the space between the seats, the lights of the dashboard making blue stars in her mother’s engagement ring. Then her father said, “Did they get whoever torched that house?”
“I think one of the boys did it. Mary Joseph’s son. He was badly burned. They say he may lose a couple of fingers, and some of the use of his hand.”
Tommy whistled. “Police?”
“I think they’re handling it privately. The father has a bundle, and he’s going to need it. The construction people want $25,000.”
Maggie saw her father look over at her mother, his profile sharp against the windshield. “Yeah?”
“I get that from your sister-in-law,” Connie said with a wary look. “That’s where I heard it. I don’t know if it’s true.”
Tommy grunted, satisfied. “The kid set these fires all by himself?” he added.
“He was the ringleader,” Connie had answered.
Maggie stared again at her mother in the limousine stopped in front of the Gates of Heaven sign. Connie’s eyes looked clear, her face smooth. This was how she always looked after the baby had settled in, once the bad part was over. The lines of her mantilla melted into the black of her hair. Everyone was stopped behind them, the cars with their headlights on, dim in the sunshine, snaking out onto Westchester Avenue. There were 111 cars in the procession: John’s children, grandchildren, brothers and sisters, the workers from Scanlan & Co., the leaders of the unions that represented those workers, the leaders of the dioceses that bought what they made, a great long chain of procreation and commerce. There was one friend, a man named McAlevy who said he’d gone to high school with John Scanlan and had read his obituary in the newspaper. “A helluva pitching arm,” the man had told Maggie’s father at the funeral home. “Jesus, I’ll never forget it. A helluva pitching arm.” Maggie had seen the Malone car in the parking lot as she got into the limousine, but she knew she shouldn’t wave. She saw it again now, as the limousine inched forward and the family slid from the cars and gathered under the tent that sheltered the old man’s bronze casket from the noonday sun.
“I am the resurrection and the life,” said the archbishop’s representative, a monsignor with a deep, powerful, effortlessly dramatic voice,