her fast. Connie beat her little fists against his chest, and he laid his sandy head on her dark one.
Damien and Terence were behind Maggie. “You broke the flashlight,” Damien said sadly, pushing the switch back and forth with his thumb, which was red and chapped from his incessant sucking. “It’s time to go in,” Maggie said, and as she moved to the screen door and opened it, the boys could see their parents move apart, their mother smooth her hair. Their father walked through to the kitchen. “Tell your brothers to come in,” he said to Maggie as he opened the refrigerator. In its white glow his pale skin was mottled pink. He reached for a beer and held the bottle against his forehead. Terence and Damien stood outside the screen door peering in, seeing him through the wire mesh as though he was on television. “Don’t just stand there,” Tommy said impatiently as he looked over and saw them, Terence’s mouth a little open, Damien’s fair skin flushed pinker than his own. “Come on in and go to bed.”
When Maggie went into the living room it was empty, and she wondered where her mother had gone. She had not wondered what her parents had been talking about; a distance, filled by the charged electricity of married people on the verge of a fight, had been between them in the car all the way home on Sunday. For the first time Maggie realized it was sensible for her mother to stay away from the Scanlans. Her grandfather Scanlan’s house was always full of discord. Her grandfather Mazza’s was the most peaceful place in the world. But her mother never came here, either. Maggie supposed that, like other people, Connie saw a cemetery only as a place of death.
As Maggie went back and knelt beside her grandfather, a hearse, familiar as a station wagon, swung past the house and down Nazareth Way to the back plots. Behind it was the flower car, piled high with gladiolus. Angelo Mazza’s eyelids drooped. He hated cut flowers, but his emotions were always just a flicker across his face. From inside the lead limousine someone lifted a hand to him. Maggie made the sign of the cross.
“Not so many cars for the old people,” Angelo said, as a dozen cars followed, their headlights shining faintly in the bright sunshine.
“What about Mrs. Romano’s boys?”
“Two killed in the war, one a heart attack at Mass five years ago. One left, he lives far away.”
Across the stretch of lawn Maggie could see people begin to emerge from their cars, the view interrupted only by the DiGenova family’s obelisk and the mausoleum with the Good Shepherd stained-glass window in which the Lisa family were buried. A priest, she could not tell which one, took his place and opened his black leatherbound missal, a purple stole slung round his hunched shoulders. “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” he said, and everyone made the sign of the cross in unison.
Two men in dark-gray suits stood apart from the mourners. They turned and looked across at the Mazza house, their hands folded in front of them. “ … Gives me the creeps,” Maggie heard one say, and knew they were talking about her again, and about the unseemliness of children in cemeteries.
“Why did the Romanos go to the O’Neal’s funeral home to get buried?” she asked.
“No Italian funeral homes,” her grandfather said.
One of the men, the older, balder one, walked across to the road and down it toward them. He wore on his face a carefully arranged smile of welcome. “Angelo,” he said, in the voice of a professional greeter, oily and loud, pulling a breath mint from his pocket and popping it into his mouth as he towered over Maggie and her grandfather.
“Hi, Mr. O’Neal,” Maggie said. “How’s Cathy?”
“She’s fine, honey, fine,” Matthew O’Neal said, lowering his voice so he couldn’t be heard by the group under the tent. “Misses the girls at Sacred Heart, that’s for sure.”
“Does she like her new school? Mrs. Malone told me there’s a pool and tennis.”
“There is, there is,” he said, sucking on the mint.
“Tell her I said hi,” said Maggie, although she disliked Cathy O’Neal, who was chubby and wore her hair in sausage curls and who told patently fantastic stories about the goings-on in the preparation room on the third floor of the O’Neal Home for Funerals.