front of the headstones and dig a little hole and put the flowers in and then pat the earth around the roots gently, as though they were patting the person beneath. They never worried about the plants dying. Angelo took care of them once they were in the ground. It would have been nicer if her grandfather Scanlan could have been buried at Calvary Cemetery, but Maggie knew he never would have allowed it. She could picture him lying under his shirred white satin blanket, his black rosaries twined around his fingers in the stagy position that would never allow you to say the rosary in real life, thinking to himself, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I’m surrounded by guineas.” She laughed a little to herself, and her father frowned at her.
She knew that she should feel sadder than she did, but the fact was that she did not believe that her grandfather was dead, although she had knelt before the coffin and looked down at the waxy hands, still so big and powerful looking. He had made her recite the seven deadly sins just two weeks before. She had forgotten one. “Sloth,” John Scanlan had thundered, the violence of the sound bringing two nurses to the door of his room. “And don’t you forget it, little girl.” Her grandfather had looked better, his mouth less elastic, his eyelids matching, both at half-mast. Sometimes when she would arrive at the hospital he would be sleeping, his breath rippling through his lips like that of an old horse, and when she left he would still be sleeping, even though she had sat there for an hour or two, watching the white light of the sun lay bright rectangles on the linoleum floor. Sometimes they played Parcheesi, and most of the time he told her stories about his childhood, about beating up Billy Boylan behind the garage on Lexington Avenue or being taken into the precinct house by the cops after he stole penny candy from the Greek’s place around the corner from the tenement building where his family lived. Some of the stories had been new. Some Maggie had heard before, but they were transformed. For the first time Billy Boylan got some punches of his own in, and was not simply decimated by John Scanlan’s invincible right hook; for the first time it turned out that some lemon balls had indeed been stolen from the Greek’s. “The cops took ’em, and ate ’em!” her grandfather said loudly, as though consumption was the real crime. Occasionally the stories would be interrupted by her grandfather’s doctor, a man named Levine who was ugly and very kind, and who disliked John Scanlan very much but was always cheerful around him. When Maggie first came to the hospital, Dr. Levine and some other doctors would often enter and make her move outside, pulling the white curtains hanging from the ceiling tight around the bed. Their shoes moved at the bottom of the curtain, their shadows made a kind of mime show. But after a few weeks Dr. Levine just felt for her grandfather’s pulse, and then left. Maggie had imagined this was because her grandfather was getting better. Now, of course, she knew it had been because he was dying.
“What?” she had said, when her father told her. Tommy was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a glass of Pepto-Bismol, his face gray. “What? Are you sure?” She had gone upstairs to her room to think, looking out over the asphalt shingles of the new roofs to the place where the house that had burned had stood. For some reason she had thought of the picture in the Baltimore Catechism of mortal and venial sin: first the milk bottle with the little flecks of black in it, then the milk bottle dark as a moonless night, and then the bottle pure white again after confession. In some way she felt pure white.
She had not talked to Debbie since that night. She had barely talked to her mother, only watched her walk around the house with the wary eyes of the guilty. Now her grandfather was dead. She felt as though she was bereft of any connections at all. As she lay on her bed, she felt as though she was floating, the motion in her body like the motion of Cap’n Jim’s big tug as it plied the Jersey coastline. She looked at the blackened supports of the burned house from her bedroom window, and