The Last Good Day by Peter Blauner

Author:Peter Blauner
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Suspense
Publisher: Warner
Published: 2003-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

31

WITH EACH THUMP and scatter of dirt hitting the coffin lid, Lynn felt the hollowness inside her chest.

A breeze swept across Green Hill Cemetery as she watched the ritual of mourners taking turns shoveling dirt into Sandi’s grave, having heard Saul and Rabbi Heyman from B’nai Israel recite the burial Kaddish.

“Yisgadal v’yiskadash sh’mei rabbaw …”

The words still seemed to circle in the wind. But a different recitation was going on in her head.

That’s my friend down there in that rosewood box. That’s real dirt they’re throwing on top of her. These are three dozen people we both knew dressed in black, gathered in a circle around this hole in the ground. Those are her children back in the rented Lincoln Town Car by the entrance with their step-grandmother. Those are her feckless brothers at the back of the crowd. That’s the man she married, looking ashen and anemic. That’s my husband standing beside me in a black yarmulke, holding my hand and bowing his head.

Amen.

Grief kept reinventing itself and finding new ways into her. She remembered a woman she’d met at Sloan-Kettering with Sandi last spring, an old lady with Alzheimer’s and a double mastectomy. Every night she forgot what had happened to her, and every morning she woke up and started crying again.

She saw Saul, his hair brilliantined and his eyebrows trimmed, take the shovel and stare bitterly at his son-in-law. With a grunt, he stooped and stuck the blade into the mound and then ladled the dirt lovingly into his daughter’s grave. A decommissioned old warship adrift on a dark river. She understood that he needed to do something with all this pent-up rage, but this seemed wrong. Not a half-hour before, Jeffrey had delivered the eulogy at B’nai Israel and spoke so movingly of how Sandi had been his soul mate and conscience that tears burned the corners of Lynn’s eyes like kerosene. So weren’t they all part of this growing province of grieving people?

She looked up the hill toward the grove where she’d buried her own mother last year. Harold and Paco Ortiz stood in the shade of an elm near the grave, with their heads lowered but their eyes conspicuously alert. Something about seeing them here broke the mood. Were they paying their respects or on the job?

She turned back, watching Saul daven, rocking back and forth over the grave. Lost in bereavement, he closed his eyes and began to recite the Kaddish all over again, having forgotten he’d already done it. Marty Pollack came to the head of the grave and took the shovel from him. He bent over to stick the blade into the pyramid of dirt and then stopped and delicately touched the small of his own back as if he’d injured himself. Jeanine came up quickly and took the shovel from him, tossing a coffee cup’s-worth of soil down on the lid and fulfilling the family’s obligation. Again, the thump felt like a depth charge going off inside Lynn. The finality of it.

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