“Good.” The grin flashed, without humor. ‘There’s business I can be getting on with while you say your goodbyes. I’ll get rooms for us at the Motel America. Meet me there when you’re done.”
Shadow got out of the car and watched it pull away. Then he walked in. The dimly lit corridor smelled of flowers and of furniture polish, with just the slightest tang of formaldehyde. At the far end was the Chapel of Rest.
Shadow realized that he was palming the gold coin, moving it compulsively from a back palm to a front palm to a Downs palm, over and over. The weight was reassuring in his hand.
His wife’s name was on a sheet of paper beside the door at the far end of the corridor. He walked into the Chapel of Rest. Shadow knew most of the people in the room: Laura’s workmates, several of her friends.
They all recognized him. He could see it in their faces. There were no smiles, though, no hellos.
At the end of the room was a small dais, and, on it, a cream-colored casket with several displays of flowers arranged about it: scarlets and yellows and whites and deep, bloody purples. He took a step forward. He could see Laura’s body from where he was standing. He did not want to walk forward; he did not dare to walk away.
A man in a dark suit—Shadow guessed he worked at the funeral home—said, “Sir? Would you like to sign the condolence and remembrance book?” and pointed him to a leather-bound book, open on a small lectern.
He wrote SHADOW and the date in his precise handwriting, then, slowly, he wrote (PUPPY) beside it, putting off walking toward the end of the room where the people were, and the casket, and the thing in the cream casket that was no longer Laura.
A small woman walked in through the door, and hesitated. Her hair was a coppery red, and her clothes were expensive and very black. Widow’s weeds, thought Shadow, who knew her well. Audrey Burton, Robbie’s wife.
Audrey was holding a sprig of violets, wrapped at the base with silver foil. It was the kind of thing a child would make in June, thought Shadow. But violets were out of season.
She walked across the room, to Laura’s casket. Shadow followed her.
Laura lay with her eyes closed, and her arms folded across her chest She wore a conservative blue suit he did not recognize. Her long brown hair was out of her eyes. It was his Laura and it was not: her repose, he realized, was what was unnatural. Laura was always such a restless sleeper.
Audrey placed her sprig of summer violets on Laura’s chest. Then she worked her mouth for a moment and spat, hard, onto Laura’s dead face.
The spit caught Laura on the cheek, and began to drip down toward her ear.
Audrey was already walking toward the door. Shadow hurried after her.
“Audrey?” he said.
“Shadow? Did you escape? Or did they let you out?’
He wondered if she were taking tranquilizers. Her voice was distant and detached.
“Let me out yesterday. I’m a free man,” said Shadow. “What the hell was that all about?”
She stopped in the dark corridor. “The violets? They were always her favorite flower. When we were girls we used to pick them together.”
“Not the violets.”
“Oh, that,” she said. She wiped a speck of something invisible from the corner of her mouth. “Well, I would have thought that was obvious.”
“Not to me, Audrey.”
“They didn’t tell you?” Her voice was calm, emotionless. “Your wife died with my husband’s cock in her mouth, Shadow.”
He went back in to the funeral home. Someone had already wiped away the spit.
After lunch—Shadow ate at the Burger King—was the burial. Laura’s cream-colored coffin was interred in the small nondenominational cemetery on the edge of town: un-fenced, a hilly woodland meadow filled with black granite and white marble headstones.
He rode to the cemetery in the WendeU’s hearse, with Laura’s mother. Mrs. McCabe seemed to feel that Laura’s death was Shadow’s fault. “If you’d been here,” she said, “this would never have happened. I don’t know why she married you. I told her. Time and again, I told her. But they don’t listen to their mothers, do they?” She stopped,, looked more closely at Shadow’s face. “Have you been fighting?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Barbarian,” she said, then she set her mouth, raised her head so her chins quivered, and stared straight ahead of her.
To Shadow’s surprise Audrey Burton was also at the funeral, standing toward the back. The short service ended, the casket was lowered into the cold ground. The people went away.
Shadow did not leave. He stood there with his hands in his pockets, shivering, staring at the hole in the ground.
Above him the sky was iron gray, featureless and flat as a mirror. It continued to snow, erratically, in ghostlike tumbling flakes.
There was something he wanted to say to Laura, and he was prepared to wait until he knew what it was. The world slowly began to lose light and color. Shadow’s feet were going numb, while his hands and face hurt from the cold. He burrowed his hands into his pockets for warmth, and his fingers closed about the gold coin.
He walked over to the grave.