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By Root 662 0

her students, her only luxury, meeting her unmarried cousins in the city for lunch once a month. She keeps thinking how alone her mother must have felt when Nora's father died. Was it this same emptiness, she wonders, emptying the dryer in the laundry room. Her father died loving her mother, so at least she had that. Even without the physical presence the memory of love can be a source of strength, a comfort like prayer. Nora has a husband, but not his love, though he would probably deny that. Mired, Stephen said. She is an obligation. But Ken is a man of his word. He will do right by her. It's the way he was raised, the way his father managed all his affairs. Sadly, this is her assurance now, she thinks, folding the warm towels.

She is remembering her own father's funeral, all the outfits she tried on before choosing the red sailor dress, the brass buttons with anchors, white piping and blue stars on the square bib over her shoulders. “Aye, matey,” her father had saluted, the last time she wore it. She remembers being confused by her mother's reaction, shocked, grabbing her arm, hissing, because the Boston cousins were downstairs waiting with Carol, “What're you doing? Take it off! You look ridiculous!”

Stung, she tried to explain. “But Daddy likes me to wear this.”

“It's not appropriate. Take it off.”

“No!”

It was the first time her mother ever slapped her. She closes her eyes against the memory of the next, years later. Still can't bear remembering. She's forgotten what she did end up wearing to the funeral but remembers the burning heat that day, the brilliant sunshine, and the eerie displacement, her sense of being caught in another dimension, a discordant reality as if the car she'd been in had come to a wrenching stop, though trees and houses and people continued to blur past the windows. Grief had exposed an acute sentience. Death had made her too alive, too receptive, every nerve quickening with sensation. She remembers the sting of holy water on her smarting cheek with the priest's blessing and the painfully horsey gulp of Carol's sobs during “Amazing Grace.” She still remembers the dissonant skirl of birds chirping as the family shuffled after the flag-draped casket out of the small, crowded church, her dizziness in the sudden blinding glare, then at the quiet gravesite her knees buckling with the wormy smell of hot dirt. And afterward the noisy, smoky gathering, the party they called a mercy meal, saying it under her breath, mercy, mercy, mercy meal, like a prayer, a plea, over and over through the knotty pinepaneled VFW hall, pausing by her father's poker buddies shocked by his sudden death, but seeking solace in the old stories, their beery, heads-back laughter with each tale told, then, finally, on to the old woman gesturing from a table, her father's testy aunt Louise, raising her fork of macaroni salad to ask what those little green flecks were, onions or celery, because she couldn't eat onions, they made her throw up, and why on earth did people have to put onions in everything anyway when all they did was agitate your insides and sour the mayonnaise. And how good that was to hear, what a relief for the young girl at the mercy meal to be snagged back among the living.

Life was tough, so you squared your shoulders and kept putting one foot in front of the other. Only high honors and Girls' State for Marina Trimble's daughters. Scholarships through school. Work hard, study hard, protect the little that's left. Her mother had been promoted to assistant English department head at the high school. Nora was sixteen, the late spring night when Mr. Blanchard came by the house to take her mother out to dinner. Everything about it was shocking to Nora. He seemed so young compared to her mother. The idea of her mother's wanting to be with a man, even four years after her father's death, was reprehensible, as much a violation of her father's memory, as a threat. She couldn't stop thinking of the flesh of the most vital and sacred person in her life touching another man's, even just his hand brushing hers. Worse