my father had worked out the arrangements.
“Absolutely not. What are the chances that they’ll want to leave when you can leave and return when you have to return? Zero.”
I said, “But, Ray: I don’t know you well enough to bring you to a funeral.”
“I’ll wait in the car,” he said.
“It’s not an hour or two. There’s the service, then the burial, then I’m sure there will be a lunch for the out-of-town guests back at my house.”
He said quietly, “I know all too well the number of hours that a funeral can consume.”
I said I couldn’t talk. Someone’s ears needed tubes. To end the conversation, I yielded. I said he could pick me up at six A.M. And just in case he didn’t spend the whole time waiting in the car, he should wear a dark suit.
I also said, “Ray? I don’t want you to construe this as anything but what it is—transportation. I’m being completely forthright here. If you want to drive me all the way to Princeton as a friend, I’d appreciate it, but otherwise I’ll make arrangements with my cousins.”
“I get it,” he said. “I think I was a little too pushy at the party, coming on too strong in the kitchen. But I know that. That’s why I called your apartment—to apologize. Besides, I have my own guilt to deal with.”
“Guilt? Because you went to a party?”
“More like, if I ever told my parents that I had feelings for a woman so soon after Mary died, they’d be furious.”
I asked, “Your parents? Or are you talking about your parents-in-law?”
Ray said, “Let’s not talk about parents, especially with your mother just having passed.”
“Not my mother, my grandmother.”
I heard a low chuckle in my ear. “You did sound kind of blasé for a gal whose mother just died.”
“She was ninety-four and comatose,” I said.
“God bless her.”
I was at the nurses’ station on Fletcher-4. I caught one nurse rolling her eyes at another. They’d been listening.
I hung up the phone and stated for the record, “My grandmother died last night, unexpectedly.”
“We heard,” said one, not even looking up from her fashion magazine. “Unexpectedly, despite being ninety-four.”
“No one’s sympathetic when they hear ninety-something,” I said. “They think that makes it easy, as if it’s overdue and you should have been prepared.”
They exchanged looks again. I wanted to say, What am I doing wrong? Did I sound brusque or unfeeling? Have we met before? Instead I said, “I’m Dr. Thrift. This is my first night in ENT. You probably know my housemate, Leo, from pediatrics. Leo Frawley?”
The younger one sat up straighter and hooked stray blond tendrils behind her ears. “I know Leo,” she said.
“And you are?”
“Roxanne.”
“I’m Mary Beth,” volunteered her deskmate. “I used to work in peds.”
“We’re sorry for your loss,” said Roxanne. “I’d be, like, devastated if my grandmother died—no matter how old she was.”
I took a tissue from their box, touched it to each eye, and said with uncharacteristic aplomb, “I’ll be sure to tell Leo how kind you were.”
HAD I REALLY thought that Joyce Thrift’s social reflexes and nuptial dreams would fail her on that January day, just because she was laying her mother to rest?
Ray whistled appreciatively when we pulled up to my parents’ house, a sprawling Dutch Colonial, previously white, now yellow with pine-green shutters—a new color scheme they’d forgotten to tell me about.
“How many square feet in this baby?” Ray asked, squinting through his tinted windshield.
I said I had no idea. One doesn’t think of one’s childhood home in mathematical terms.
“How many bedrooms?”
“Five.”
“Five! For how many kids?”
“Two. But one is a guest room, and another’s my mother’s studio.”
“For what?”
“Fiber art,” I confessed.
Ray looked engaged, which was his psychological specialty: filing away facts that would later make him seem uniquely attentive. “You mean like weaving?” he asked.
“Weaving’s part of it. She incorporates different elements—wool, feathers, newsprint, photographs, bones.”
“Human or animal?”
I said he could ask her himself. She’d be thrilled to discuss it since her relatives and friends had grown tired of her shaggy wall hangings, both as a topic of conversation and as an art form.
“Maybe on a future visit, but I certainly wouldn’t bring it up today,” said the master of funereal etiquette. He pointed to the silver van in the driveway and read approvingly, “Fêtes by Frederick.”
“The caterer. People will be coming back after the cemetery.”
“Buffet, you think?”
“Something low-key. When my grandfather died, we had finger sandwiches and petits fours.”
“So what’s the plan? I meet you back here?”
I looked at my watch and calculated aloud, “Funeral at eleven, then to the cemetery, then back here for an hour. How does one-thirty sound? I’ll come out to the car.”
“Doc,” said Ray. “That’s terrible. You’re not going to run in and run out like you’ve been beeped. This is your grandmother who died, not some second cousin twice removed.”
“Two-thirty, then?”
“I wouldn’t mind going to the church,” said Ray. “I find that even if I don’t know the deceased, I get a lot out of it.”
What could I do but include him after the gas and mileage he’d invested in the trip and his curiosity about fiber art? I said, “I think I’ll be riding with the next of kin in the limousine. But if you want to go to the church, I’m sure that’s fine.” I reached for the door handle. “I should probably have this time alone with my mother, though.”
“Absolutely,” said Ray. “I don’t want to be underfoot while she’s getting dressed.”
I wasn’t worried about my mother, who could be gracious in any tragedy. But I needed to take her aside and explain that the rough-hewn man in the red car was a mere acquaintance and—not that she’d ever entertain such thoughts on a day like today—wholly unsuited to any other role. And the Swarthmore sticker on the back windshield? Not applicable; a relic from the previous owner.
“Mind if I run in and use the toilet?” Ray asked.
I said okay. There was a powder room just inside the front door.
“Thirty seconds, and that includes the hand-washing,” he promised.
He took his gray pin-striped jacket from its hanger, put it on, tugged at his cuffs, smoothed his silver tie against his sternum. “Not bad, huh?” he asked.
Already on my way up the stone walk, I didn’t look back. I opened the front door and called, “Anyone home?”
Ray