What would happen this week?

She touched her face, her hand shaking. No, don’t start thinking like that. But she looked down anyway. The week held far fewer appointments, none of which she felt she had the strength to keep. She wondered who had taken Hal and Lottie’s children, if they’d gone on their vacation to Monterey after all. They hadn’t been at the funeral.

“Stop it,” she said aloud. But her mind kept humming. She saw Eddie’s casket at Ging’s, heard Big Ed’s one sob as he kneeled before it, saw Frannie almost go down at the gravesite.

She shook her head again. Yes, the others had it easier now. It had been bearable, getting breakfast made because Big Ed had been there, next to her, touching as they passed one another. But now, with nothing to do but think and remember, she didn’t know if she could stand it.

Maybe she should go and wake up Frannie?

But Frannie, nowhere near as strong as she was, needed her rest. She was sure of that.

“Hi.”

There she was, in the doorway. Erin hadn’t even heard her. “Are you okay?” Frannie asked.

“Sure. I’m just”-she motioned to the calendar-“the week… just seems kind of long.”

Frannie came over next to her. She was barefoot, wearing one of Jodie’s robes, and ran her hand across Erin’s shoulders, leaving her arm draped there.

Erin shook her head again, unable now to see the calendar. Why is that? she thought. And what is this rushing sensation? She turned into her daughter-in-law, hiding her face in the front of the robe. Frannie hugged her close, and suddenly Erin couldn’t hold back anymore.

“It’s all right,” Frannie said, “it’s all right.”

Over and over, as the tears wouldn’t stop.

Bunch of dorks, Steven thought as the class filed out around him. Everybody talking about how tough the test was. What was hard was having to sit there after you were finished for twenty minutes while the rest of the class labored over this bullshit.

Okay, so if that got to him, he’d just stay longer, until everybody’d gone.

“You finished, Steven?”

Mr. Andre, a major-league nerd, though he knew his math, stood up by the desk, waiting. Normally, he called Steven Mr. Cochran. All the kids here at S.I. were Mister. So maybe Andre felt sorry for him because of Eddie.

Well, fuck that. “I was done a half hour ago.”

“Too easy?”

Steven shrugged.

Andre was stacking the other tests, cutting him all the slack in the world. “You want to bring it up?”

He gathered his books, head hung down. Andre was standing right over his desk. “I’ll take it. I’m very sorry about your brother.”

Thanks, that helps a lot, Steven thought as he squeezed out by him. “Yeah,” he said.

Big Ed didn’t tell Erin that he called in sick. He figured not telling her didn’t break their rule about being truthful to each other, even when it would hurt. She didn’t have to know he’d come here. She’d only worry about him, and she had enough on her mind.

The gravesite seemed different. They had put the stone up, was one thing. “Edward John Cochran, Jr.-1962- 1988.”

He wished he could somehow wipe off the last numbers, make them not have happened. Go back with his wife and kids to two weeks ago and just stop everything right there for all time.

Kneeling on the wet morning ground, he thought about the last time he’d seen Eddie alive, the disagreement they’d had. He wished it hadn’t happened, the same way he wished every tiny event of the last week hadn’t ever been, as though any small change might have prevented what was.

Anyway, the argument hadn’t been important. And it wasn’t as if father and son hadn’t gotten along in general. Sometimes Eddie got a little carried away with his brains, was all, maybe thought his dad was a little too salt-of-the-earth.

Ed didn’t know. Maybe he was a little simple. Things seemed to work for him, though. What was so tough, you had to get all worked up over them? He didn’t get it. You just did your job, you were faithful to your wife, you stuck by your friends. That was it.

Not, he knew, that there weren’t hard questions. Like Eddie’s problem with his boss. Sure, that wasn’t easy to figure out. Maybe the man was in trouble, and getting deeper. But Big Ed really believed it wasn’t Eddie’s problem. If it got too serious, Eddie could just go get another job for a couple of months before starting graduate school. There were tons of options.

All of ’em gone.

He moved back into the shade and pulled himself up to sit on a horizontal cypress branch.

He guessed he’d come up here to say a few prayers, but for some reason, they weren’t coming out very well. His mind kept jumping.

Or rather, remembering…

“What if,” Eddie had said, “what if you’d been alive in Germany in the thirties and had seen what was going on with Hitler? Would that have been your business?”

“Well, sure.”

“So where do you draw the line?”

And Ed had sat there in the trophy room surrounded by the memorabilia of his family’s life and said: “It’s a commonsense thing. You figure where it’s going to hit you.”

“So what if you weren’t Jewish and you had a good government job in the Third Reich? It wouldn’t have hit you at all?”

“Yeah, but there you’re talking evil.”

“God versus the devil, huh?”

Big Ed realized how dumb that sounded. “I guess you also have to figure out if it’s a big enough issue. If it is, you get in it.”

“How about if getting in it early might keep an issue from getting big in the first place?”

He couldn’t help smiling as he thought back on it. How’d he raised this white knight?

He had changed tacks. “What’s the matter, are you bored at home? Not enough to do?” Meaning it to be funny.

But Eddie didn’t have much of a sense of humor about his notion of right and wrong. He hadn’t actually spoken harshly to his dad, but Big Ed could tell he’d said the wrong thing. “Sometimes,” Eddie said, “there are just things you’ve got to do, even if everything in your life is rosy, or it’s inconvenient.”

“I agree with you,” he’d said, placating. “All I’m saying is you’ve got to pick your shots. You waste your ammo taking target practice, and when real shooting time comes you’re out of luck.”

That’s really what he’d said, and suddenly it brought him up short. He had really talked about guns and ammo. And then, less than a week later…

If there was a connection, he thought, between that talk and his son’s death…

His brain jumped again. What had Eddie said about his boss- Polk at Army Distributing? Something about him and his wife and the business. Was it just that they were in some kind of trouble, or was that only what Big Ed remembered?

Across the cemetery, through the trees, a black limo was pulling slowly up the hill, leading another group of cars to another hole in the ground.

No, he was sure Eddie hadn’t said what it was. Big Ed kicked at the ground, then stood up. Goddamn, he thought. I should have listened to him, not argued with him. Maybe I’d have some idea now about the why of it all.

They’d laid the sod over Eddie’s grave. It was a good job, he noticed, all but seamless. As he’d done countless other times working at the Park, he walked the sod’s edge, pressing it into its bed. He wanted the grass over this grave to grow.

Nobody home.

No surprise there.

He put his books on the table adjacent to the front door and walked back to his bedroom.

Probably out do-gooding somewhere. Making Frannie feel better by taking her to lunch or a museum or a park. Never mind it’s my last day of finals, never mind how I might feel about Eddie being gone. Never mind anything about ol’ Steven.

And Eddie was gone. He was dead. Eddie dead. Say it say it say it.

She hadn’t made the bed again. Well, that experiment had certainly worked. Sure, Mom told him it was his job, but funny, it hadn’t been Eddie’s, or Mick’s. Or if it had been, they hadn’t done it and Mom had covered. But she didn’t cover for him. Not one time. And every day he left the bed unmade, hoping she’d come in, as he’d seen her do every day with his brothers in their room. She’d cluck disapprovingly-but then make the beds.