Maybe it was lucky that the nun was there to go after her, though the nun didn’t move. She was so stunned she just stood at the door. But then Birdie came back, for it had dawned on her that the nun was driving a little tin can of a car, and she could drive her into the hospice in twenty minutes. To see her son.

No bother at all, says the nun.

But in fact Birdie wasn’t going to be seeing her son that day. No. Not ever again. For before the little tin can of a car came to a complete stop at the main entrance of the hospice, a staff nurse was already fussing around the vehicle, and opening the door and pushing a wheelchair into position in order to convey Birdie with the utmost speed down the quiet corridor that could well have been a convent in the previous century, and into the little enclosed cubicle where Gussie had choked on internal fluids thirty minutes earlier and passed away without struggle or distress, but alone, and with no witness.

He didn’t look any different.

And – it must have been only seconds later – Hughie and Louise arrived, talking to each other about the snow that was falling, and they strolled into the cubicle and found a nurse sitting beside him and the sheet already pulled over his face. Birdie was in the family room talking to the priest about the funeral.

Was that yesterday? No. It was the day before. It had been snowing for two days. And the poor birds were starving. Pecking at the kitchen window. Especially the robin. Couldn’t see in. But his little head was close up to the glass. Didn’t have great eyesight, that wee robin. Not that Birdie’s eyes were so good either. But she must leave a few crumbs out for them. Yes. That’s what she should do. And she did it. Just like she should change out of her dressing gown and red slippers, and put on her black rags, and go to the funeral, at half-eleven. And she did that too. She did everything as everything should be done.

3

GUSSIE WAS BURIED on the last day of November, and his funeral passed off without much notice in the town. A small scattering of old friends gathered in the front pews around the grieving mother. The priest said something about life being a long walk, and that for some it’s longer than others.

The coffin was bedecked with bouquets of flowers and the black hearse glided like a hovercraft through the main street of the town, with the required amount of dignity. Birdie sat in the back of a Mercedes that purred like a cat. Hughie Donoghue, old friend of the stricken mother, and Louise, erstwhile heart-throb of the deceased, either side of her on the black leather seats.

When nobody was watching them, they were all reasonably jolly. Birdie quizzed Louise on her plans. Louise said she was going back to Missouri. She missed her boyfriend, and he was helpless without her. Or was it Montana? It was definitely America.