Back in the house I had inherited, cat shadows slinked to the edges of the porch and the human heads were clustered around the television set. As I revolved the can-opener handle, I tried to remember the song my mother used to hum. It had an old-fashioned lilt to it, like “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” but wasn’t that. From the living room Nancy, still hurt about my not urging her to come with me, called that the pretzels were tasteless. “They’ve taken out the fat and the salt,” I explained. “For your good.” When I was a boy, some summer evenings after work, my father would bring home not only a bag of pretzels but a carton of tri-color ice cream. “I should have brought you back some ice cream.” As a boy I would use pretzels to fork in the ice cream: the combination of tastes improved both.

“Goodness,” my wife said, from the overstuffed wing chair my mother used to sit in, watching one inane program after another. “You are really reverting.”

The morning of the funeral, I began to clean out my mother’s crammed desk and found a little note on brittle blue stationery in an envelope addressed simply DAVID. It said, in her small backslanted handwriting:

In the event of my death I wish to be buried in the simplest possible ceremony, in the least expensive available coffin. Instead of flowers, I ask that contributions be directed to the

Boone Township Humane Society

R.F.D. 2, Box 88

Emmetstown, Penna.

I had done it all wrong. Flush with my inheritance, I had bought her the second-most expensive casket in the undertaker’s basement, cherrywood with shiny brass rails to carry it by, and had arranged with the Lutheran pastor for the usual Lutheran service, with a catered lunch afterwards. The announcement of the death in the Alton paper had said nothing about giving money to the humane society. Nor did her note say anything about what I was to do with the cats.

After the burial service, Dwight sidled up to me on the cemetery grass and said, “I haven’t been able to come over with the rifle these last days—we’re getting the buses ready for the school year, there’s been a ton of maintenance. And Adam has the early peaches coming in. But we’ll get to it, absolutely.”

The sight of the cherrywood coffin, with its brass fittings, sinking into the clean-sliced earth was still gleaming in my brain. I said, “Dwight, maybe it’s too much to ask. Why don’t you and Adam forget about it, and I’ll try to think of something else. It’s not your problem.”