“No, now, we wouldn’t want to do that,” he said consolingly. He looked strange, in a navy-blue churchgoing suit under a noon sun on a weekday. Adam had brought his entire family, including three grandchildren, getting them out of the orchard and into their good clothes. A few other neighbors were there, and Martha Stoudt from down in Fern Hollow—she was the caterer. Roy had stayed behind the counter at the store. Three of my female high-school classmates showed up, touchingly, and a business associate of my father’s, a fellow-accountant, who I thought had long ago died. In fact, though older than my parents, he was wiry and tan. He spent half the year in Florida, and didn’t lack for dancing partners down there; this last was confided with a wink. Senility showed only in his tears, which refused to dry up in the outdoors, even with the early-fall sun beating down and a dry wind blowing on the cemetery hill. All the grief the rest of us were too distracted to feel flowed, it seemed, through his unstoppable rivulet.

Martha Stoudt and the pastor’s wife and I had been too optimistic about the funeral attendance; there were high-heaped platters of potato salad and cole slaw and sliced bread and cold cuts waiting for us in the church function room. The food held us fast like flies; we murmured and circled, though the farmers were anxious to get back to their farms and my high-school friends back to their jobs. All three former girls worked in welfare administration, as it had turned out—government-sponsored mothers to the nation’s hordes of orphans. “It will all be fine,” June Zimmerman reassured me. She had been the prettiest of the three forty years ago, when she weighed half of what she did now. “They are learning English,” she all but sang. “They know they must, to get out of service jobs. It just takes a generation or two, the same as it did for our people.” Prodigiously bosomy, she had long outgrown the bobby socks and pleated, flippy cheerleader’s skirt in which I still saw her. In her eyes, perhaps, I was a newborn orphan.