I couldn’t figure out why Horace was acting so weird. I mean, he wasn’t ever a warm person, but you could at least expect fury or anger from him, some bit of rage under the surface. But that day he just seemed preoccupied, like something else was on his mind. It was strange, you know?

At the gravesite, which was unbearable, by the way—a gray-grassed plot of nothing, little tombstones with their humped backs slouching around us, Mom’s coffin up on this mechanical lowering device, a little blue tarp slung up to keep out the rain—Horace kept looking over his shoulder, scanning the trees for somebody, like he was afraid of being watched. I couldn’t figure out what he was doing or what he was looking for.

The time came for us to sprinkle soil on the casket. Horace was supposed to go first, but he wasn’t paying attention, and the preacher had to give him a nudge. Then he just walked up to the casket, tossed some dirt on it, and stormed off like he had something better to do.

We found him sitting in the Trans Am, honking at us. Our mother was dead, and the asshole was honking at us. He rolled the window down and stuck his head out of the car.

“Move your asses,” he said.

They were the first words he had spoken to us all day.

After the funeral, Murphy and I hung out in the garage, still in our nice black clothes, while Murphy smoked. I was shell-shocked and numb, all cried out. I kept trying to write a funeral poem for Mom the way Auden had written one for Yeats. “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry” and all that, but nothing was coming, nothing seemed right. I couldn’t stop thinking about my vision: Mom’s car sliding wheelless over the pavement at a hundred miles per hour. The police told us she hadn’t felt anything, that she’d died instantly. I sure hoped so. And what an awful thing to hope, you know? It made no sense that the best thing you could ask for in life was an instant, painless death. I mean, what did that say about the world, about living in it? How easily, how quickly an entire life—the whole universe of a person—could just vanish forever. What was to become of us, the ones left behind? Who was going to take care of us? Horace? Are you kidding me?

Murphy stomped out her cigarette, walked inside the house for a minute, and came back with a pair of keys.

“What are those for?” I said.

“It’s time we check out this trunk situation,” she said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, you saw a bunch of weird shit in your vision, right?” she said. “One of those things was me in this goddamn dress opening Horace’s trunk. Since it’s going to happen anyway, I figure we might as well get to it.”

“You really want to do that?” I said. “I mean, it wasn’t a happy vision. And besides, my visions don’t always come true. You remember all the times I’ve been wrong.”