When the doors opened, the metal frame nearly hit Josie across the lower back, and she stood quickly, walked down the steps, and into the parking lot. Natalie followed.

“Did you drive?” Josie asked.

“We’re not leaving,” Natalie said.

“I just want to sit in the car.”

Natalie gave Josie the keys and they made their way to the car. It was parked close to the funeral home, and Josie had to slide down in the passenger seat to keep from being seen. Still, from where she sat, she could see the steady stream of black-clad bodies make their way to their cars, and then she saw her father. He looked tiny even with her aunt’s thin arm around his shoulder, and he looked tired and old. Josie forced herself to imagine him dead, laid out in a dark mahogany casket identical to her mother’s. Besides his work, her mother had been his life, her mother and herself, and now her mother was dead, and Josie had excommunicated herself, and now he would have no one. She could easily imagine him as one of those perfectly healthy men who die shortly after their wives. He would die, and she would add another baby block to the already towering stack of guilt.

She watched her father and her aunt stand beside the hearse, its back doors wide open like a gaping mouth. Then four men emerged from the back door of the chapel with the casket. They transferred it easily, the front carriers using only one hand, and Josie wondered if her mother was still inside. When Matthew died, she had watched the casket lock shut, heard the clicks of the brass brackets, and then followed the men outside. Now, Josie watched the men slide the casket into the hearse, watched her father blow his nose in a handkerchief, watched her aunt looking very much like her mother with her puffs of blonde hair and red painted fingernails, and imagined this was what would have played out if she had managed to drown herself the night of Matthew’s funeral. She would have joined Matthew in the soft ground, their skin drying up like old orange peels, their bones replicas of each other—brother and sister, sister and brother.

Natalie turned the ignition on.

“No,” Josie said.

“We can drive behind the other cars.”

“I don’t want to go up there.”

“You can stay in the car.”

Josie put her feet on the dashboard and leaned the seat back. As they drove, she could see the too-green slopes of endless grass from the corners of her eyes, and when they stopped, two tall cypress trees jutted up beside her.

“I’m getting out; are you coming or staying?”

“Staying,” Josie said. She felt the rush of cool air, heard the door slam shut, and immediately felt the complete stillness of the sealed car. She looked up. Natalie had parked far enough away that there were no cars behind, but close enough so that if Josie stretched out of her seat, she could just make out the crowd of dark bodies engulfing the gravesite. She watched Natalie walk quickly toward the crowd.