“Is he in heaven now?” He looked up at her, and she felt a spasm of guilt. He looked so small, so young, and she wondered if she had been that believing when she was four, and her brother Matthew died. She imagined she had. She had been sent to Sunday School a handful of times, and the family had gone to church on a few Easters, but that was before Matthew’s death. After, no one seemed to care about Jesus or redemption, and Josie thought Matthew had probably gone to heaven not because her parents told her so, but because she remembered how, at Sunday School, she had colored a picture of heaven with smiling winged babies floating on clouds. But she had learned soon after that souls didn’t float around in some cosmic or heavenly sphere. When she was eight, she had watched an after-school television special where a teenage girl had told her mother she hated her before she left for school one morning. That afternoon, the girl came home to find her house surrounded by police cars and ambulances, and her mother dead. Josie couldn’t remember what happened in the middle of the program, but at the end, the mother mystically appeared at the foot of the girl’s bed one night to forgive her daughter. Josie had no idea that someone who was dead could appear again. She had been told that Matthew was never coming back, but here was this woman returning to grant forgiveness. The idea was astounding, and for weeks she whispered “Matthew, I hate you” out her bedroom window at night. But of course, Matthew hadn’t appeared, and one morning, when she once again woke up with no visit from her brother, she went downstairs and hurled every throwable object she could find at the television. After that, Josie knew that dead meant dead, and it was the people who were left that you had to deal with. That’s who funerals were for—the people left. It didn’t matter to the dead what food or clothing or adornments they were buried with, whether the day and time of the service were auspicious, what each family member shaved or painted or tore.

But to Tyler it mattered, and the existence of someplace better suddenly seemed quite possible. The thought pricked her roughly, and she shook her head.

“Almost done,” she said. She didn’t know what to say next, but the idea of telling him that yes, the bird was in heaven with God watching from above made her palms damp and her heart quicken. “Do you want to say a prayer?” she asked.

“I don’t know any prayers,” he said.

“Don’t you say prayers at school?”

“Only before we eat.”

“Well … do you want to say that one?”

“It’s only before we eat,” he said, and pushed the hair out of his eyes.