“Minnie is closing it, right?”

“I don’t know. She hasn’t said. But you still need to move.”

“Yeah. Might as well get it done.”

Only a few months ago, he had packed to leave the dorm, carrying boxes along the balcony in air drunk with pollen, hearing the crack of a bat across the way from the baseball stadium; today, in the cramped boardinghouse room he slid around Ben, from the dresser to the makeshift closet, packing five boxes this time, and a stack of books. A dozen hangers, faded shirts. He called to have the phone turned off. Sheila came to the door, saw what they were doing. “Here we go. You heading home?”

“Yep,” said Ben.

Jamal passed behind her, laid his hands on her shoulders. They had drifted together again without making much of it. Maybe it was Miss Dee, dying, who changed their minds. Who knew what would happen with them? They might stay together a month, or a lifetime. The four of them in proximity—the feeling had changed—they were older in a marked way, they spoke as if they had been friends for a long time, they had become entangled by the last few days, and now they were about to separate, but not without a difference. There was tacit agreement with what they saw in one another, two couples, even though they had preferred not to speak about it. Ben’s staying in the room with Ronny through the last days had settled that side of the question. Maybe it would have been different without the finality of Miss Dee’s dying, the closing of her boardinghouse, the end of the semester, the coming of the holiday. But they were parting, two from two, and so it was all right.

It had been the same at Miss Dee’s graveside service. Two and two. Maybe two dozen people there, Minnie and her family, Miss Clara in her shaky lipstick and smeared mascara, a neighbor, the women’s circle from Miss Dee’s church. The four of them from the boardinghouse. Ben had refused to go at first but changed his mind; appeared to change his mind again during the service, while the casket, closed, hung on green cloth straps, waiting to be lowered into the grave. Maybe he wished he were somewhere else. Ronny stood alongside picturing his own mother, feeling the substance of death, the carpet of it, the next step toward oblivion, for himself, one day, and for everyone else. For Ben.

Everyone at the graveside sorry, but only mildly so, and embarrassed at the idea of her death, Miss Dee, lying in her box, safely out of sight.

Something about the coldness of this drew them near, Ben and Ronny. There was something true in the idea that a person could die so alone, something fearful about it, that people should stand around in slight embarrassment at a graveside to which they gathered more out of a sense of obligation than loss. It made Ronny and Ben want to stand closer, to sense each other. Kept Ben from fleeing the scene.