The day they buried him, however, the weather had cooled considerably. It was one of those May days in which you can still glimpse the retreating spring, and the air tasted of damp and melancholy. Not grief, mind you. As I said, nobody really mourned Tommy. You saw the relief in everybody’s eyes, the guilt at the relief, the narrow, shameful stares at the coffin as the pallbearers inched it into the ground and the breeze picked up as if to hurry them along, get that bastard inside the earth where he belonged, that much closer to hell. The new leaves shivered in the trees. I remember the good reverend father spoke his lines hastily, so that the words slurred together, Wecommendtoalmightygodourbrotherthomas, and that a little glint of sunshine caught the lid before it disappeared from view. Then it was all mercifully over and we turned away from Tommy and from each other. I shook hands with the Randolphs without meeting a single eye. My mother was there too, although the twins were both in college, Leo at Harvard (the Lightfoots were Harvard men) and Vanessa at Skidmore, and couldn’t come. Or perhaps it was thought best that they didn’t come, tender lambs as they were. Meanwhile, my father had avoided the affair on principle—he hadn’t attended the wedding, and he damned well wasn’t going to attend the funeral—so it was just the two of us on my side, mother and daughter, against the various Randolphs, and I’d like to say that we forged a bond in that moment, that this harrowing encounter brought us close together at last.

But you see, I was still so shocked, so numb with horror at myself. I couldn’t speak to my mother at all. I caught her glance only once as they nestled Tommy’s coffin in its eternal hole. During the service, they had left the casket open, because a well-placed shot behind the ear leaves your face remarkably unscathed and Tommy’s face was the only noble part of him, and as I’d stared at his waxy skin and his eyes for the last time, his lashes that remained as long and lush as in life, I’d felt terrifyingly little emotion. Maybe a speck of pity, that was all. So I was reflecting on this apathy as the breeze nudged my widow’s veil, wondering whether it meant I was a monster, a sociopath or whatever they called them, and I happened to glance at my mother just as she was glancing at me, and I saw at once that she knew exactly how Tommy had died. Mothers know, don’t they? They gave birth to you and suckled you and tended every inch of you. They can peer straight through your eyes and part the drapes of your soul.