On the corner of Twenty-second Street and First Avenue, in an old Victorian that now houses an accounting firm, Lincoln has created a mortician who solemnly and wordlessly prepares the dead. In the three years since Caroline’s death, the spell of that redbrick house with the carved white gables has grown so strong that he can no longer remember her real funeral, Caroline died on the reservation. “At least she was convenient,” said Betty miserably. “May have raised my kids in the city, but they gonna be buried up next to the lake.” Lincoln’s mortician interfered. When he recalls Caroline he thinks of rows of mourners in black suits and a viewing room draped in black crepe and lit by candles.

When Caroline died, Betty and Lincoln took the bus up north. Irma was already there, but hadn’t been in the car when the Burlington Northern freight train folded it in half. It was the only time he’d ever gone to the reservation. They left the city on the freeway. After every stop, every turn, the roads got narrower, the bus stops shabbier, the houses set along the road smaller. What took six hours by car stretched into nine on the bus. Betty sat with a straight back, her hands clasped tightly around her sequined black purse. Her wedding purse, she called it. “I got this my wedding day. This and a whole lot more,” Betty told Lincoln as they packed one small suitcase with both their belongings. She shook her head. “Didn’t have a clue it’d turn out like this. No idea at all.” The black purse covered in glittering black sequins was to accompany them to the funeral but they had no proper mourning duds, as she called them. Instead, she put on her darkest skirt, forced Lincoln into the shower, dressed him in the cleanest jeans in his dresser and bought him an almost-black work shirt on Nicollet on their way to the station. They’d entered the store before she realized it was a uniform store for nurses and deliverymen.

“Can I help you?” the clerk asked doubtfully. She stood behind a rack of Carhart overalls and looked reluctant to come out.

“I need the smallest black shirt you got,” said Betty, all business.

The clerk stepped from behind the rack and pursed her pale lips. “You look like a twelve,” she mused, tucking a patch of greasy bangs behind her ear.

“It ain’t for me,” snapped Betty, “it’s for him,” she said, and pointed at Lincoln, who stood absently fingering a pile of sun-bleached socks that sat in a dusty plastic bin.

The clerk eyed Lincoln and turned back to Betty. The disdain in her eyes familiar, the surprise at seeing two Indians in the city quite new. Not today, thought Betty. God, just not today.

“Man’s small still gonna be too big. Cuffs are gonna be draggin on the ground.”