“Yes,” I respond. As much as I’d like to squeeze Eric for more info, I don’t think I can stomach any more truth today. When he comes back into the room, I make my apologies and decide to wait in the car.

At the door, I pause and turn to him. “You never knew Moony to gamble, did you?”

“That one? Gamble? Other than the weekly bingo game, I think she’d sooner let hell swallow her whole than be seen participating in anything as immoral as that,” he says with a good-natured laugh.

I know he’s right. Not about Moony’s gambling, but about whether she’d let herself be seen gambling. Whatever machines she frequented must have been far enough away from here that she felt certain she could keep up her pious image.

I thank Eric again, head for the car, roll the windows down, and bury my earbuds in my ears, laying the seat back for a nap.

When Mary finally makes it outside, she spots me straightaway. “Wake up, kiddo!” she practically sings into my ear. “We got what we came for. Next stop, the crematorium.” She announces this like one of those tour guides forever wandering the Quarter.

I sit up, a little less queasy, and slide her sunglasses from my face. “Great. Can’t wait.”

She pats my knee and pulls away, using Eric’s drive to turn the car around. As we breeze past Moony’s house, I can’t resist looking back for one last glimpse of my old life. There, tangled in the blooms of the red hibiscus, I think I see a string of red and purple Mardi Gras beads.

I am turning the afternoon with Eric over in my head like a well-worn bone on our way to the crematorium. I hear the low wail for several minutes before I register the sirens. The traffic slows, and my mother begins cursing under her breath. She is suddenly anxious to get out of this town, as if the very air makes her skin crawl. We pass the little Pik-M-Up convenience store where Moony would sometimes stop for milk if she was in a hurry and the dentist office with the low roof where I had my first tooth pulled without anesthetic. We pass the garden center with their pink hanging baskets full of plants and the bank where Moony always stopped for cash. We even pass the drugstore that always smelled like band-aids and iodine.