In the morning, she parked the car on the thin, soft layer of snow in the driveway. Helen Sears was waiting for her in the little office. The Fletchers sat on a couch, side by side, silent.

“He’s dead,” said Helen. “He died at three twenty.”

———

They weren’t Jews, Mrs. Fletcher said, so the burial would take place after the proper interval and Annie would either have to cancel her sailing or miss the funeral. The choice was so cruel—she was, momentarily, so affected by the injustice of having to make such a decision—that it overshadowed her uncle’s death. Helen Sears was watching her with a kind of detached interest, the way she might have followed the progress of an insect confronted with an obstacle in its path.

Annie, unable to bear the Fletchers’ complacency, Helen’s death professionalism, drove to the cemetery, parking at the circular entrance and walking up the path on the fresh snow. She had not known until this morning that her mother was buried in a “family plot” and the news, given to her by Vernon Fletcher in his pallid fainting voice, had struck her like a blow. Her mother, she thought, as she walked toward the north hill, had been here all along.

She passed a new marble stone in front of which lay one long red gladiola sprinkled with snow. Just beyond, where the hill rounded from east to north, was a group of three small gravestones. As she stood in front of one, a man in a shabby plaid woodsman’s jacket came out of the trees bordering the north side of the cemetery. His hands deep in his pockets, he walked toward her, kicking the ground with the toes of his thick work boots.

“Ground hard,” he said. “Too hard. Feel that wind? It’s likely to bring more snow. Sometimes, this time of year, we have to stack them up in the crypt over there. Well, we’ll see.”

“My uncle died,” she said.

“You’re his niece? Well, I knew him. For a long time. Now I got to dig the hole for him.”

She looked down at the legend on the gravestone. Elizabeth, she read. Next to her would lie Gregory. Behind were the graves of Elizabeth’s and Gregory’s mother and father, her grandparents. She shivered as the wind hastened among the bare tree branches and lifted the soft snow into small flurries.

The gravedigger hunched his shoulders and walked back in the direction from which he had come. Annie remembered the damp cold feel of the doll she had found in the trunk in Uncle Greg’s attic. Then she hurried away from the cemetery. This would be over. Then her real life would begin.

“I can’t stay for the funeral,” she told the Fletchers. “If I don’t go on that ship, I won’t have enough money to ever go.”

Dr. Fletcher seemed not to have heard her. Perhaps he only heard barking dogs and hissing cats. But Mrs. Fletcher pursed up her lips and shook her head. “It’ll be on your conscience, dear,” she said with unconcealed triumph.