Beneath “wedding tent” from “Rent-A-Tent.”
I shot out through the wall, landed on “Shirley’s lawn,” where “cute fake well” (with “little clay donkey”) used to be but was no more.
Why had my darling wedding dress been just left up in that dumb musty attic like that?
Where was Lloyd?
Where was he?
—
I emitted the shrill repetitive shrieking one of our ilk will emit if wishing to attract others of our ilk for consultation.
A crowd soon gathered.
Some of whom I knew (Jen Ballard, who I used to babysit, all grown up now, albeit dead; Mr. Mendon, the creep from the drugstore, who could sometimes be nice; Lisa Childs, the cheerleader who’d fallen off the Ferris wheel at Melody Lake while tipsy; eight petite gymnasts from Stanley High, whose bus had overturned coming home from “away game,” who had, it seemed, ever since, been holding hands), some I didn’t know (a threadbare fellow with a musket and a pamphlet; four wiry drowned Iroquois toting a canoe with a busted-out bottom; many simple Indiana working folks, hats in their hands, trying, eternally, to loosen the fancy, too-tight dress clothes in which they’d been buried; a short, fat priest with a goatee who rushed from person to person, urging repentance, but he had this very annoying voice and now, as in life, that voice was causing people to turn away from him while trying not to laugh, and hence no one at all was getting saved).
Forward stepped my grandmother, in the faded green housedress she’d worn pretty much constantly there at the end.
Grandma Gust, we’d called her. Because of her late-life farting. She’d been the first to call herself that. After ripping one at dinner. And then we all picked up on it.
It was actually so funny.
Sweetest grandma ever.
Yes, dear? she said.
Lloyd? I said. Lloyd Blaine.
Grandma cocked her head.
As if in thought.
Then rose, and the others fell in behind her, and I behind them.
We flew west across Stanley, to a part of town that used to be its own separate village, Hickum, but then got absorbed into the greater town of Stanley, and was known, in my day, for two bars (Jocko’s and the Maze), both of which would let a high school kid (even one as baby-faced as me, with no ID, not even a fake) just waltz right in.
Behind Jocko’s lay (my heart dropped) the broad expanse of the cemetery.
Sacred Heart of Mary Cemetery. Down we all floated as one.
Beneath a willow, fifteen feet from a stone bench upon which that Slurpee cup rested and had been resting now for the better part of a year, was the same old (disappointingly economical) stone reading:JBlaine, Wife, 1954–1976.
There beside it was (oh dear) a new one, made of marble, not just plain old stone, reading:LBlaine, Husband, 1948–2023.
I dived down underground before I’d really thought it through, and there he—
And shot back out so quick I found myself up on a phone line, sobbing, and though I had zero bodyweight, the phone line was swaying ever so slightly just from the sheer power of my feelings.
Those others of our ilk rose up, forming around me a consoling cloud.
He went, I said.
Yes, Grandma said. Right away. Immediately after. No dilly-dallying.
Without finding me first, I said.
Right, she said.
