Chapter 14: Graceland

I showed Damiano the text before I'd decided whether to.

He read it standing at the sink with a dish towel over his shoulder.

"No," he said.

"I didn't ask."

"You were about to."

"She said alone."

"She also said she was praying for you," he said. "Danielle says a lot of things."

Bruna came in for a glass of water and read the screen over my arm.

"Graceland at nine," she said. "On Memorial Day. There'll be flags on every grave and old men with folding chairs."

"So it's public," I said.

"It's a cemetery. It's public in the way a library is public."

"She wants me to take something," I said to Damiano. "Or sign something. She won't say it in front of you."

"Then she won't say it."

"She will if she thinks nobody's listening."

Bruna set her glass down very slowly.

I watched her get it a second before her brother did.

"The Palmer tomb is two rows from your mother," Bruna said. "Big granite thing with columns. I've hidden behind worse."

"Absolutely not," Damiano said.

"You're not invited," his sister told him. "You'd stand behind a column and it would still be obvious."

He looked at me for a long moment.

"I'll be at the Clark Street gate," he said finally. "Twenty minutes. Then I come in, and I bring everyone."

At nine the next morning Graceland was green and bright and full of small flags.

My mother's stone was gray, plain, under an old oak, the way she'd wanted it.

Someone had already been there.

A low glass vase of white roses stood against the stone.

No card.

I touched one of the petals and found it cold with dew.

Danielle came up the path at ten past, in pale pink and sunglasses, with the rosewood box in her arms.

She'd brought nobody either.

She stopped on the other side of the grave and looked at the roses.

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