Marta was already at Lucy’s when Will arrived the morning of the funeral. She put a cup of strong black coffee in his hands and he was touched by the wordless gesture. But then, he had been touched by the angle of sun on his bedroom floor and the deference of pigeons that took flight from his path across the parking lot toward his car. He was grateful for everything. For these two, mother and daughter. For Marta’s opportunistic contrariness. The way she took her coffee in halves —half milk, half sugar, half finished— waiting for her mother to protest. He was grateful when Lucy ignored the provocation.
     Will had never been to Lucy’s apartment. He looked around, feeling the warmth of it, a sense of open arms. It wasn’t the architecture. It was the round comfort of the old couch and chair, the used quality of everything. Candles burned to varying lengths suggested the peaceful soft glow of nights when electricity was banned. There were pieces of Mexico —a blanket, hand-painted pots, a punched tin candleholder. The kitchen, hardly large enough to turn around, might allow two people to work in it only if they choreographed their movements. At the moment, Lucy was dancing solo, making a salad. Will shifted from the dining room to the living room, a matter of a few steps. On the walls hung photographs —some of migrant workers, some scenic, some family. A large, signed photo of Cesar Chavez occupied a prominent position.
     Will stopped in front of a photograph of two girls, placed carefully on a small, spindly-legged wood table, situated between the couch and the wall. Next to the photo were two white rounded candles as small as golf balls, with teacup saucers placed under them to catch wax drip. A stick of incense was stuck in a cherry wood incense holder. Will thought he smelled sandalwood. A handful of smooth pebbles lay in a pile. One of the girls in the photograph was unmistakably Marta, at twelve or so, and the other was not much more than a toddler. The landscape around them was flat, the horizon low, and nearly straight. The girls were laughing at something or nothing, their eyes alive with joy. “Who is this with you in the picture, Marta?”
     “Elena, mi hermana.”
     Of course. He should have known. Emmy told him about Elena, that she was Lucy’s daughter by her second husband. After they were divorced, he took Elena for an afternoon and never came back. She was only three years old.
     Will sat down in the armchair across the room from the little table. From there, the arrangement of items reminded him of an altar.
     He gazed out Lucy’s window at the man in the opposite building. The man’s white T-shirt deepened the warm brown tone of his arm. He was reading a newspaper. Will could see the shadow of someone moving behind the curtains of the kitchen. “It’s so quiet here,” he said.
     “All the folks with kids have been gone for hours, so they could get a good spot to watch the Rose Parade,” Lucy said.
     But it wasn’t the lack of noise in the apartment complex. “There’s no family, besides Doug,” Will said. “Whenever anyone died in my family there was always a crush of relatives surrounding the immediate family. It wasn’t that there was a lot said. They were pretty stoical. But that many people just breathing in the same house make noise. Then there’s the scraping of chairs, and somebody offering bratwurst, and the smell of sauerkraut.”
     “In my family it was spaghetti and tuna casserole,” Lucy said.
     “No enchiladas?” Will asked.
     “Not a chance. My family went out of the way to be American. All my Anglo friends ate chorizo and camarones. Not me. I barely knew what they were.”
     “Maybe family is over-rated. Present company excepted,” Marta said. The phone rang and she reached past Lucy and picked up the receiver.
     It was Doug calling to say that he was leaving the crematorium in Sellwood.
     “Let’s get some flowers,” Marta said. “Where are your scissors, Mom?”
     “In the bottom drawer of the cabinet. Whose flowers do you intend to steal?”
     “There are tons of roses between here and the cemetery. We’ll spread it out. Emmy would have done it,” Marta said. She laid two pairs of scissors and two paper grocery bags on the table.
     Will considered the tools. How long had it been since he had broken the rules? To what world did those rules apply? In these days since she had been killed, a crumbling had been taking place, a cracking of mortar, loosening of bricks. Was there a moral, ethical issue here? What were the consequences of cutting roses? Who was he if he did not, could not break this convention of society? He knew he was not trying to talk himself into it or out of it. He was offering himself the alternatives so that he could say that it was not an unconscious act —that it was deliberate. Even though he knew as soon as Marta suggested it, that he would be an accomplice. He was outside of the rules just now —society had grown transparent and he could see the vital forces of chaos at the center. He felt laughter moving in the hollowness of his heart. It was so small a thing. If stealing flowers was as far as chaos would carry him, it seemed hardly worth the effort. They were only roses, not the breakdown of civilization, not even murder. Roses, unlike people, benefited from pruning.
     Will picked up one set of flower thieving tools and said, “Let’s go.”
     Lucy gave him a look and a sigh. The look she gave Marta was sharper.
     They went in Lucy’s car. Will rode in back. Marta rode shotgun. She directed Lucy to drive through the winding streets of Laurelhurst. “Slowly, Mom.”
     The neighborhood was quiet. There were no other moving vehicles.
     “Here. Stop here,” Marta said.
     Ten or fifteen rosebushes clustered near the sidewalk at the bottom of a lawn that swept upward, meeting with a hedgerow tall enough to obscure any view from the lower windows of the mini-mansion behind it.
     They chose the best of the nearest roses, working quickly. Will’s heart beat fast. He glanced around him, guiltily. In less than a minute, they were back in the car bagging the roses.
     “We don’t want to be too conspicuous. Let’s go around the corner and take the next street over,” Marta said.
     “I don’t like how good you are at this,” Lucy said.
     They took no more than four or five blossoms from any of the yards. After the third one, Will stopped looking around. He reached over a rosemary plant aiming his scissors for a vermilion edged, creamy yellow rose. A cloud of bumblebees lifted from the lavender then, as quickly, resettled, and suddenly Will was surrounded by a series of other moments anticipating this moment. A déja vu stuttering of time, as ephemeral as life itself, gone before it could be known. He clipped the rose and stepped back. The bees ignored him.
     They might have been there for hours, combing through the fields of Laurelhurst, harvesting. He felt no urgency to be anywhere else —to do anything else. They worked their way down to 33rd Avenue, the bags full, and Lucy turned left toward Stark Street. In a few minutes, they were turning in the gate of the Pioneer Cemetery where the Bartlett family plot waited for Emmy.
     It was a small cemetery surrounded by a chain link fence. Even so, the burying ground was a peaceful oasis. Some of the trees had grown there for more than a hundred years and most were at least fifty. A few fir trees towered over elms, oaks, and walnuts. Light green moss padded the branches and trunks, and softened the hard edges of headstones. Obelisks, crypts, and angels were scattered among the stones. The cemetery was well kept, the grass neatly mowed except where it grew next to anything vertical, there it leaned against trees, stones and the pedestals of angels, going to seed in quiet disarray.
     Lucy took a card table and cloth out of the trunk of her car. They pulled rose after rose out of the plain brown bags and arranged them in a circle on the table leaving an empty spot in the middle for Emmy.
     Next to the makeshift bier, a square of artificial turf covered a hole and a mound of dirt. Two nearby headstones were engraved with the Bartlett name and just beyond them was a large stone crypt composed of the same rough cut basalt as the Bartlett house. Will felt drawn toward it, but Lucy said, “Doug’s here,” and he turned toward the drive.
     Doug was driving slowly toward them, invisible behind the windshield of his dark blue Land Cruiser. He parked behind Lucy’s car. The olla that Lucy had given him was large and top heavy. Doug had strapped it into the seat with the shoulder harness.
     Will, Lucy, and Marta watched from a few feet away as Doug released the seatbelt and removed the unglazed clay jar. He carried Emmy to them with both arms. He stopped in front of Will.
     Will took the jar in his hands. The clay was warm. He put it inside the circle of roses. His ears hurt from his efforts to swallow. Behind him he could hear the crunch of gravel as more cars began arriving and he was grateful again.
     Funerals have a way of starting on time, he thought. Right at the punch of the clock. Even families incapable of gathering for anything else on time will start a funeral on the stroke of the appointed hour —and drifters be damned. A lot of Emmy’s friends could be characterized as drifters. People with no particular anchor. But here, today, they were Emmy’s family. Will watched them moving across the grass, weaving between headstones. Emmy had introduced him to some of them, others were strangers.
     Colin, Kimmi, Bug, and Tweak climbed out of Colin’s van. Tweak’s two-inch hair was stiffly spiked, dyed black, a matching her leather jacket. Bug was small and wiry, nut brown. With her shaved head, she looked like a Buddhist nun.
     Colin’s head was shaved, too.
     “I’ll be damned. Colin shaved his hippie hair. Emmy would appreciate that,” Marta said.
     The four approached, Bug and Tweak hanging back a little behind Colin, whose arm was around Kimmi’s shoulders. Colin was an average sized man, not much taller than Kimmi. He was good looking in an agreeable way —fair skin, warm brown eyes. His usual ready smile was missing today. Kimmi’s hair was scarlet red. Though she wore plain black clothes, she hadn’t been able to resist a neckline low enough to reveal most of her cleavage. Her face was puffy and pasty as it had been the few times Will had seen her before.
     Marta greeted them. “Hey Colin, Kimmi.”
     “I hate funerals,” Kimmi said. “If it weren’t for Emmy, I wouldn’t be here.”
     “If it weren’t for Emmy none of us would be here,” Marta pointed out.
     Colin shook Will’s hand and Will got the feeling that the young man would have hugged him, had Will given him any encouragement.
     When they moved away, Marta said, “I’ve never been able to figure out what kind of drugs Kimmi is on. She’s never taken in front of the group and her arms and legs are clean except for some old scars. But I know she’s using something. One of these days I’m going to find out.”
     There was no formal ceremony. All the mourners gathered around the small table on which Emmy’s last remains rested in the red clay jar surrounded with stolen roses. Will thought of stolen kisses and stolen lives.
     Will had not moved since placing Emmy’s ashes on the table, except to shake a hand or two. A circle formed around the table and linked hands. Marta was holding Will’s hand on one side and Lucy on the other. Marta nudged him with her elbow and nodded toward the drive beyond the opposite arc of the circle. A man and a woman stood stiffly at the edge of the grass with their hands folded in front of them. With the exception of Doug, they were the only people wearing suits. The man was Sgt. DeChris. Someone started singing Motherless Child, and Will was surprised to see that it was Colin, eyes closed, tears on his cheeks. Beside Will, Marta’s voice joined in and the rest followed. He found he could sing if he thought only about remembering the words to the song.
     Will listened as Emmy’s friends began to talk about her, who she was to each of them. He remained silent. The suits on the perimeter made no move to leave or come closer.
     After Emmy was interred, Will moved away from the group, wanting a few moments alone. He walked to the crypt. On the lintel above a gated opening, BARTLETT was chiseled into the stone. The gate was in the same wrought iron style as the gates at the Bartlett estate. On either side of it, the names of the occupants were chiseled into the stone. Two men and two women. Beloved wife and mother, Lilly Frances Bartlett, Born August 1, 1927 – Died, October 12, 1962. Possibly Doug’s mother, Will surmised. Inside the crypt were four weather corroded marble sarcophagi, one to the left, one to the right, and two deep in the center, against the rear wall. Leaves from autumns past, blown through the bars of the gate, drifted against the dead. Dustmotes danced in the ray of sunlight streaming through one of the three semicircular openings beneath the peaked roof. A squirrel burst through the leaves and froze for a split second before escaping through the padlocked gates of the crypt.
     Will turned his attention to the graves. Sarah Bartlett lay beneath his feet headed by a large marble cross, he noted she was only seventeen when she died. On the opposite side of the crypt, an angel guarded the grave of Corp. Wesley Dean Bartlett, U.S. Marine Corps, died in 1966 in Vietnam. He was twenty-one.
     A shadow fell across the stone. “You know what the preacher said when my brother, Wes, died? He said ‘Sometimes people who don’t deserve to die, have to die.’” Doug rested his hand on the shoulder of the concrete angel who stood with head bowed, wings dragging over his brother’s grave. The angel’s arms were held low, but extended and open as if beckoning the brave young soldier to rise out of the earth into her embrace.
     Will heard a movement behind him. It was Marta. “I guess that happens all the time. I’m just not sure about the have to —who says they have to die?” She asked.
     Doug’s eyes did not leave his brother’s grave, “God, maybe.”
     “First, you have to believe in God,” Marta returned. “When something like this happens to someone like Emmy, it’s kind of hard to put God in the picture.” She was looking away from both of them at some point in the distance. “There ought to be a hole in the universe for a little while. How is it possible that someone like Emmy disappears without leaving a hole that everyone can see?”
     Will put a hand on his chest. But there is a hole, Marta, he thought. I just can’t show it to you.
     Marta turned away without waiting for an answer and walked toward her mother, whom Will could see was standing by herself in the shade of a great old oak tree, one of many that populated the cemetery. Its roots had long ago thickened, and rippled the surface of the baby graveyard. A tilted flock of tiny marble lambs slept around Lucy’s feet.
     Doug seemed to be immersed in his thoughts, staring down at his brother’s grave. So, Will followed Marta to where she stood, several feet from Lucy.
     Marta acknowledged Will’s presence with a wan smile. “I really miss Emmy,” she said, “but, Mom… Emmy was like another daughter to her. I wasn’t jealous.” She paused and there was tenderness in her voice as she continued. “Mom’s got space in her heart for a roomful of children.”
     They watched as Lucy knelt and brushed something away from one of the miniature stones. “I wonder if Mom’s going to go off to Mexico on another search for Elena, or if she’s just going to get drunk for a week or two.”
     Will thought of his own lost children; the one formless, embryonic ashes, lost forever; the other, Zoe, who had placed the country between her and her father, just as he had placed it between himself and his parents.
     “Marta.” It was Bug. The slight girl ran her bony hand over her slick scalp. “Could I talk to you for a minute? Alone. Over there.” Bug pointed to a crypt several yards away. The two girls sauntered away. And Will was alone.
     Will went to the table, and folded the cloth. Doug appeared and collapsed the table. They stood for a moment over Emmy’s grave. Roses covered the naked ground. Their scent as heavy as their colors were intense.
     “Flowers are always most beautiful when they’re dying,” Doug said.
     “They are probably trying to attract bees or other insects. One last effort to propagate the species,” Will said. “Cut flowers just don’t realize that it’s over.”
     He turned away, walking toward the graveled drive. Doug followed with the table, leaning it against Lucy’s car.
     “You have the key?” he asked.
     “No.”
     “You didn’t drive, did you? Would you like to ride back to Lucy’s with me?”
     Will thought about it for a moment. No reason not to. “I think I would, Doug. Thanks. Ah, here comes Lucy.”
     “So Will, your criminal activity is limited to stealing flowers. You don’t break into cars,” Lucy teased. “Now where is Marta?”
     “Bug had something on her mind and wanted to talk to Marta in private. I imagine she’ll be here soon,” Will said.
     They looked out across the cemetery shading their eyes against the sun. “That’s her,” Lucy said. As Marta came closer, Lucy frowned. “Is she carrying a pack? Probably some of Bug’s laundry. Marta is such a soft touch.” Lucy got in her car and started it up.
     Marta arrived. “Is Mom in a hurry? Are you coming with us?”
     “Will’s going to ride with me,” Doug said and put his hand on Will’s shoulder.
     “Here, Will. I guess you should have this,” Marta dropped her shoulder letting the strap of a pack slip down to her hand. She swung the brown bag toward Will, offering it to him. Emmy’s pack.
     He wanted to ask her why she had it, where it came from, how it got into her hands, but Marta was already climbing into her mother’s car.
     And Doug’s hand was gripping his shoulder too tightly, and he was saying, “Let’s go.”
     Doug’s Land Cruiser had a new smell. It was spotless. The seats were leather, they curved around Will’s back whispering, relax. Will held Emmy’s pack in his lap, stroking the rough hemp canvas. Where had it come from?
     Neither of them spoke as they followed Lucy out of the cemetery. Will felt the silence spread. He had never been inclined to small talk. But no matter how familiar he was with this awkward stillness, no matter that he preferred to let it be and go into his own thoughts, there was always a kind of embarrassment involved, as if it meant that he did not know how to engage someone in conversation. Which, of course, he did know. There was also that social imperative whispering that he should want to. For a moment, before he sank into his own world, he considered breaking this silence, but he was really at a loss for words and the weight of Emmy’s pack defeated him.
     But Doug was not so constrained. “We’re cursed,” he said, as they approached 39th Avenue.
     It took a moment for Will to register that Doug had spoken and he wasn’t sure that he heard Doug correctly. “What do you mean?”
     “The best of the Bartletts end up badly and the rest of us are just bad.”
     “Are you saying that you think Emmy was murdered because she was related to you? Because she had Bartlett DNA?” Will was amazed, his inward retreat forgotten. “Do you think the whole world revolves around the Bartletts?”
     “No, of course not.” Doug’s face was tense. He seemed to be struggling to express something he felt very deeply, but that he realized also sounded very foolish. “But consider my great-aunt Catherine, Emmy’s great-grandmother, if she had not run off with those communists, she would not have gotten pregnant and ended up with such a hard life.”
     “I suppose her father could not have forgiven her?” Will asked. He did not attempt to curb the sarcasm. “Besides, being poor and having a hard life isn’t the worst that could have happened to her. Suppose she had become like her father. That would have been a tragedy, to be so rigid and bound to inhuman rules.” Will did not really care that he might be treading on Doug’s sensibilities, but he softened a bit because the important thing had just occurred to him. “And then there would have been no Emmy and no matter what, I’m better now than I was before I fell in love with her.”
     “I’m glad that I got to know her, too,” Doug said. “I’m not an easy man to get close to. Most people don’t make the effort. But Emmy did.” He was making the turn now, onto 47th Avenue. They would be at Lucy’s soon. “Maybe there was a reason for what happened.”
     “I don’t know, Doug. I’m not ready to look for reasons. The person who did this couldn’t have had a reason. It was just some wacko thinking he had an unlimited right to fulfill his fantasies.” Will’s body was caught in a spasm of anger and bitterness. He sat rigidly with his teeth clenched.
     “Maybe it was someone she knew.”
     “No one who knew Emmy would be capable of killing her. No one.”
     “Perhaps,” Doug said. He brought them to a stop along the curb in front of Lucy’s complex, and turned off the engine. “I think, maybe, I won’t go in. I feel a little uncomfortable. Not knowing anyone, really. But,” and he reached into the console compartment between their seats and handed Will a business card, “Here’s my phone number. Let’s stay in touch.”
     Will pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, acutely conscious of the frayed edges, and shiny smooth surfaces where the design had worn away. He placed Doug’s card among the cards of other people he would never call. He thanked Emmy’s cousin for giving him a ride and dismounted from the SUV. Before he closed the door, Will met Doug’s eyes, “I do appreciate what you’ve done. The plot —a place for Emmy. She was looking for a place, you know.” It wasn’t coming out well, but Will kept going, trying to let Doug know what it had meant to Emmy to find him, to have a place in a family again. Maybe he was uncomfortable with what Will was saying, maybe it was something else, but Doug’s eyes left Will’s and shifted down to Emmy’s pack in Will’s hands and remained there as Will rambled on, “I mean, with you, with family. You gave her that, too, and that was good. That was good.”