I said, “How can you just sit there like you’re attending a second grade piano recital? You’re polite, but you’re bored. You’re waiting for it all to be over.”

“Is it over?”

“Yes.”

“I think,” she said, moving close enough to put her arm around me, “that that was a very brave speech. Especially for you. I admire your courage.”

“Gee, thanks. I feel like an idiot. I’ve been yelling for the past five minutes.” I leaned forward. Her hand, which had been squeezing my shoulder, dropped to the small of my back. “I want to throw you into the lake.”

“Don’t. You’ll only have to fish me back out.”

“I hate it when you’re like this.”

“Like what?”

“Calm. Cool. Collected.”

“I can afford to be calm,” she replied. “I know something that you don’t.”

“Oh, yeah. What’s that?”

“I love you, too.” She tugged on my shirt. “Come on, sit up. I can’t talk to your back.”

I sat up. I didn’t want to look at her, and I didn’t want to cry, so I closed my eyes.

“No,” she said, “that won’t do. You have to look at me. Can you do that? Good. Do you know what funeral sex is?”

“What?”

“Sometimes, when someone close to you dies, you feel the need to reaffirm the fact that you’re still alive. You have sex with someone.”

“Oh, for God’s sake. I don’t want to have funeral sex.”

“I did,” she said. “After Rosalyn died. I met a woman in a bar, and I went home with her. I’d never done anything like that in my entire life. When it was over, I wished I were dead.”

“Abby.” I reached out to touch her shoulder, but she leaned away.

“No,” she said. “Not yet. Please. I’m telling you this so that you’ll understand. I still feel guilty. I feel, right now, like I’m cheating on Rosalyn. I don’t know if I’ll ever get over that. As much as I love you, I still love her, too. I always will. She wasn’t perfect, God knows, but she was a part of me.”

“I understand.”

“No, you don’t. Honey, I want to cheat on Rosalyn. With you. Tonight.”

“With me,” I repeated slowly. “Tonight. You mean you want to have sex?”

“Yes, if we can figure out who kisses who first.”

“What about feeling guilty?”

“I can live with it if you can,” she replied. “I just wanted you to know that it’s there, and that it might always be there. Rosalyn looms pretty large, Poppy. Just like she did in life.”

I took her by the hands and helped her to her feet. “Thanks for the warning, but I’ve made my decision. It’s you, me, and Rosalyn. I just hope she doesn’t hog the covers.”

“What about our other problem?”

“The who kisses who first thing? It’s not a problem.”

Before she had time to panic or object, I kissed her. I caught her off balance and held her there, with my arms wrapped tightly around her waist. When she reached up and put her arms around my neck, it felt like a triumph. I had no illusions about making her forget Rosalyn. I was content to live with Abby’s memories just the same as I lived with my own, but I’d be damned if I’d let them occupy the space between us. In that intense moment of physical connection, as Abby tangled her fingers in my hair and kissed me back with a rare passion, I knew that we could push Rosalyn and Susan and everyone else into some far corner, and even if we couldn’t keep them there forever, it would be enough for us to go on.

Several minutes later, giddy and breathless, I asked if she was ready to drive us back to the hotel.

“Yes,” she said.

“Can you drive quickly?”

“I can get a speeding ticket.”

I glanced at the illuminated dial of my watch. “I don’t care about the speeding ticket. Put your foot down.”

She laughed. “You’d think we’d never done this before.”

“We haven’t, but that’s not what I’m worried about. We’ve got exactly fifteen minutes before my grandmother calls the police. Unless you’d care to be interrupted by Raleigh’s finest, we’d better get back to the Velvet Cloak.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

There are disadvantages to making love with your best friend, especially if she’s a nurse and you’re recovering from surgery. Once you’ve overcome the fear of experiencing the familiar in a new context, and the potential embarrassment should you get it all horribly wrong, she still might stop right in the middle of things and examine your hysterectomy scar.

Abby traced her index finger over the skin just beneath my incision. “It looks better,” she said. “The swelling’s gone down.”

I raised myself up on my elbows and glared down at her. “Just for your future reference, that’s a real mood breaker.”

“Sorry. Want me to start over?”

“No. Now I feel like you’re reading from a manual. Begin with the breasts and then work your way down past the navel, being sure to stop . . .”

“At the five-inch long incision in your lover’s abdomen.” She laughed. “Okay, I apologize for the clinical interruption, but listen—you need to relax. You’re so tense I could bounce a quarter off of your stomach.”

“And how do you propose I relax? That damned surgeon . . .”

“That damned surgeon what?”

“She cut out something I might actually need.”

“Go on.”

I laid back down and covered my eyes with my hands. “My cervix. She took my cervix. It was attached to my uterus.”

“I know what the cervix is,” she replied. “Why would you need it?”

“Because. She explained to me at great length that it was . . . that it might be . . . goddamn it, for some women, the cervix is part of the sexual response. At a certain pivotal moment, it clamps down. It’s . . . it might be important. I don’t know.”

“Okay,” Abby prompted, “and now you’re afraid that you . . .”

I stared up at the ceiling. She resumed her tracing of the skin beneath my incision, slowly sweeping the tips of her fingers from one side of my abdomen to the other. The sensation this generated was on the verge of being ticklish.

“I’m afraid that nothing will work as well as it used to. I’m afraid that I won’t be able to, you know, and that . . . oh, hell, I’m afraid that it’s like Frankenstein’s monster in there. A jagged seam, and pieces missing, and God knows what all.”

She smoothed the skin beneath my navel and then kissed it. “Can you feel that?”

“Of course.”

She moved lower and kissed me again. “How about that?”

“Uh huh.” I shifted on the bed, allowing her to slip a hand beneath my hips.

“And that?”

My tongue was suddenly stuck to the roof of my mouth. “I . . . wow.”

“I don’t think we have a problem,” she said.

A flashing light in the dark room woke me. Abby was sitting up with her back propped against the pillows, watching television with the sound off.

“What time is it?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to wake you. It’s a quarter to four.”

I sat up. “Insomnia?”

“Sort of.”

“Freaked out?”

“A little.”

I yawned and squinted at the TV. “Anything on worth watching?”

“No.”

The sheet was tucked up under her arms, covering her chest. I reached between her breasts and tugged on the fabric, untucking it. She let the sheet fall to her lap.

“Want to do it again?”

“Definitely.”

Hunter had finally passed out. He was lying on his back in the middle of the living room floor, snoring loudly. It was long past midnight, and Nana and I were both too tired to sleep. We were watching a western on television, something featuring a very young John Wayne.

“He was kind of handsome, wasn’t he?”

“I suppose so,” Nana said. “I always preferred William Holden.”

“They’re both drunks.”

“They might be,” she agreed.

“They both look like drunks, anyway. Do you think we ought to cover Hunter with a blanket? We don’t want him to get cold and wake up.”

“He’s going to have a terrible backache,” she said, “sleeping on that hard floor.”

“Serves him right,” I replied. “Look at him—mouth hanging open, snoring like a buzz saw. Why’d you ever marry him?”

“I don’t know. Crazy, I guess.”

“And not once but twice.” I shook my head. “I know he was good-looking once upon a time. I’ve seen the pictures.”

“Pretty is as pretty does,” she said.

John Wayne walked into a bar. “Want a drink?” one of the patrons asked.

Hunter sat bolt upright. “What’s that?”

“For goodness sake,” my grandmother said. “That was someone talking on the television. Lie back down and go to sleep.”

As soon as he was settled again, I took the afghan off the sofa and covered him up. I had to resist the urge to kick him. As I sat back down, I caught Nana’s eye. She put her hand over her mouth and began laughing. Soon, we were both rocking back and forth, the tears rolling down our faces, laughing until it hurt.

While Abby took a shower, I found a funeral home in the telephone book. My mother would have shopped around. I just wanted to get it over with. I called, made the arrangements for my grandfather to be cremated, and paid for the whole thing on my credit card. Apart from the cost, which was astronomical, it was all very easy. We just needed to stop by to sign the paperwork, and they’d send an ambulance to pick up the body. The funeral would take place in two days’time. I said I’d drop off the obituary just as soon as I’d written it and that I’d let them know what we wanted by way of a service. We might have to call upon Nana’s preacher after all.

“Would you like to purchase a cemetery plot?” the director asked. He had a pleasant voice, light and casual and not at all sepulchral. I don’t know what I’d been expecting. Boris Karloff, maybe.

“Why would I need a cemetery plot?”

“Some people bury the ashes,” he said.

“Why?”

“To have a place to visit on the deceased’s birthday or Memorial Day.”

“If you’re going to do that, why bother to cremate? No, I think we’ll keep the ashes. We can put them in an urn or something. Keep them up on the mantelpiece. To tell you the truth, it’ll be nice to have him at home for a change.”

He discreetly ignored this last remark. “We have a very nice selection of urns here. When you come in to sign the paperwork, perhaps you’d like to look . . .”

“Perhaps so,” I said. I looked at my watch. It was just past eight. “We’ll stop by around eleven. Should I call the hospital and tell them you’re coming?”

“No,” he said. “We’ll do that. We’ll take care of everything.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re very welcome.”