Later

48

I don’t know if the professor’s old friend died or not. I only know that the professor did. He had a heart attack on the flight and was dead in his seat when the plane landed. He had another old friend who was his lawyer—he was one of the recipients of the professor’s final email—and he was the one who got the call. He took charge of getting the body shipped back, but it was my mom who stepped up after that. She closed the office and made the funeral arrangements. I was proud of her for that. She cried and was sad because she had lost a friend. I was just as sad because I’d made her friend my own. With Liz gone, he’d been my only grown-up friend.

The funeral was at the Presbyterian church on Park Avenue, same as Mona Burkett’s had been seven years before. My mother was outraged that the daughter—the one on the west coast—didn’t attend. Later, just out of curiosity, I called up that last email from Professor Burkett and saw she hadn’t been one of the recipients. The only three women who’d gotten it were my mother, Mrs. Richards (an old lady he was friendly with on the fourth floor of the Palace on Park), and Dolores Magowan, the woman Mrs. Burkett had mistakenly predicted her widower husband would soon be asking out to lunch.

I looked for the professor at the church service, thinking that if his wife had attended hers, he might attend his. He wasn’t there, but this time we went to the cemetery service as well and I saw him sitting on a gravestone twenty or thirty feet away from the mourners but close enough to hear what was being said. During the prayer, I raised my hand and gave him a discreet wave. Not much more than a twiddle of the fingers, but he saw it, and smiled, and waved back. He was a regular dead person, not a monster like Kenneth Therriault, and I started to cry.

My mother put her arm around me.