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For Mary Schons, whether she wants it or not. ;-)
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Graveyards should be all spooky and creepy, right?  This one wasn't.  It was an upscale memory garden where the upper class stuck their loved ones in family plots or big stone mausoleums.  Well tended, well kept, well behaved--even the sun was shining.  Not the kind of place you'd expect to find Joe Dick, with his earrings and worn out black leather jacket.

I didn't want to be there.  I hated cemeteries and always had.  They were full of people who were either sad or dead.  I didn't want to have anything to do with either.  I was only there because of him--like so many other places I've been over the years.  Always been that way.  Joe said jump and I started jumping.  Didn't bother asking how high because it wouldn't be good enough, no matter what, and that was just another part of the whole.

Doing things because Joe said so was second nature.  I didn't particularly like it, but I didn't exactly hate it either.  Just the way it was and always had been.  Joe was a natural leader or just naturally bossy, whatever.  Sometimes, for the hell of it, I used to act like I was going to say no.  Had to keep him on his toes.  That was always fun, making him *ask*.  He'd demand, but never beg.  Joe was many things, but never a beggar.  Sometimes I could get him to do what I wanted, but only by making it sound like his idea.  Manipulative?  Nah, just necessary.  He probably *allowed* it anyway, so how's that for manipulative?

Sunlight bounced off the pale grey marble like bullets, absorbed into the priest's robes as if into a black hole.  Joe's mother's dress was another black hole, but one that repelled instead of attracted.  Everything and everyone around her seemed darker just for being near her grief.  It hurt my eyes to look at her, so I didn't.  I looked up at the painfully blue sky, trying to pretend I was somewhere else, trying to ignore the anguish that surrounded the hole in the ground and my own ambivalence at bearing witness to it.  That gaping hole seemed to grow larger every time I glanced at it, as if it might soon pull all of us in.  As if it would keep growing until there was nothing left of the world.  Nothing left.

I wondered if that was what Joe felt like--as if there was nothing left.  The blank, almost peaceful look on his face gave away nothing.  He was as much a puzzle at that moment as he'd ever been.  I was curious but I didn't *want* to know what he might be feeling or if he felt anything at all.  I don't know which scared me more, the prospect of his pain or his lack of it.

I'd seen plenty of Joe's pain, years of it.  But maybe that day ended part of it.  I thought at the time that it might.  There were no tears in Joe's eyes, no manly sniffles to counterpoint his mother's sobs.  I'll bet he was stoic and impassive as they lowered the box into the ground.  I didn't see, couldn't look at him.  I stared across the grave at his mother and the slow seep of tears from under the black veil across her face.  Too steady a stream for the dainty lace-trimmed handkerchief clutched in her hand to do any good.  Then it got to be too much, reminding me uncomfortably of my own mother, and I looked back at the sky.

Warm blue in a dozen shades untouched by clouds.  There should have been clouds, if not low-hanging thunderheads, at least a big puffy cumulus or two.  But the sky remained clear and Joe's mother kept crying, no matter how much I wished differently.

And Joe...  Joe just stood there next to me as they lowered his father into the ground.  Silent and dry-faced, he stood next to *me* instead of his mother.  Stood too close to me.
 

He's still standing too close to me.  Too damn close, even when he is the one being lowered into that gaping hole.  Can't see his face, but I know he's not crying.  He never did and now he's lost his chance.

The End.

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