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standing around me but this ceremony is especially raw. Nobody should have to bury a girl like Mel.
    My mother is not around, which is just as well. She was never close to Mel. I haven’t spoken a word to the woman for twelve years and a burial doesn’t seem like the right place to break the silence. I’m standing between Amelia and Ginny, who is leaning on my shoulder and sobs through the whole wretched affair. My sister Jamie is on Ginny’s right and Jeff is on the other side of Amelia. In the end, I put a shovelful of dirt onto the grave, hug my sisters, and shake hands with Jeff before walking silently from the gathering. I’m remembering my father’s funeral. He’s here somewhere, too.
    Veronica stands waiting for me outside the cemetery. I didn’t see her during the interment, but that’s not surprising given the size of the crowd. It must have been intimidating for her. When a small town buries one of its children, it is a communal enterprise. Every family in Conestoga had some connection to Mel and would have, even had she not been teaching half of their children. For days now, Ed and Beth Harris’s home will have been overflowing with people stopping over to deliver pies and casseroles. They won’t cook for months. For the next year, they’ll get a call every few days from some fellow parishioner, asking them to play bridge or go to a movie. It will probably take them a few months to identify the pattern. For all of its flaws, Conestoga takes care of its own.
    “Where should we go?” Veronica asks. She’s wearing another simple but expensive-looking black dress under the same jacket with a different set of pearls. This strand is a bit longer, long enough for her to twist into a loop with her finger while she bites her lip, waiting for my reply.
    I have to think for a moment. Conestoga has exactly one diner and three bars, but it will be difficult to talk privately at any of them. I suddenly realize that I’m already attracting stares from people leaving the cemetery. I can see a pair of middle-aged women looking at me as the one with a moon-shaped face points at me insistently with a jabbing gesture and whispers furiously into the other’s ear. I think the thinner one is my mother’s hairdresser. My return might rival the funeral itself for gossip value and I have a strong urge to disappear. Not Conestoga, then.
    “Let’s go to the coffee shop in Dill Springs,” I suggest. “It’s about twenty minutes’ drive south.”
    I’ve walked to the cemetery from my motel, so Veronica drives. Her SLK-350 roadster with its 268 horsepower motor makes short work of route 9W as we head south. Dill Springs is the northernmost town in the Catskills within a two-hour drive of New York City and it wears an urbane air that marks it a world apart from Conestoga. The coffee shop is set in an old storefront with hardwood floors and a vast ceiling of worked tin. It’s different from what I remember – it now looks more like a Starbucks without the generic Pottery Barn interior. Veronica orders a cappuccino while I puzzle over the menu for a moment, finally asking for the closest approximation to real black coffee that I can find. We sit down in leather armchairs set at an angle to one another and I have the transitory sensation that I’m in someone’s living room. There are some impressively detailed portraits of kitchen appliances on the wall and I wonder for a second if they might be Ginny’s, but the name on them is Jennie Schaeffer.
    “You said that you met Mel in Russia?” I ask after we’ve sat in silence for a few moments. The car ride was also quiet. I wonder if I’ve been rude. Soil gets in your blood and the smells of my hometown – that mixture of red earth and river – have finally caught up with me. I realize that Veronica hasn’t spoken, not because she lacks curiosity, but because she’s both intuitive enough to have figured this out for herself and patient enough to wait for me to start