Cheating at Solitaire(25)

The cabbie turned left and pulled into the cemetery’s broad entranceway. Gregor reached into his pocket for his wallet.

“I could drive you in, if you wanted,” the cabbie said. “I could wait. It’s going to be hard finding a cab to take you back if I don’t.”

“I know,” Gregor said, getting out into the cold January air. “I don’t know how long I’m going to be. Why don’t you take that and keep the change.”

The cabbie put the small wad of bills into his breast pocket without counting them. “It’s good to see these old cemeteries kept up like this,” he said. “You’d be surprised how many I see that are falling apart. Families die out, maybe, or move away. Or maybe it’s just that it’s not a custom anymore, visiting a grave.”

“People do seem to do less of it,” Gregor said.

Then he turned away and began to walk slowly through the gates, past the small guard house with nobody in it. It was not a quiet cemetery. The stones were very close together, and some of them were so large that they oppressed the landscape, big statues of angels and eagles, big slabs of marble with the Ten Commandments carved into them. He wondered what it cost to buy a monument like that, and why anybody would do it. He could almost understand it for the death of a child. He found it hard to comprehend that a family would go to that expense for an older member, somebody they had been expecting to die forever. Maybe families felt guilty. Maybe they just felt scared.

He made his way through along the curving asphalt drive that would have taken him to every corner of the cemetery and then out again at the front if he’d followed it that far. The wind was stiff and cold, but not as cold as it had been only a few days before. The day was grayish, as if suspended in time, neither morning nor evening, neither fully day nor approaching night. He found the lot section where he had laid Elizabeth to rest in the oddest ceremony he could remember. Father Tibor had performed it, and a dozen people from Cavanaugh Street had come, but he had known none of them at the time, not even the ones he’d grown up with. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe there was something in his mind that said that Cavanaugh Street was a grave he’d escaped from, and only returned to bury his dead, and that by staying he had buried himself as well. The idea made him impatient with himself. Had he really been unhappy all these years? Had he really gotten nothing more from the time he’d spent there than to be buried alive? He was behaving like an adolescent ass, imagining that nobody would ever understand him until he shook off the dust of his provincial home and made his way to the Great Big City.

Philadelphia was a Great Big City. Elizabeth’s grave was on a small knoll right next to an expansive family plot for some people named Haladanian. Next to Elizabeth’s grave there was space for only one more, and the reason for that was obvious. When he’d buried Elizabeth, he’d never expected to have anyone else in his life. He and Elizabeth had had no children. What would have been the point of buying a bigger space, to put down bodies that did not and could not even exist?

“You’d probably kick me silly if you saw me behaving like this,” he said, out loud, to Elizabeth. There had been a time when he would have heard Elizabeth answering, but he didn’t now. The stone he had selected for her sat in the ground, just slightly settled, the rose tint of its polished marble almost exactly the color that had been her favorite in life. He had not done that thing people did, where he forgot what she looked like. He remembered exactly. He could even hear the memory of the sound of her voice in his head. That was not the same as actually hearing the sound of her voice in his head, and it unsettled him.

Deep in the pocket of his trousers, his cell phone went off. This was a new one, called a Razr, that Bennis had bought him for his birthday. He wasn’t sure why it was important to buy a new cell phone every other year or so, but she thought it was, and she bought them for him, so he took them.

He pulled it out and checked the caller ID. It was Father Tibor. He almost let the call go to voice mail, even though he wasn’t entirely sure how to operate the voice mail. Hadn’t he come out here to get away from Cavanaugh Street, at least for a while?

He couldn’t help himself. He’d never been able to ignore a ringing phone. He flipped the thing open and said, “Ti-bor?”

“Krekor,” Tibor said, sounding frantic. “You have to come back, right now. Wherever you are, you have to come back. There is somebody who has come here to see you.”

“Somebody threatening?” Gregor thought Tibor sounded threatened.