From the Corner of His Eye

beginnings."
        With a solid thump, Naomi's fine casket reached the bottom of the hole.
        This sure looked like an ending to Junior.
        "This momentous day," the detective murmured.
        Deciding that he didn't need an exit line, Junior headed toward the service road and his Suburban.
        The pendulous bellies of the rain-swollen clouds were no darker than when he had first come to the cemetery, yet they appeared more ominous now than earlier.
        When he reached the Suburban, he looked back toward the grave.
        The mortician and his assistant had nearly finished dismantling the frame of the winch. Soon a worker would close the hole.
        While Junior watched, Vanadium extended his right arm over the open grave. In his hand: the white rose, its thorns slick with his blood. He dropped the bloom, and it fell out of sight, into the gaping earth, atop Naomi's casket.
        On this Monday evening, with both Phimie and the sun having traveled into darkness, Celestina sat down to dinner with her mother and her father in the dining room of the parsonage.
        Other members of the family, friends, and parishioners were all gone. Uncanny quiet filled the house.
        Always before, this home had been full of love and warmth; and still it was, although from time to time, Celestina felt a fleeting chill that couldn't be attributed to a draft. Never previously had this house seemed in the least empty, but an emptiness invaded it now-the void left by her lost sister.
        In the morning she would return to San Francisco with her mom.
        She was reluctant to leave Daddy to adapt to this emptiness alone.
        Nevertheless, they must leave without delay. The baby would be released from the hospital as soon as a minor infection cleared up. Now that Grace and the reverend had been granted temporary custody pending adoption, preparations had to be made for Celestina to be able to fulfill her commitment to raise the child.
        As usual, dinner was by candlelight. Celestina's parents were romatics.
        Also, they believed that gracious dining has a civilizing effect on children, even if the fare is frequently simple meat loaf.
        They were not among those Baptists who forsook drink, but they served wine only on special occasions. At the first dinner following a funeral, after the prayers and the tears, family tradition required a toast to the dearly departed. A single glass. Merlot.
        On this occasion, the flickering candlelight contributed not to a romantic mood, not to merely a civilizing ambience, but to a reverential hush.
        With slow, ceremonial grace, her father opened the bottle and served three portions. His hands trembled.
        Reflections of lambent candle flames gilded the curved bowls of the long-stemmed glasses.
        They gathered at one end of the dining table. The dark purple wine shimmered with ruby highlights when Celestina raised her glass.
        The reverend made the first toast, speaking so softly that his tremulous words seemed to bloom in Celestina's mind and heart rather than to fall upon her ears. "To gentle Phimie, who is with God."
        Grace said, "To my sweet Phimie… who will never die."
        The toast now came to Celestina. "To Phimie, who will be with me in memory every hour of every day for the rest of my life, until she is with me again for real. And to… to this most momentous day."
        "To this momentous day," her father and mother repeated.
        The wine tasted bitter, but Celestina knew that it was sweet. The bitterness was in her, not in the legacy of the grape.
        She felt that she had failed her sister. She didn't know what more she could have done, but if she'd been wiser and more insightful and more attentive, surely this terrible loss would not have come to pass.
        What good was she to anybody, what good could she ever hope to be, if she couldn't even save her little sister?
        Candle flames blurred into bright smears, and the faces of her good parents shimmered like the half-seen countenances of angels in dreams.
        I know what you're thinking," her mother said, reaching across the table and placing one hand over Celestina's. "I know how useless you feel, how helpless, how small, but you must remember this…
        Her father gently closed one of his big hands over theirs.
        Grace, proving again the aptness of her name, said the one thing