Yesterday's News

wish, Ida. This is John Cuddy.” The aunt pressed my hand and said, “You were a friend of Janey’s?”
    I wasn’t sure how much detail Liz had told her. “Yes, but only recently.”
    “Too bad. More friends like you and Liz, and I’ll bet matters wouldn’t have come to this.” She noticed the room emptying out, and said, “If you don’t have a ride to the cemetery, how about sharing the limousine with us?”
    “Sure.”
    Ida gazed back at the casket. Almeida and the three I’d seen outside were politely waiting till the room was cleared before trundling the coffin out to the hearse.
    Ida said, “Well, best be on our way, I guess. Leastways Jane’s gotten a nice day. She would have liked that.”

    “ Manhattan , Kansas . Ever hear of it?”
    “No, ma’am. I haven’t.”
    “Call ourselves ‘The Little Apple.’ Get it?”
    “Yes, ma’am. Clever play on words.”
    “I think so. I do. Even got some decals and bumper stickers, that sort of thing. Couple of the shopkeepers made themselves a bundle on them. A bundle, word has it.”
    Liz and I sat next to each other in the limo, facing Ida in the most comfortable seat. I was thinking that if Ida was close to cracking, I’d hate to see her party mood.
    “ ‘Course it’s still just a little town, just the university to keep it going, truth be told. But I’ve lived there all my life and never wanted anything else. Not like Janey, no.”
    “Did she stay in touch?”
    “Oh, some. She’d write me, call on birthdays, Christmastime, that sort of thing. Janey was my sister’s child, my younger sister. Died young, too. Right around Janey’s age. Bad luck or bad seed.”
    “Janey talk much about what she was doing here?”
    “On the newspaper?”
    “Yes.”
    “No, not since she wrote me with her new address and all. Said she was real happy with it, her first ‘real’ job, she said. I guess the other papers didn’t treat her so well, but if it wasn’t for them, she wouldn’t have been here, so who can say?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Well, if it wasn’t for her friend down in Florida, she wouldn’t have gotten this job, but who can say whether it was good or ill, seeing as how things worked out for her.”
    Liz and I exchanged glances. “What friend?”
    “Well, young man, I don’t rightly know. Can’t say she ever said, and if she did, I don’t remember. Think it was just somebody from Florida who helped her, from the paper she worked on down there.”
    “Do you remember which paper?”
    “Oh, mercy, no. She worked on so many, and they all sound the same to me, like nobody who ever owned them had as much imagination as a farmer naming his herd. But it was in Florida , for certain, near where she went to school.”
    I said to Liz, “You know where that was?”
    “Probably Miami . They’ve got—”
    “No, no. Wasn’t Miami . Miami I would have remembered. Ry Bicks, he moved down there when his wife took sick. Couldn’t ever understand Ry’s doing that, never even saw the place before he upped and took her there, but I would have remembered Miami . When I read Janey’s letter, I mean.”
    I said, “ Tampa , Gainesville , Talla—”
    “ Gainesville ! Gainesville , yes, I remember wondering if that’s where the dog food came from, you know? Yes, it was Gainesville alright, whatever their newspaper is.”
    I was about to ask something when the driver slewed to the right and through the cemetery gate. As he proceeded slowly down the macadam, Ida looked around and her lower lip began to quiver.
    She said, “Trees. Oh my, that’s nice. Janey would have liked having trees around her.”
    Liz shot me a look that said, “Enough, okay?,” and I had to agree with her.

    Almeida was as short and sweet over the grave as he had been indoors. I could appreciate the heavily Catholic parts of the ceremony that he necessarily, but smoothly, deleted. The dozen or so mourners stood uncomfortably close together, Fetch directly behind me, Grace next to him.
    Ida, weakening slowly, was between Liz and me. Liz had her right arm around the aunt’s waist for support. Ida reached down with her right hand and clasped my left in that bony, intense way older people have. She cried softly into a hankie. The hankie gave off a faint scent of lilac.
    Almeida, from the tone of his voice, was approaching the last few sentences when I felt Liz tug on my suit pocket with the hand behind Ida’s back. I ignored it, but she tugged harder.
    I looked