"No."
"Why?"
"Because they weren't to me."
Josie looked at the photograph a long while. Then she said, in her careful-thinker voice, "If they're in the cedar chest, then they're in the car. Because we brought the cedar chest stuff. It's in the box with the quilts."
"I know it."
"So you *could* read them."
"I could."
"Grandpa," said Josie, "was Aunt Ellen at Grandma's funeral?"
Walt looked up.
* * *
He had not thought about it in two years. He had made a point of not thinking about it. But it came now, sharp and whole, the way the October drive had come back at the diner, as if the hot beef sandwich had broken open some seal in him and everything was pouring out like coolant onto snow.
April 1983. The cemetery on the hill west of town, the Lutheran one, with the wind coming across from Nebraska the way it always did, flattening the new grass. Marian's casket on its straps over the hole. Pastor Lindahl reading the twenty-third psalm with his stole whipping. Jimmy beside Walt in a borrowed suit, Pam beside Jimmy, and Josie, four years old then, in a white coat, holding Walt's hand.
And at the edge of it, up by the old section where the stones were sandstone and leaning, a woman. Standing by herself under a cedar tree. A tall woman in a dark coat with a scarf over her hair. Too far to see her face. She did not come down to the graveside. She did not go into the church hall afterward for the ham sandwiches and the bars. When Walt looked up again, after the first handful of dirt, she was gone.
He had thought: some woman from Marian's quilting circle in Lewis, maybe, who did not want to intrude. He had thought: some cousin. He had not let himself think anything else, because the anything else was a door he had nailed shut in 1969 and he did not have the strength that day to pull the nails.
But Jimmy had looked up at the cedar tree too. Walt remembered that now. Jimmy had looked up, and then looked at his father, and then looked away. And afterward, in the church hall, Jimmy had gone outside for a long time, and come back with his eyes red, and Walt had assumed it was his mother.