Bury This by Andrea Portes Page A

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    Now Dotsy coming in, a plate of muffins, oatmeal cookies, and shortbread, a doily on the plate. Everything just right. Everything just so. Done the old way. From the old time. “All homemade. Except the shortbread. The shortbread is just that same Walkers.”
    Now the three of them are seated at the dining table, the tablecloth pale blue and cream. A casual everyday tablecloth, across it an ivory lace runner. In the middle a bowl of fruit, a Willow Ware bowl with apricots and apples.
    The robin outside drinks and looks around, drinks and looks around, then a little hop, then a drink, hop hop hop.
    â€œDelicious. Delicious muffins. What did you say they were?”
    â€œBlueberry crumble. It’s a new recipe. From Redbook .”
    â€œWell, I’ll have to get it, for my wife. She’d like that.”
    â€œOh, that’s easy. I’ll just jot it down. The secret is blueberries. You can get ’em at the farmers market, fresh.”
    The robin looks around, hop hop, drinks under the wan washed sky.
    â€œWell, as you might have guessed, well . . . there’s been some renewed interest in the case. Your daughter’s case. Since the documentary.”
    Not wanting to speak. Not wanting to say it. Maybe he could just say forget it and still get away, a fluke of a visit, no big deal. It wasn’t too late. Last chance. Just drop it.
    â€œAnd, um, well, there have been some new developments. In the case.”
    The Lt. Colonel reaches his hand over, past the coffee, past the paper, past the muffins, and puts his hand on Dotsy’s wrist, now trembling.
    Dotsy’s lips are pressed together, her eyes staring down at the table.
    â€œAnd, well, this, this isn’t easy. Well, Lt. Colonel, Dorothy . . . we have reason to believe we may actually be able to solve this case. Now. With the kind of technology available today. Um. DNA testing. In particular. We think, maybe, given the right amount of information, the right tests, we might be able to get the matter resolved, finally.”
    They are waiting. They are suspended. There is a question coming here.
    â€œAnd, in this case, that would mean to get the right information . . . we would have to . . . um . . . get permission from the two of you to . . . well . . . exhume the body.”
    Dotsy’s eyes close. Keep them closed.
    Outside the picture window the orange-chested robin goes hop hop hop, takes a drink, and then hop, gone away for good. And now the birdbath and the white blanket lawn and the black scraggle trees bury their heads in sorrow, suddenly alone, abandoned, and the desolate postcard wants no more to be looked at.

ELEVEN
    T he white laid out over the sloping hill, the sun just above the horizon in a yellow glow glare. Never gold, on a freeze black-tree silent morning like this. Fifteen below windchill and the tombstones sticking out of the milk-sprawl ground, sporadic. No grid here. As random the plots as the snow around them. Some trodden. Lots of visitors. Some bare as an ice rink. No visitors. Long dead. What did you make of it? Does it matter now? What did you collect? Anything good? Is it with you now?
    Some buried in great grand family orchestrations, with giant granite obelisks. Fischer. Macon. Collins. We were in it together. We were a family. We meant something. Once. Some, just the two of them, husband and wife. We stayed true. We fall and rise as one.
    Then, also, the lone gravestones with nothing around, no prints, nothing but the scrape-black trees and the shadows drawing long in rectangles for companionship. What did it mean, any of it? What did I do wrong, to end up alone and snow-print-less here? Or do we all end up alone, really?
    Then, the angel field near the gates, reserved for toddlers, infants, and children. The ground crying, too. Don’t fill me. Don’t fill me with that.
    And all beneath the pale, oatmeal sky with streaks of silver, streams of yellow-white strands masking sunrise.