Hemlock Grove by Brian McGreevy Page A

newspapers were saying. If he was going to hear it he was going to hear it from her mouth. Dr. Pryce dandling Shelley at the service—looking at her like their father never had. Like something of his.
    “People like to say it was Mom, but no way,” said Roman. “She would never have done it on that rug.”
    “Who was the other funeral?” said Peter.
    “Shelley’s,” he said.
    *   *   *
    It was near dawn with threads of mist playing cat’s cradle between the graves when they hit it. Roman climbed up to the ground and pulled on his palms to stretch his cramping forearms and the night air felt good on the callused pads of his hands. Peter braced his legs against the side of the hole, wedged his shovel under the lid, and pried. Lisa Willoughby was in a satin blouse safety-pinned at the bottom and completely surrounded with stuffed toys; each had the painstaking imperfection of having been made by hand. The bottom half of the casket was weighed down by sandbags where it was not weighed down by Lisa Willoughby. Peter lowered into a hunker unfastening the safety pin at the hem of the blouse and asked Roman to hand down the bag but got no response.
    Roman was fixated on something staring up from near the head: a plush cardinal, the bead of the moon on the curve of its black eye. Roman stared into its black eye lost suddenly to another childhood memory, one of his earliest. A third funeral that had previously escaped him. He had been in bed and jarred awake one morning after a late winter’s snow by a sharp bang against the window. He got up and opened it and poked his head outside. There was a cardinal down on the ground. It was late February and it lay there in the snow, wings spread. He went downstairs and hunched over it, mesmerized by the brazen redness but unspeakable delicacy of the thing. Its black eye quivered and he expected it to roll down like a teardrop. He watched, not noticing the cold, for he didn’t know how long. Until the quiver stopped. He felt a hand at the back of his neck and looked up at his mother.
    “Where did it go?” he said.
    She pointed into the sky, and he tried to follow her finger but had to look away in the bright.
    “Earth to fucknuts,” said Peter.
    “Sorry,” said Roman and handed him the bag.
    *   *   *
    When the sheriff picked up Alexa and Alyssa three hours later, both said “Shotgun,” but as their father called it Alyssa had been a hair quicker and he cocked a finger at her. Alexa climbed grudgingly into the back and their father said to just hold on now while we get ourselves combobulated and handed Alyssa a brimming cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. He backed out of the driveway and asked how Chrissy was holding up.
    “We told you not to call her Chrissy anymore, it’s infantilizing,” said Alexa.
    “She still says the demon dog is Peter Rumancek,” said Alyssa. They went over a pothole and a spurt of coffee came through the slit of the lid and onto the webbing of her hand. “Ugh, coffee burp,” she said.
    “She says it’s going to happen again the next full moon,” said Alexa.
    He reached for the cup and gingerly took a sip. His saliva spanned a membrane over the slit and then popped.
    “Does she,” he said.

 
    Inch by Inch
    That afternoon Peter had company for lunch. This was unusual. For a while he’d sat at the table with the kids who wore dog collars and misquoted the Existentialists, but then they started sitting somewhere else, even the girl called Scabies Peter was pretty sure had left him anonymous voice messages of just moaning a couple of times. He didn’t follow; more to say for eating alone than running around after a girl called Scabies. But today a brown bag was set down across from him and he looked up from his motorcycles and tits magazine to find Letha Godfrey joining him. She opened a container of fruit salad with exaggerated casualness and said, “There’s a rumor going around you’re a werewolf?”
    Peter sipped his orange