Six Feet Over It by Jennifer Longo Page A

cosas será bien,” he says. “You’ll see.”
    He drives slowly up the hill toward the shed. I watch until he is gone.
    I could see Emily from here if I try. I don’t.
    I rip open the Yorks.
    Será bien, my ass. It is too late for things to turn out right.

eight
    SPANISH ONLY becomes the unspoken rule for digging graves. He is worse than Señora Levet, who won’t even let us go pee if we ask in English. My brain, occupied with vocabulary and syntax, has less room to be scared and actually think about the fact that I’m digging a dead person’s grave, and Dario knows this. It’s February and freezing.
    I can’t bring myself to help him bury, but I watch the graveside services from the safety of the office or from behind one of the babies’ angels so I can help move the flowers afterward. He always stands at the back of the cluster of mourners during services, near enough in case one of them loses it and makes everyone else domino down the path of out-of-control weeping. In those cases, he moves in swiftly, quietly comforting in two languages, and they lean willingly into him, a stranger in a Sierrawood Hills T-shirt. He waits for them to leave before he touches his shovel. Which often takes for-absolutely-ever, because they stand around talking after the religious part, and then once they move the party down to their cars, they stand around chatting it up some more. It reminds me of waiting around after Kai’s cross-country races, she and Wade recounting every step of the six, thirteen, twenty miles she has just run: “… and then at the five k I had this cramp …” What about the reception? Aren’t there seven-layer dips and Bundt cakes these people need to get to?
    When at last they’re gone, heavy belts and pulleys and a whirring, groaning motor ease the casket into Dario’s perfect, careful grave, fitting it into the liner. Heavy cement lid on top, shovelfuls of soil until only the slim dark mound remains, waiting to be covered in a combination of tightly arranged, boring, from-out-of-town funereal bouquets and the wilder, admittedly beautiful Rivendell ones.
    It is mostly the At Needs who stay till the end; and sometimes they insist on watching him bury. At Needs want every single last second they can get before their person turns to past tense. The Pre-Needs mostly take off and he buries them without an audience.
    Pre-Need, as a concept, drives Dario nuts. He gets so worked up about it, he has to repeat his rapid-fire Spanish over and over before I get his drift, which is essentially that Pre-Need takes the ritual out of death. Takes away any reason to get out of bed when a person dies. You buy your own grave, schedule the funeral and the flowers, do it all yourself, and what have you left your loved ones with? A blank emptiness where you used to be, and no space to go through the motions of grief without the tangle of emotion. A person needs things to do, he says; a list of chores ( Schedule burial! Buy mini quiches for reception! Pick out headstone! ) gives you air to breathe. Flowers and food and choosing a space—a person needs those tasks.
    “I don’t know,” I sigh one afternoon as we pile flowers on a fairly well attended Pre-Need woman. “For one thing, it’s expensive.”
    “So why not just leave the money?”
    “Because! It’s sad. They’re just trying to be nice. It’s hard.”
    He shakes his head, carefully drags a giant pot of overly romantic red roses to the mound.
    I’m not so sure choosing a casket to put Emily in provided her mother “breathing room” as much as it probably gave her a permanent broken heart. His logic escapes me.
    Shag Haircut’s nighttime lawn meltdown is what comes of At Need. Hasty, ill-advised decisions, and not that anyone wants to Pre-Need their own kid’s grave just in case, but still. Did Emily’s mom put her in some itchy, fancy dress instead of the Mendocino County Spelling Bee Finals T-shirt she wore and washed so many times all year it