Six Feet Over It by Jennifer Longo Page B

was super soft and pulling apart at the left shoulder seam? Did she watch Jimmy bury her?
    I clutch a paper-wrapped bunch of Rivendell chrysanthemums by their blossoms. Dario eases them from my grip.
    “What if they do it wrong?” I say.
    “Who?”
    “At Need. What if it isn’t what you want?”
    “Well, I think you have to give people a break and know they’ll take care of you.”
    “But what if they don’t? And what if you don’t have anyone?”
    The flowers are in place. Aside from the chrysanthemums and misguided roses, either her friends and family are all totally cheap or this woman was a lover of gas-station carnations and baby’s breath.
    “They will,” Dario insists. “There’s always someone. Everyone has someone.”
    “What about homeless people?”
    “Everyone.”
    Emily’s grave is lonely. No flowers. By unfathomable chance, here she is, here I am, and what good is it? I can’t go near her, near her headstone. Seeing it once was an accident. Going back again, bringing flowers … that’s visiting. That’s tending. And then she really will be dead.
    Mourning Emily, tending her would leave Kai without my singular attention, vulnerable to every falling tree in the world. I chose Kai. It’s done.
    This whole situation is a snake eating its own tail. I can’t tend Emily to protect Kai, and I can’t betray Emily by replacing her with Elanor.
    He folds the blue tarp neatly, respectfully as a flag.
    “Why are you here?” I ask without thinking. “This can’t be the only job in California. How can you be here every day doing this?”
    “How can you ?” Dario asks.
    “I have no choice.”
    “Of course you do.”
    “No,” I sigh. “I don’t.”
    “Well, whose fault is that?”
    “Uh … Wade’s? Meredith’s?”
    He shakes his head. “Your job. Your responsibility.”
    “I’m a minor!”
    “You’re a patron saint. Act like it.”
    He pulls his canvas gloves off, shakes the soil from them. Walks me home.
    Grave after grave sold in English, dug in Spanish.
    The grave-buying public at large seems to mysteriously decide en masse to do their shopping not in the morning with Wade but in the afternoon with me, on my days, which thrills Wade and leaves me fatigued and somewhat apathetic—can’t fight patron sainthood, apparently. My handwriting takes over the grave binder, every name carefully written first in pencil, then, once they are safely in the ground, in ink. I twist the knife and watch Emily’s grave from the office to see if anyone has left her flowers. Never any. I keep my distant, careful vigil over her unvisited body and remind myself I am securing Kai’s happiness.
    “I’m sorry,” I say to strangers across the desk day after day. “I am so sorry for your loss.”
    And I am.
    While I keep my own loss properly quiet. Nondramatic.
    Suppressed grief suffocates, Ovid whispers, it rages within the breast and is forced to multiply its strength.
    I am circling the drain. Surrendering to a life of At Need sales in this office forever and ever until I wind up middle-aged, alone, living in the house by myself while Wade and Meredith travel the beaches of the world and Kai spends her life polishing Olympic track and field medals, with her husband, Balin, and their three adorable, well-behaved children.
    My three-days-per-week after-school office schedule becomes generally understood by everyone involved as an every-day-per-week after-school-and-weekends-too schedule. Kai still secretly rendezvousing with Balin, Meredith gone to Mendocino, Wade being … Wade, and no one seems to care at all, or even register the change.
    Well. Except Dario.
    My fear of never getting out of the graveyard is eclipsed by his fear that I’ll never want to leave. He begins delivering occasional spontaneous, pleading lectures along the lines of “This isn’t good for you. Please, please go do something—anything—else. Come with me to Rivendell!” and tossing me “You should be trying to