The Chocolate Money by Ashley Prentice Norton

sitting inside. She probably went back to it the minute I began my walk down the aisle. She’d made her point. No need for another scene.
    The engine idles and she’s sitting in the back, smoking leisurely. She studies the program for the service as if it were a
Playbill.
Fingers the stock.
    “Cream is iffy,” she tells me. “It says ‘wedding.’ I would have gone with stark white. Also less feminine. And the font—a tad too informal. What the hell was she thinking?”
    She holds it up to the light and inadvertently ashes on her black dress. She brushes herself clean with the program in her hand.
    We’re not moving. Franklin knows better than to drive without instructions. Babs could easily say
O’Hare
or
Newport.
She finally looks up at me. Sees the bouquet. Not pleased. At all.
    “Bettina,” she says, “you were supposed to put the damn thing on the casket. Even handing it to Mags would have been a nice touch. Mack actually liked you, you know. This was your chance to say thank you. I am going to have a lot of men in my life. Not many of them are going to give a shit that I happen to have a kid.”
    She looks out the window. Is she going to make me go back inside, try again? The only thing I know for sure is that my bouquet of roses won’t be coming home with us.
    “Maybe I could just leave them on the steps?” I offer.
    “No,” Babs replies. “Someone would trip over them and fucking sue me.”
    I study the hearse parked just in front of us. Maybe I can give the flowers to the driver and he can put them on the coffin. At present, he has nothing else to do.
    “Bettina, he’s not a fucking florist,
”
Babs says. Reading my thoughts, as usual.
    I would eat the roses if I could. I know plan B isn’t going to be any better than the first.
    It is a bright day with hard shadows. I think of how many fractured nights of sleep Mack had before this eternal rest. Sex, showers, leaving the aparthouse at three, four A.M. Two women. Two beds in one night. Exhausting.
    Babs says, “Oak Lawn,” and we’re off to the cemetery. Franklin knows exactly where it is. He drove Babs there when Mont and Eudy died. Two caskets, two hearses.
    We pull into Oak Lawn. Inch down a long driveway. Babs signals to Franklin to stop and we get out to walk. Babs is wearing her
ladylike heels,
and they dig into the ground like golf tees. She pulls a heel out of the wet grass with each step. It rained the night before, and the outdoors seems to stick to us. My pink ballet flats are now a smudgy brown. They look like Babs bought them at a thrift store.
    Maybe we are going to visit Eudy and Mont. Leave the flowers on their graves. But when we had our picnic on their plot after our Tea House visit, Babs didn’t bring a bouquet. She thinks leaving flowers for the deceased is dumb. Dead people can’t enjoy them, and the flowers just wilt and die. So why am I carrying roses for Mack? No clue. We’re walking in the opposite direction of where my grandparents are buried. I can’t see precisely where we are going yet, but I just know.
    Here we are. There is a white tarp surrounded by freshly dug ground. There’s a man standing over it, walking around the perimeter. As if it’s a swimming pool and he doesn’t want anyone to fall in. He’s wearing a short-sleeved checkered shirt, khaki pants. Has short gray hair, thinning a bit. Babs walks right up to him, puts her hand on his shoulder.
    “Hello, Carl,” she says.
    “Tabitha! Well, hello,” he says, glad to see her. His eyes get all soft and there’s a tenderness in his tone that surprises me. But there’s no way Babs has slept with him. He is way too old and not good-looking enough.
    “How are you?” He reaches out with one hand, soft and wrinkly with age, and touches her. I have never seen someone so comfortable in her presence. He must remember when her parents died.
    “They don’t often go two together,” he says to me, softly but kindly. I now realize he sees Babs as no one