It was the season of funerals. Grandparents dropped left and right. Nick, en route to Texas from North Carolina to see his Papa buried, wondered if the Boeing flew over Arkansas. A lousy sense of geography, Nick’s. He thought about the hundreds of birds who’d recently fallen dead in Arkansas. Air Force experiments maybe, sonic blast weapons. Errant clouds of pesticides taken up by a horrible wind. Maybe they were all grandparents. The guy in the middle had been talking about art and optics.

“Eyes in paintings appear to follow you because they have no depth, no curvature. The convexity of a living eyeball reveals the beholder’s subject, and what isn’t knows it isn’t.”

He said that sounded right, to make an effort. He hadn’t cared much for his Papa, who’d been a geologist for Exxon and later a substitute teacher of Spanish or something. Middle school kids. Unthinkable, the kind of abuse they no doubt heaped on him. A spot of grace: the old man couldn’t hear anything anyway.

Mom and Dad will be there at the airport. His hearing is going, too; her figure. The both of them gradually swallowed-up by years. What advice does he remember from Papa? If you’re unemployed, it’s important to get dressed every morning. Nick works at a coffee shop. At 31 and an aspiring novelist, it’s a growing embarrassment. He’s not even the manager.

Julia’s not taking the trip with him because any day now her grandma will die. They’ve been saying it for seven years; seven years of watching the lady curl up on herself, eating her own mind, the fist still clenched around her ring finger from the time not long after 9/11 when she was told her husband was dead. Still enough of a glimmer of coherence in there to register the loss, to make the sacrifice of a hand. Julia told him her mom told her she’d wedge the fist open to clean it on visits, that the nurses had stopped trying, that it stunk in there of mold and decay.

It’s their first time being apart in three years of marriage. Why would a man purchase a movie? Papa boggled. Never purchase a movie. It is complete foolishness.

The guy in the middle changes topics. “I walked into MOMA. The mind remembers where it was, when. Or: when it was, where. All of a sudden, standing in line at the bag check, that Bruce Hornsby song comes to me. ‘Da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da, that’s just the way it is…’ You know the song. And it occurred to me, the last time I’d been there, in the taxi on the way over, that was on the radio. Three plus years ago, in line at the bag check, I’m humming this tune. Then, last week, I pick up where I left off. Like this Hornsby song was still there, incomplete, waiting for me.”

Now his in-laws have flown in on account of the notorious turn for the worse. Nick heard all about it from his mom and all about it from his wife, who heard it from her mom. Death’s indomitable campaign. News from the front. He’d gotten so thin it hurt to sit, but he couldn’t stand. She fell in and out of sleep all day, all night. He couldn’t swallow without help. The food fell from her mouth. His voice, once sonorous, baritone, Texan, his most remarkable trait, now a thin croak, brittle as dried leaves. Her once continuous blabber petering out. Into silence, both of them. He kept saying, “Why is it taking so long? Why won’t God have me?” Instead of nonsense, broken words, her breath came raspy and stuttering. Then God had him, and her daughter, Julia’s mom, boarded a plane with her husband.

Even his father-in-law’s dad is about to go. Headline from Chicago: the notorious broken hip from a spill in the tub.

Never drink in your pajamas.

Over the phone he relates a 500-word op-ed on the funeral, hitting the highlights. Mom upset by preacher, who couldn’t avoid talking about eternal life, even though Papa, a Methodist or something but also a man of science, said “fiddlesticks” to such pipe dreams. The singing of hymns from the 16th century, written by Tyndale. Crying, relief, the big family, every one on a different page of coming-to-terms. How the speakers—all of his DNA—presented each a picture of a very different man. Also, says Nick, I met someone interesting on the plane.

Julia tells him they’re all gathered, Mom a little strained, sisters arrived, uncles. Everyone gentles conversation topics up, fending off the awkward silence. They visited grandma, a human…she can’t make a comparison, says never mind, not even that, really. Visited grandpa. You can hear highway traffic in the cemetery. Next to his plot, hers. Funny how you make reservations.

“Isn’t it weird,” Nick says, “that the stone already exists they’ll etch your name into? That it predates us?”

“I think Uncle Frank is going crazy,” she says.

“How’s your dad?”

He was sure his father-in-law must be prey to simple pleasures, same as the next man: being called Tom instead of Thomas; certain smells; the sound of fat frying; moments of eye contact, of significance in every day getting-along…but if he was, he didn’t show it. Some Scandinavian aloofness kept his expression flat and accepting. He corralled and confined sensitivity in his strong stooped back. Everything was fine, nothing was preferable. Call me what you want to call me. Look me in the eye or don’t. Take my chair if you like, I need to lie down on the floor for my back, anyway. Nothing you do impacts my equanimity.

Back home, Nick keeps in constant physical contact with Julia. Hand on back. Arm around shoulder. Hand holding hers. Hand on thigh. He tells her, I wonder if they’ve ever made cheese from breast milk?

They go out to eat, the whole clan, and Nick fields questions about his novel. Goes on too long answering them. Uncle Frank has four glasses of wine. Something’s busted in his eyes. When he looks at you, he doesn’t.

Nick is maybe the best barista in his time zone. He is the Achilles of froth, the Hector of crema. Tell him once the order, do it seven customers deep, he won’t forget. His hands are pitchers, wands, cylinders. He packs and blesses a shot quicker and prettier than kiss my grits. Customers brave traffic, go out of their way, just to see him work. His obnoxious friend Mike comes in early. If Mike operated according to some rulebook, it was called: How to Strut In Like You Own the Joint.

Mike orders a triple shot. “Know what I was thinking about three?”

Nick asks him what, Mike, what on earth were you thinking about three.

“It’s the only number that’s the sum of every number preceding it.”

Mike has the loudest voice of anyone. Strangers are routinely unnerved. “If I had one more customer like you,” Nick says, “nobody would come here. I wouldn’t have any customers.”

“Two,” says Mike. “You’d have two customers.”

On his break he smokes on the curb and thinks about how when you’re young, you spend a lot of time forging an identity. You act certain ways in order to make a point about who you are. Then you get older and you just…are. Do we grow into ourselves? Or out?

Walking back to his car he gets “I Ain’t Got Nobody” by Leon Redbone in his head. Keys the ignition, and there it is, the next track on a mix CD; the one just about to start eight hours ago, when he parked.

His mom’s dad gone, her mom loopy with Alzheimer’s. It broke his heart, back in Texas, when the old woman saw him in her husband’s shirt. The one she’d bought for him just a month or so before, the one Nick’s mom thought Nick would look especially good in. How all the warmth returned to her face, her worn blue eyes suddenly clear of confusion, alive with sweetness. “Oh yes,” she said, “that is handsome.”

In one hundred years, everything living will be dead. Except trees, and the occasional giant tortoise. Maybe an elephant. But: the headstones are already here.

Julia’s grandma was cremated and sealed into an urn they put in the ground next to her husband. She whispers to him, “I wonder if the ring’s in there.” Gray clouds, a stiff wind, a Priest with the collar on reads from the Bible. Highway traffic is heard. Uncle Frank sobs now and then like a man violently sneezing. Julia’s mom recites a poem she wrote that rhymes. The sky is birdless. He thinks: it will come to your state next. Arkansas was a dress rehearsal. God looks at creation and sees a menu.

At home they undress, dress again for the memorial service. Nick stands before the bedroom mirror, unbuttoning his shirt. The cat sidles up and sits next to him. He says, “Which of us do you think is taller?”

“Snakebite,” she says, not missing a beat, “by a whisker.”

There are moments when it seems impossible he’s big enough to contain his love for her.

He recalls his mom told him about how, nearing the end, Papa grew weepy. The smallest things would set him off. Acts of kindness that for 85 years he’d hardly acknowledged. Then: the oak gone to tears.

It’s as if he’s walked into it—the love. As if it predated him, and had nothing to do with him.

He shows her to the closet. Look at this, he says. Look at all the shirts you’ve bought me. Which one do you like the best? Which one do I look handsomest in?