Room Eight

Camille kept rubbing her thumb over the place where the final letter should have been.

The ribbon was meant to say BELOVED MOTHER in gold. The last R had failed to take, leaving BELOVED MOTHE stretched across the white satin. It was a small mistake, hardly deserving of anger, but Camille had spent six days deciding what should happen to her mother’s body, clothes, mail, medicines, casseroles, and half-finished library book. The damaged ribbon was the first thing small enough to resent properly.

The florist had shown it to her at a quarter past ten, before the first mourner arrived. They stood near the front of the empty church beside the largest arrangement: a standing wreath of white lilies and dark greenery positioned where Evelyn’s coffin would soon rest. Smaller tributes lined the side walls, but this was the family’s wreath, the one every mourner would face during the service.

The florist believed he could draw the missing letter by hand with a blue marker. Camille believed everyone would see the repair. Their argument ended without resolution when he went to finish positioning the remaining flowers, the marker still uncapped in his hand.

At half past ten, the outer doors began to open. Bright April wind entered with the mourners and lifted the corners of the service cards arranged on a folding table in the entrance hall. Each card bore Evelyn Mercer’s name, the date of her birth, and the date of her death. Camille could not understand how those three facts were supposed to contain her. She received cold hands, careful embraces, and sentences that people had plainly rehearsed in their cars.

Beyond the inner doors, the church filled by degrees. Heels tapped along the aisle, kneelers came down with padded knocks, and the dry wooden pews creaked beneath shifting bodies. The air smelled of lilies, floor wax, old oak, and the faint warm starch of clothes ironed that morning. Voices gathered beneath the rafters in a low murmur, then quieted whenever Camille passed near them.

By the time the bell gave its first warning strike, ninety-three people had settled into the pews. Camille escaped to the entrance hall, where the florist was gathering his tools. Through the open inner doors, the family’s white wreath commanded the front of the church. Its missing final letter was still the first thing Camille saw.

“It will show,” she said, and the florist looked down at his marker as if it had failed him personally.

The funeral director entered from outside. His name was Arlo Penn, and until that morning Camille had thought him incapable of hurry. He was a narrow, formal man who seemed to have been pressed between the pages of a heavy book. For four days he had spoken only in level tones and complete sentences. Now he stopped in front of her and said, “There is a problem with the hearse.”

Camille waited. When no careful explanation followed, she looked through the open doors. Two black limousines remained beneath the elms, but the length of curb between them was empty. She assumed the hearse had gone around the block. Then she noticed its driver standing near the gate with both hands on his head.

“What kind of problem?” she asked.

Arlo glanced at the florist before answering. “Your aunt Mavis has taken it. The driver saw her get behind the wheel. I saw her face as she passed the church steps, and she turned east at the end of the block.”

Camille flattened one of the service cards against the table. She did this carefully because everything else in her had become abrupt. “Mavis took the hearse.”

“Yes.”

“My mother is inside it.”

Arlo nodded once. The florist capped the marker and slipped it into his pocket, but made no further effort to gather his tools. He lowered his eyes in an imitation of professional discretion while arranging himself squarely within hearing distance. Whatever happened next, he intended to receive every word of it.

For one peculiar moment, Camille felt almost calm. Her mother was dead. The coffin was closed. Ninety-three people were waiting in the church. None of those facts had changed, and yet the funeral had somehow become capable of leaving without her.

Before Camille could think where Mavis might be going, her son came hurrying in from the parking lot, still working on his tie. Jamie was twenty and had the long, unfinished look of someone whose body had grown faster than his authority. He looked back toward the street and asked, “Was that Aunt Mavis driving the hearse?”

Camille stared at him. Jamie explained that a friend had been dropping him off when the hearse drove away. He caught only a glimpse of a small woman behind the wheel before she went through the red light at the end of the block. It had looked like Aunt Mavis, he said, but the idea made so little sense that he assumed he was mistaken. His friend had already driven away.

Arlo explained the rest. The hearse had arrived minutes earlier. While the mourners took their seats, its driver had left it idling at the curb until the pallbearers were ready to carry Evelyn into the church. Mavis asked whether the lilies beside the rear door belonged to Evelyn. When the driver turned to check, she entered the driver’s seat, locked the doors, and drove away.

“She distracted your driver with lilies?” Camille asked.

Arlo’s expression barely moved. “He was not aware it was a distraction.”

The bell struck eleven. From inside the church came the soft reorganization of ninety-three people who believed the funeral was beginning. Camille looked at the florist’s van blocking her car, then at the florist.

“Give Jamie your keys.”

The florist drew them from his pocket, but hesitated. Camille asked whether he would rather explain to the congregation why her mother’s funeral had been stolen. He surrendered the keys.

Four minutes later, the three of them were squeezing across the front of a white delivery van that smelled of wet stems and overheated brakes. Jamie climbed behind the wheel, Camille pulled the passenger door shut against her hip, and Arlo folded himself into the narrow middle seat with his knees touching the dashboard. Their shoulders pressed together as they searched for unfamiliar seatbelts. Arlo found only a lap belt, snapped it shut, and planted both hands wherever he could find something solid to hold. Behind them, empty buckets, wire flower stands, and loose sheets of cellophane waited on the van floor.

Jamie started the engine but kept his foot on the brake. Camille pulled her phone from her handbag and found Mavis in her contacts. Her fingers missed the name once before she managed to call. She turned on the speaker and held the phone between herself and Arlo. Mavis answered on the second ring. “Don’t follow me.”

Jamie looked at Camille. She pointed east, the direction Arlo had seen the hearse turn, and he pulled away from the church. The buckets and wire stands began clattering behind them.

Camille stared at the road. “You stole my mother’s body.”

Mavis insisted that she had only borrowed a car and that Evelyn happened to be in it. Arlo leaned toward Camille’s phone. “Ms. Hall, the distinction is not legally meaningful.”

“Who’s that?” Mavis asked. “Is that the undertaker?”

“Funeral director,” Arlo said.

Mavis ignored the correction. Camille asked where she was going.

Mavis was silent long enough that Camille heard the engine and the hollow rush of air around the stolen vehicle. Then her aunt said, “Your mother is not being buried beside Howard Shaw.”

They had argued about the grave twice already. The Shaw family plot had been purchased in 1987, when Evelyn was still married and everyone assumed that marriage was a single decision. Howard, her former husband, occupied the left side. Evelyn’s married name had been carved on the right, leaving an empty space for the date.

Evelyn had objected to the plot once, in a Christmas voicemail left after two glasses of wine. Camille had filed it with her mother’s other dramatic complaints: sincere in the moment, funny enough to save, but not quite an instruction. The burial was covered by an old insurance policy. Almost every other choice cost money Camille did not have, and during the six days since Evelyn’s death, practicality had repeatedly disguised itself as certainty.

Camille said they had settled this. Mavis replied that Camille had settled it; Evelyn and Howard were both dead, and Mavis was the only living person in the family who remembered how hard Evelyn had worked to get her own name back.

“I remember,” Camille said. “I was there.”

Mavis reminded her that she had been twelve. “I was there,” Camille said again, and the finality in her voice kept Mavis from answering.

The eastern edge of town funneled into a single road toward the coast, so Jamie did not have to guess which turns Mavis had taken. She had a four-minute lead, but after running the first red light, she settled into a speed well below the limit and braked before every intersection while trying to understand the hearse’s controls. The flower van gained on her block by block.

The hearse came into view three cars ahead, moving with the solemn speed expected of it despite being driven by a fugitive. One windshield wiper scraped back and forth across dry glass.

A horn blared through Camille’s phone. Without taking his eyes off the hearse, Jamie told Mavis to use her turn signal. She insisted that she had. “That was the wiper,” he said as the blade crossed the dry windshield again.

Camille told Mavis to pull over. Mavis refused. Camille reminded her that ninety-three people were waiting and that one of them was a priest. “They can practice being patient,” Mavis said. “The priest can practice harder.” Then she ended the call.

Jamie grinned, then seemed to remember that they were on their way to his grandmother’s funeral and straightened his mouth. Camille almost smiled too. Arlo adjusted his position between them and asked whether Camille knew where Mavis was going. “No,” she said. “Mavis has been doing things no one could explain for as long as I can remember.”

They followed the hearse out of the town center, past the high school and the tire shop, and onto the coast road. Traffic thinned, and between the houses they caught flashes of sunlit sea. The morning was clear and windy. Camille had resented its brightness since waking; such a cheerful day felt out of place at her mother’s funeral.

Her mother had died six days earlier at the age of seventy-nine while eating toast at Camille’s kitchen table. Evelyn had put down her cup, said, “That’s peculiar,” and folded toward the fruit bowl.

There had been no final speech and no adjustment of the universe to acknowledge that she had left it. The ambulance came. The toast hardened on the plate. That evening, Camille found a crescent of marmalade on the sleeve of her mother’s cardigan. She sat on the laundry-room floor holding the cardigan until the washing machine finished a load she could not remember starting.

Mavis arrived the next morning wearing green boots and carrying a lemon cake. She and Evelyn had not spoken for fourteen months, and neither woman had told Camille why.

Whenever the road curved, Camille caught a flash of the orange coat Mavis had worn over her funeral dress through the driver’s-side window. She watched it tilt with the steering wheel and wondered how long her aunt had planned this, and whether the lemon cake had been part of some earlier, less criminal idea.

The hearse turned off the coast road and entered the parking lot of the Breakwater Motor Inn.

Camille recognized the place only after she saw the tall roadside sign, BREAKWATER MOTOR INN spelled across rust-streaked metal in faded blue letters. The motel was a single low row of salt-roughened blue stucco, with every room opening directly onto a covered walkway. Paint peeled from the eaves. Sunlight showed every crack in the pale pavement, and beyond the parking lot the ocean flashed between the building and a rocky headland. The Breakwater had once been a respectable place to conduct an affair. Now it offered weekly rates and kept a refrigerator in the office for fishing bait.

Mavis parked beneath the sign. By the time the flower van stopped behind her, she was standing at the rear of the hearse with both hands on the door.

Camille shoved open the passenger door and climbed out. Arlo unfastened his lap belt, unfolded himself from the middle seat, and followed her. Before either of them could reach Mavis, he asked her not to open the rear door. She claimed she had not intended to. “Then please step away from it,” he said.

She obeyed. At seventy-four, Mavis was built like an exclamation point. She wore a navy dress under the orange coat and had forgotten to change out of her running shoes.

Camille told her to return the keys. Mavis closed her hand around them. “Not yet. Your mother left something here.”

“When?”

“Nineteen ninety-eight.”

Arlo remained beside the hearse, but his face suggested that the morning had exceeded the service package.

From inside her coat, Mavis produced a second key. This one was brass and attached to a red plastic diamond with an eight stamped into it.

Camille looked from the key to the row of motel doors and asked why Mavis had it. Mavis said that Evelyn had told her years ago that she intended to keep room eight in her name. That morning, Mavis had called the motel to find out whether the old arrangement still existed. The owner, Mrs. Alvarez, confirmed that Evelyn had continued reserving the room every April third for one night, paid in advance, even though most years she never came. When Mavis arrived before the service and explained who she was, Mrs. Alvarez gave her the key.

“Today is the third of April,” Camille said.

“I noticed.”

The understanding arrived slowly. Mavis had known before the service that she might do this. When Camille said so, her aunt glanced at the hearse and did not deny it.

Room eight was the last blue door along the outside walkway, its brass number darkened by years of salt air. Mavis walked toward it without asking anyone to follow. Camille waited long enough to look at Arlo. “Go,” he said. “I will remain with your mother.” Jamie joined Camille, and together they crossed the parking lot after Mavis.

The brass key resisted until Mavis lifted the loose handle with one hand and turned it with the other. The swollen door clung to the frame, then opened all at once. Trapped heat pressed into their faces.

A small refrigerator hummed in the corner with more effort than its size appeared to justify. The air-conditioning unit beneath the window was silent. The room smelled of dust, stale heat, the particular soap purchased by the thousand, and carpet that had the faint sour sweetness of an old casino rug. Its two double beds faced a television deep enough to contain another, smaller room. The curtains were open, and on the table beneath the window sat a yellow envelope.

Nothing else suggested Evelyn. Camille had expected some arrangement of objects, a private museum maintained by the motel. Instead there were four plastic cups sealed in plastic, a Bible without its cover, and one dead fly on the sill.

Mavis stopped inside the door. Her certainty seemed to leave her all at once. She pointed at the table and said, “There it is.”

EVELYN was written across the envelope. Camille knew the handwriting. It was her own.

She moved closer, trying to remember when she might have written her mother’s name that way. The capital E was too large and leaned beneath the other letters as if carrying them. Jamie had once told her that all her capital Es looked burdened.

“I wrote this,” she said. Mavis stayed near the door and asked when. Camille did not know. She lifted the envelope. It was unsealed, weightless, and empty.

Then the room changed around her.

She was twelve again, sitting on the farther bed with The Price Is Right flickering silently on the television. Her mother had packed two suitcases while Howard was at work and driven them to the Breakwater because it was the only motel nearby that accepted cash without a credit card.

All evening Evelyn paced between the window and the door, unable to decide whether leaving a man counted if you remained close enough for him to find you.

Near midnight, she gave Camille an envelope and told her to write EVELYN on it. Camille asked why. “Because I need to put something inside,” her mother said. When Camille asked what, Evelyn answered, “The part of me that might go back.”

At twelve, Camille did not understand. An envelope could hold paper, not the part of a person that might return to a marriage. She wrote the name because her mother had asked her to, then returned to the book she had been quietly reading beneath the bedside lamp, trying to distract herself from her mother’s pacing. The next morning, Camille waited in the car while Evelyn carried the still-empty envelope into the motel office. Evelyn returned without it, and they drove home before lunch.

Back in room eight, Camille looked down at the old envelope in her hands. “It was empty then too. She never put anything in it.”

Mavis sat on the nearest bed, and the springs gave a tired groan. She said that Camille must be mistaken. Camille had watched her mother take the empty envelope. “Then why did Evelyn preserve it?” Mavis asked. “Why pay for this room every year?”

Mrs. Alvarez had explained the arrangement to Mavis that morning. Evelyn had asked her to keep the envelope behind the front desk and place it on the table whenever room eight was prepared for April third. If Evelyn did not arrive, Mrs. Alvarez locked it away again the following morning. The paid reservation had kept the unusual promise in place for twenty-eight years.

Jamie sat on the other bed, leaving the two women facing him across the narrow strip of carpet. “Maybe Grandma wasn’t paying to remember that she left,” he said. “Maybe she was paying to remember that she could.”

Outside, the loose motel sign knocked softly in the wind. Camille looked at her son, but he had lowered his eyes to his untied shoes as if the thought had belonged to someone else.

Mavis rubbed both palms over her knees. Her fingernails were painted silver, badly. “Evelyn told me to bring her here if you tried to bury her beside Howard. I thought the envelope would tell us what to do next.”

What emerged was less a plan than a collection of decisions Evelyn had made at different times and never reconciled. In 1998, she had asked Mrs. Alvarez to keep the envelope. Years later, she told Mavis to bring her to room eight if Camille tried to bury her beside Howard. She never explained what the empty envelope was meant to decide or what Mavis should do once she got her there.

Camille pointed out that Evelyn had gone back to him the next morning and stayed another eight years. Mavis replied that she had eventually left again. The instruction about Howard’s grave had come much later, but Evelyn had kept the room and the empty envelope through all of it.

Camille heard accusation in the answer and felt her own rise to meet it. “She kept his photograph beside her bed until she died.”

“Because she liked herself in it. She had a waist.”

It was exactly the sort of thing Mavis would say when frightened by tenderness. Camille closed her eyes and waited for her aunt to add something worse.

Nothing came.

When Camille looked again, tears were running down both sides of Mavis’s nose. They fell without ceremony onto the orange coat. Camille had seen her aunt rage, sing, flirt, insult a customs officer, and once remove a bat from a bedroom using a pillowcase. She had never seen her cry.

“She called me from this room,” Mavis said. “She said she had finally done it, and I drove all night to get here. By the time I arrived, she’d decided to go home. I called her a coward.”

Camille remembered waking before dawn to her mother and another woman arguing in low voices outside the room. Until that moment, she had never known the second voice was Mavis’s.

Camille sat beside her. The old mattress sank sharply and rolled them toward each other until their shoulders touched. She asked what Evelyn had said. Mavis looked down at the place where their sleeves met. “She said I loved her best when she was leaving.”

Camille let that sit between them before asking whether Evelyn had been wrong. “Not entirely,” Mavis said.

From the parking lot, Arlo called Camille’s name.

Arlo was standing between the two vehicles when they returned. During their absence, he had called the police and the church.

The hearse’s driver had brought the florist in one of the limousines, and the florist was standing beside his van. A police car stood across the entrance to the motel. The officer beside it was a woman Camille had gone to school with. They recognized each other immediately but postponed any greeting until Arlo had finished explaining the theft.

Officer Bell asked Arlo whether he wanted to make a complaint. Mavis handed over the keys before he could answer. The small gesture changed her. Without the hearse in her possession, she looked less like a criminal and more like an elderly woman who had come to a funeral in the wrong shoes.

Arlo inspected the vehicle and reported that nothing had been disturbed. He did not make a complaint. Officer Bell studied the motel, the flower van, and Mavis’s orange coat before returning to her car.

Once the police had gone, Arlo checked his watch and reminded them that the priest had another service at one and the cemetery crew was scheduled only until twelve-thirty. If traffic allowed, they could be back at the church in fourteen minutes. Nobody moved toward either vehicle.

Arlo put away his watch. When he spoke again, some of the ceremony had left his voice. “Camille, what would you like to do?”

For six days, everyone had asked what her mother would have wanted. Camille had answered using invoices, old habits, and the practical limits of a woman who had died without organizing the inconvenience. The grave beside Howard already existed. The funeral had already been paid for. Camille had not forgotten the Christmas message. She had decided it did not count. Choosing the plot had felt less like choosing Howard than choosing the absence of another decision.

Now the empty envelope rested in her handbag, and her mother waited behind a closed door inside the hearse Mavis had stolen for reasons given twenty-eight years too late.

Camille reached into her handbag for her phone. “Before I decide, I want to hear my mother’s voice.”

Camille had forty-three saved messages from her mother. Most lasted eleven seconds. Call me. Did you take my blue casserole dish? The pharmacy says Thursday, not Tuesday, which is ridiculous. I am at your house and you are not.

Camille chose six messages and played them on speaker while they stood in the windy parking lot. Evelyn’s voice arrived annoyed, amused, distracted, chewing, and once apparently speaking from inside a kitchen cabinet. In one message she sang the first line of “Blue Moon” and then denied doing so. In another, she asked Camille to remind Jamie that twenty dollars was not a birthday present but “evidence of continued interest.”

None contained final instructions. By the sixth message, Arlo had checked his watch twice and begun shifting his weight from one polished shoe to the other. Jamie had listened with his hands in his pockets. He asked Camille to play the one from Christmas. Arlo closed his eyes for a moment.

“Not now,” Camille said. “We don’t have time.” She locked the phone and returned it to her handbag. “But I remember what she wanted. Not Howard’s grave. Somewhere with a breeze, or cremation.”

Arlo removed his glasses and cleaned them with a folded cloth. He explained that there was a crematory twenty minutes north. Evelyn’s policy could be transferred, though there would be paperwork and a modest difference in cost. The church service could proceed without the burial, or the entire funeral could be postponed.

Camille looked toward the road and reminded them that ninety-three people were waiting. “Eighty-six now,” the florist said. “Seven followed the van.”

She turned. Her cousin Dean was parked behind the seafood restaurant. Beside him sat two women from Evelyn’s card club and the pharmacist who had allegedly changed Tuesday into Thursday. Another car turned into the lot behind them carrying three of Evelyn’s cousins.

Camille asked whether Jamie had told everyone where they were. He had told the family group chat, he admitted, but had not considered how quickly relatives would pass the news along.

Within twenty minutes, the Breakwater began filling with people in dark clothes and uncertain expressions. The first arrivals stood in separate groups, unsure whether they were early for something or late. Then familiar faces recognized one another, car doors continued closing, and the uneasy groups became a congregation.

Two pallbearers arrived in a station wagon with the family’s white wreath laid across the back seat. Leaving it in the empty church had felt wrong, one of them explained. They carried it to the hearse without asking where it belonged, and its arrival made the gathering look, for the first time, like a funeral.

The priest arrived in a hatchback driven by an altar server. He got out, looked at the hearse beneath the motel sign, and asked whether the funeral had been relocated.

Camille looked back at room eight. The door remained open, and from the parking lot she could see the empty table beneath the window. The yellow envelope was no longer waiting there; she could feel its edge through the side of her handbag.

Camille asked the priest whether they could have the service there. He said yes before Arlo could explain why this would be difficult. Camille added that her mother would remain inside the closed hearse. Arlo still looked doubtful, but the priest had already agreed. Mavis suggested opening the rear door, and Camille told her no.

Mavis nodded and stepped back. It was the first time all morning she had agreed to follow someone else’s plan.

They held Evelyn Mercer’s funeral in the parking lot of the Breakwater Motor Inn. The coffin remained inside the hearse, and the hearse remained closed.

The florist placed the white wreath beside the hearse, where it became the center of the gathering. Then he uncapped the blue marker and looked at Camille. This time, she nodded. The final R was blue, slightly larger than the other letters, and perfectly visible.

Mrs. Alvarez emerged from the motel office halfway through the first prayer, decided not to ask why her parking lot had become a church, and switched off the NO VACANCY sign.

Without a microphone or a planned order, people spoke when they were ready. The pharmacist admitted that Evelyn had been right about Tuesday. One of the card players said Evelyn cheated only when losing, which showed restraint. Jamie told the twenty-dollar story. Camille described the marmalade on the cardigan and discovered that she could say it without falling apart.

Mavis spoke last. She stood near the hearse and unfolded a page from her handbag. Camille braced herself for another set of instructions from 1998, but Mavis told them it was a list of things her sister had never returned: a green scarf, forty dollars, a library book borrowed using Mavis’s card, her good roasting pan, and, for a brief time, one of Mavis’s husbands. Mavis admitted that she had not wanted him back.

The laughter moved gently through the gathering. Mavis waited for it to pass, then folded the page without reading anything more from it. “I kept count because I believed love meant keeping the record accurate. Evelyn kept paying for a room she almost never slept in because she believed leaving once was worth remembering, even if you failed and had to leave again. We were both exhausting. I loved her. She knew that. It did not make us better behaved.”

She returned to Camille’s side. The priest said the final words, and nobody lowered anything into the ground.

While the mourners began returning to their cars, Arlo and the priest spoke quietly beside the hearse. The priest assured him that, as far as the church was concerned, the service was complete. Arlo confirmed that the crematory was expecting them, and the two men shook hands. Then the priest returned to the waiting hatchback and left for his one o’clock funeral.

Then Arlo drove Evelyn north. Camille rode with him. The hearse’s original driver followed in one of the limousines with Mavis and Jamie. The florist brought up the rear in his van, carrying the white wreath and the smaller tributes the mourners had brought from the church.

At the crematory, there were forms. There were more forms because the insurance policy named Evelyn Shaw, the death certificate named Evelyn Mercer, and the prepaid funeral contract named Evelyn Shaw-Mercer in handwriting nobody could identify. Death, Camille learned, did not simplify a person. It merely removed her ability to correct the spelling.

They waited in a room with mauve chairs bolted together. Mavis bought three coffees from a machine and handed Camille the least terrible one. Jamie asked what would happen to room eight now.

“We won’t renew the reservation,” Camille said. She looked at Mavis. “Unless you want it.”

“No,” Mavis answered. It was immediate and true.

Arlo returned with his clipboard and told them everything was arranged. Evelyn’s ashes could be collected on Monday.

Camille said they would take her somewhere with a breeze. Jamie suggested the high bluff overlooking the sea, but before Camille could answer, Mavis said Evelyn had hated the bluff because it ruined her hair.

Camille felt the old argument preparing to begin again. Mavis had known Evelyn as a sister before Camille existed. Camille had known her as a mother, Howard as a wife, and Jamie as a grandmother. Every person at the Breakwater had said goodbye to a different Evelyn without opening the hearse.

Then Camille laughed. It came out louder than she intended. Jamie joined her. Mavis resisted for six seconds before folding forward and spilling coffee between her running shoes.

On Monday, they collected Evelyn in a plain cardboard container because the decorative urns looked like prizes she would not have wanted to win. They did not take her to the bluff.

They drove to the Breakwater and rented room eight for one final night. Camille set the container on the table, then took the yellow envelope from her handbag and placed it beside Evelyn. She unpacked the blue casserole dish from a towel, and Jamie placed twenty dollars beneath it. Mavis brought the roasting pan she had accused Evelyn of keeping; it had been at the back of Mavis’s own kitchen cabinet since 2003.

They ordered too much food from the seafood restaurant and ate it on the nearer bed. Nobody made a speech. When Jamie asked again for the Christmas message, there was nowhere else they needed to be. Camille searched back three years and found the voicemail Evelyn had left at 11:16 p.m. after a family discussion about cemetery plots and two glasses of wine.

“Your aunt says you think I ought to use the Shaw plot because my name is already on it. That is not the worst idea you’ve ever had, but it has ambition. Howard snored for twenty-six years. I will not spend eternity listening to the groundwater move through his nose. Put me somewhere with a breeze. Or burn me and keep the money. Do not let Mavis turn it into theater. She’ll steal something. Merry Christmas.”

By the end, Jamie was laughing into a motel pillow. He looked at Mavis and said, “She really did know you.” Mavis laughed too, though her face was wet. “She knew everybody when it was least useful.”

Later, Mavis told Jamie how his grandmother had once reversed a car through the wall of a garden shed and continued denying it after the shed was rebuilt. Camille discovered that the motel television still received The Price Is Right, the same game show she had watched at twelve. For half an hour, they watched with the sound off.

After dark, Camille opened the window as far as it would go. The curtains lifted into the room and settled, lifted and settled. The sea could not be seen from room eight, but the air carried salt, and somewhere offshore a buoy bell sounded at uneven intervals.

Nobody decided where Evelyn would go next. Not that night.