The Same Stuff as Stars

“Don’t be mad at me, Angel. If I’d known you were coming back, I’d have taken better care of myself. It’s too late now, but I’m grateful I lived long enough to point you at the stars.”

“I don’t know near enough! You gotta come back and teach me.”

“You remember what I said last summer?”

“About what?”

“About us coming from the stars? About our bodies being made of the same stuff as the stars?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, try to think about me going back to the stars where I belong, okay? Whenever you look at the stars, think about old Ray turned back to stardust.”

“What about Grandma?”

“What about her?”

“She’s going to feel terrible if you go die on her before she’s had a chance to make it right with you. I know she is.”

“Tell her she was a good mama to me. Tell her”—he paused and licked his cracked lips—“you tell her I love her. She’ll believe you.”

“I want you to tell her yourself.”

“I will if I can, Angel. I might not have...

He never finished the sentence. The nurse came in and told Angel her time was up, the patient had to rest. “I’ll be back,” she said. “You better be here when I do, you hear me?”

It was the last thing she ever said to him.

***

Miss Liza sent Eric to take them to the funeral. Angel was afraid Grandma would refuse to go, but she put on a black dress rusty with age and a patched overcoat and got into the car.

In front of the church was a long black hearse. Two men with slicked-down hair, wearing identical black doublebreasted raincoats, were standing beside it. When Eric’s car pulled up behind the hearse, the two men came over. One of them opened the door for Grandma to get out.

“I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs. Morgan.”

Grandma didn’t take the hand he offered, didn’t even look at him. As he closed the door of Eric’s old Buick, he said, “Mr. Morgan didn’t arrange for a family limousine; otherwise, of course...”

The second man cleared his throat. “The casket is already at the gravesite,” he said. “If you’ll come this way.” He took Grandma under the elbow. She shook him off.

Angel could see Miss Liza shuffling out the door of the library. “Wait, Grandma,” she said. “Miss Liza’s coming.”

Eric ran over and took his great-aunt’s hand. Angel, the undertakers, even Grandma stared at the librarian, her hand in her young nephew’s, her head sidewise, her skinny little legs picking their way across the uneven lawn. It took an age for the old lady to get to where they stood. “I’m so sorry, Erma,” she said, her voice breaking. “He was such a lovely man.”

Grandma shook her head and mumbled something that might have been “Thank you,” but Angel couldn’t be sure.

Angel had imagined a funeral service like the ones she’d seen in movies, where the church was packed and people stood up and said nice things about the dead person. She thought she might even get the nerve to stand up and tell people that the star man was her friend, that he had taught her about the heavens. But they didn’t go inside the white church with its tall, copper-colored steeple. They went directly to the cemetery on the other side of the building, where a fresh hole had been dug in the ground. On one side of the hole was a plain boxlike coffin with an American flag neatly folded on top, and on the other, a mound of moist dirt. Two men in work clothes stood a short distance away, leaning on shovels. The undertakers herded the tiny group of mourners to the casket. There were two folding chairs. Grandma was told quietly to sit in one and Miss Liza in the other.

There were only two other mourners. They wore heavy plaid jackets, big red workmen’s hands poking out of the sleeves. Awkwardly, they came to Grandma’s chair and introduced themselves. They said they had worked with Ray Morgan at the landfill. It was Miss Liza, not Grandma, who thanked them for coming.

“He was a good man,” one of them said, and the other nodded in agreement. Everyone thought Ray Morgan was a good man. Why hadn’t Grandma been able to see it?

A short, bald man in a flowing black robe came out of the back of the church. He shook hands with each of them, murmured something Angel didn’t catch, then opened a small black book and began to read out loud.

On this gray morning, with the late-autumn grass brown beneath her feet, it was hard to imagine that the star man lay in that box next to a gash in the cold earth. The star man should have been buried at night with all his stars dancing in attendance. She could believe that the shriveled man she had visited in the hospital, Grandma’s son Ray Morgan, was dead, but how could she believe the magical star man was gone forever?

While the minister kept reading, she looked around at Morgan tombstones, some so old she could hardly make out the names and dates. It was funny to think of people being scared of graveyards. How could you be scared of a place that felt so quiet? There were big trees among the stones. The limbs were bare now, but she remembered seeing them last summer with their broad, leafy branches, almost inviting you to climb up into their laps.