Elise had an index card with her. She teetered up to the lectern on her strappy high heels, gazed out at the congregation with a dazzling smile, and cleared her throat. “When me and my cousins were little,” she said, “Grandma would call us on the phone and say, ‘It’s Saturday! Let’s have Camp Grandma!’ And we’d all go over to her house and she would do handicrafts with us — pressed flowers and pot holders and Popsicle-stick picture frames — or she’d read to us from these storybooks about children from other lands. I mean, some of those books were boring but parts were, like, sort of interesting. I’m going to remember my grandma for as long as I live.”

Deb and Susan glared at her — it must have been the “my grandma” that irked them — while Alexander took on the sullen expression of a boy trying not to cry. Elise gave the congregation a triumphant look and clopped back to her seat.

“Thank you, all,” Reverend Alban said. He nodded to the pianist, who pivoted hastily toward the piano and started on a rendition of “Brother James’s Air.” It seemed a peculiarly lighthearted tune for the occasion. Amanda’s Hugh absentmindedly tapped one foot to the beat, till Amanda leaned forward and sent a meaningful frown down the row to him.

At the end of the piece, Reverend Alban rose and approached the lectern again. He placed his fingertips together. “I didn’t know Mrs. Whitshank,” he said, “and therefore I don’t have the memories that the rest of you have. But it has occurred to me, on occasion, that our memories of our loved ones might not be the point. Maybe the point is their memories — all that they take away with them. What if heaven is just a vast consciousness that the dead return to? And their assignment is to report on the experiences they collected during their time on earth. The hardware store their father owned with the cat asleep on the grass seed, and the friend they used to laugh with till the tears streamed down their cheeks, and the Saturdays when their grandchildren sat next to them gluing Popsicle sticks. The spring mornings they woke up to a million birds singing their hearts out, and the summer afternoons with the swim towels hung over the porch rail, and the October air that smelled like wood smoke and apple cider, and the warm yellow windows of home when they came in on a snowy night. ‘That’s what my experience has been,’ they say, and it gets folded in with the others — one more report on what living felt like. What it was like to be alive.”

Then he raised his arms and said, “Page two thirty-nine in your hymnals: ‘Shall We Gather at the River?’ ” and everybody stood up.

“I don’t understand,” Red said to Amanda, under cover of the music. “Where did he say she went?”

“To a vast consciousness,” Amanda told him.

“Well, that does sound like something your mother might do,” he said. “But I don’t know; I was hoping for someplace more concrete.”

Amanda patted his hand, and then she pointed to the next line in the hymn book.

Ree Bascomb had warned them earlier that people would surely show up at the house right after the service. Whether or not they were invited, she said, there they’d be, expecting food and drink. So at least the family was prepared when the first caller rang the doorbell. Without so much as a pause to catch their breaths, they were back to murmuring thank-yous and accepting hugs and allowing their hands to be clasped. Ree’s maid offered trays of little sandwiches delivered that morning by the caterer. A trio of Middle Eastern men, more formally dressed than Abby’s own sons, watched in shocked silence as Stem’s three boys chased each other around the legs of the grown-ups, and a tiny old woman whom nobody knew asked several people whether there were any of those biscuits that Abby used to make.

When Denny said his goodbyes before driving Susan to the train station, it was clear that he assumed the guests would be gone by the time he got back. But no, there they still were when he returned. Sax Brown and Marge Ellis were arguing about Afghanistan. Elise had got hold of a glass of white wine; she was pinching the stem daintily between her thumb and index finger with all her other fingers splayed out, and her makeup had worn thin and her black eye was re-emerging. Ree Bascomb’s maid was serving crudités in her stocking feet now, and Ree herself, who had maybe had a tad too much to drink, stood with an arm looped around the waist of somebody’s teenage son. Red looked exhausted. His face was gray and sagging. Nora was trying to make him sit down, but he stayed stubbornly upright.

Then suddenly the guests were gone, all of them at once, as if they had heard some secret dog whistle. The living room held no one but family, and it seemed too bright, like outdoors after a daytime movie. A decimated cheese board rested on an ottoman, and cracker crumbs littered the rug, and someone’s forgotten shawl was slung across the back of a chair. Ree Bascomb’s maid tinkled glassware in the kitchen. The toilet flushed in the powder room, and Tommy returned to the living room still hitching up his pants.

“Well,” Red said. He looked around at everyone.

“Well,” Amanda echoed.

They were all standing. They were all empty-handed. They had the look of people waiting for their next assignment, but there wasn’t one, of course. It was over. They had seen Abby off.

It seemed there should be something more — some summing up, some account to deliver. “You wouldn’t believe what Merrick said,” they wanted to report. And “You’d have laughed to see Queen Eula. No sign of Trey, wouldn’t you know, because he had an important meeting, but Queen Eula came. Can you imagine? Remember how she always used to swear you were a Communist?”

But wait. Abby was dead. She would never hear about any of this.

8

IT COULD BE ARGUED that with Abby gone, there was no further need for anyone to stay on in the house with Red. He was more or less able-bodied, after all, and he went right back to work the morning after the funeral. That afternoon, though, he came home early and slipped upstairs to bed, and if Nora hadn’t walked into his room with a stack of folded laundry he might have lain there undiscovered for who knows how long, one hand clamped to his chest and a line of either pain or worry crimping his forehead. He said it was nothing, just a tired spell, but he didn’t object when Nora insisted on Denny’s driving him to the emergency room.

In fact it was nothing — indigestion, the doctors decided six hours later, and he was sent home along with all four of his children, the other three having assembled at the hospital as soon as Nora phoned them. Still, it started his daughters thinking.

They had agreed, till then, that there would be plenty of time to sort out the household arrangements. Let things settle a bit, they told each other. But the rest of that week, both girls seemed to be on Bouton Road more often than they were at home — and generally without their husbands and children, as if to show that they meant business. They would wander in on some errand, Jeannie wanting Abby’s recipe box or Amanda bringing grocery-store cartons to sort Abby’s clothes into, and then they would hang around engaging one or another person in pointed conversation.

“You know we can’t depend on Denny in any permanent way,” Amanda told Nora, for instance. “He might promise us the moon, but one day he’ll up and leave us. I’m surprised he’s lasted this long.” Then Denny walked into the kitchen and she broke off. Had he heard? But even after he’d set his cup in the sink and walked out again, Nora made no reply. She slid cookies off a baking sheet, her expression pleasant and noncommittal, as if Amanda had been talking just to hear herself talk.

And Stem! Maybe it was grief, but he’d become very quiet. “Underneath,” Jeannie tried telling him once, “I think Dad has always assumed that you and Nora would live here forever. Inheriting the house, I mean, after he’s gone.” Then she sent a guilty look toward Denny, who was sitting next to Stem on the couch flicking through TV channels, but Denny merely grimaced. Even he knew it was Stem that Red would have pinned his hopes on. As for Stem himself, he didn’t seem to have heard her. He kept his eyes fixed on the screen, although there was nothing to watch just then but commercials and more commercials.