Jimmy D’s Thrive-N-Dine
A Short Story
Excerpt A
She was new at this, he imagined.
She had never been a widow before. Maybe new to death entirely.
Mid-fifties. Well-connected in society, judging by the turn-out. Money, yes. Money enough, that was certain, judging by the fine cars lining the drive at the bottom of the hill like stones of polished onyx, and by the fine black dress that hung from her bones like wet grief in the still heat. She was put together. Even now, she was put together. She was comfortable in her life.
And, yet, perhaps, here was something she had never experienced.
Garrett watched the small, brittle woman, and realized that she must have felt all of the eyes upon her, weighing her actions against the moment, and she must have felt self-conscious.
She plunged the silver shovel deep into the pile of soft, coffee-colored loam and he thought that it was all wrong. She moved with far too much resolve; a vigor too easily interpreted as eagerness or even excitement at the task.
Maybe, Garrett thought, maybe she was glad to see him go. Maybe she had hated him. Maybe she had killed him – poison, he surmised, it would have to have been poison – and maybe this burial was but the denouement to a long and twisted plot to free her from a marriage rotted by violence and deceit.
He panned the mourners discretely. Her lover was certainly among them. Her husband’s brother. His business partner. The priest. No, not the priest. Maybe the alderman.
She withdrew from the middle of the mound what would be her third heaping load of soil. Straining under its weight, her knees buckling slightly and pushing out against the fine limp grief of her dress, the new widow swung the shovel over and down into the earthen rectangle that held her former husband. There was a small grunt from her effort and the dirt made its soft, muffled contact with the cleanly polished cherry wood down in the hole.
There, Garrett thought, his compassion returning, that will do, now. That will do.
But the new widow rotated her tiny shoulders back to the mound, driving the shovel in hard and deep for another load, and another straining expression and another little grunt, as though this was the way it was done. As though grieving required some solitary feat of strength in the midday sun as others watched on in silence, judging the sincerity of her loss by her willingness to suffer physical injury.
The man they called Milo—her brother, Garrett guessed—stepped in to take the shovel and pat her on the shoulder. He was a big man, depositing a load of dirt into the grave like he was spooning cream into his coffee. He handed the shovel to the bald man in the sunglasses who looked like he worked for the government.
A meadowlark alighted on the branch of the young sycamore that would one day split the polished planks of cherry wood with its roots. The bird cocked its head and chirped a lackluster condolence before moving on.