The brass lowering device groaned and snapped a rusted cable just as my grandmother’s casket reached the bottom of the grave.

Pastor Samuel stopped reading from the Book of Psalms.

He adjusted his collar and looked down into the muddy trench.

I dug my fingernails into my palms.

The late autumn rain had turned Cedar Ridge Cemetery into a field of slick brown clay.

My father stepped to the edge of the wet earth.

He didn’t look sad, and he didn’t look down at the mahogany casket.

“Well, that’s fitting,” Gregory said.

He reached inside his expensive wool overcoat, pulled out a small blue savings passbook, and held it up in the gray afternoon light.

“What are you doing?

Why do you have her bankbook?” I asked.

Gregory looked at me with a tight smile and adjusted his crisp white shirt cuffs.

“Don’t say she never gave you anything, Sammy girl,” he said.

He tossed the blue passbook straight into the open grave.

It landed with a wet smack in a puddle of brown water pooling on top of the casket, right beside the small porcelain angel I had carefully placed on the lid before the funeral directors closed it.

“There’s your whole inheritance, a useless old notebook,” Gregory said.

I watched the blue cardboard start to soak up the dirty water.

The gold lettering on the front cover was already disappearing under the spreading mud.