They sat on the surface, refusing to go in — and underneath the refusal, faint but already there, was a small wrong note I couldn’t name yet, the sound of a woman telling me a story she’d decided on rather than a thing that had happened.

“Why did nobody call me?” I heard myself say.

“Three days — why did nobody call me?”

“Your phone was out of range.

Your Mr.

Calderon said the security operation couldn’t be interrupted for anything.” She said it the way you say a thing you have practiced, and some cold animal part of me, underneath the shock, filed that away without yet knowing why.

I pushed past her into my own house.

And there in the center of the living room, where the couch should have been, was a casket — open, waiting, ready to be closed.

My aunt Rowena, my mother’s sister, who owned a funeral home two towns over, stood beside it with her hands folded, and she was already talking about the cemetery, about the schedule, about how we really could not delay past seven o’clock.

“It’s best to let her rest,” Rowena said, in a smooth, practiced, funeral-parlor voice.