Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral

Merge

59 Merge When we went to meet Joan, I thought there’d be sweating glasses of tea and a wide porch, wide-rimmed hats. I thought at least she’d be wide, wearing a dress printed with poppies. But she is slender, serves us nothing to drink, just a leftover cheese log. Her husband Frank slides the knife through it, his hands trembling, and Joan says she remembers walking my mother in the pram, What do they call it now? While Frank spreads a bit of cheese on a cracker and shakily passes it to me, Joan is getting the blue pram from the basement, putting my small, fat, lacy mother in it, taking her out into 1946. Finally, my mother has a witness. She sits in her high-backed chair, taking no refreshment, listening to Joan confirm her long existence, all the way back to the beginning for which there has been no proof, no brother like mine who remembers sitting next to me in the backseat of our blue Buick, Mom snapping, 60 Be quiet while I merge, long minutes of freeway, then the mountains and the clouds cleaving and Mom finally speaking again, calm now, saying Look, kids, it’s Heaven. ...