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best left alone.  He was already so late, anyway.
    "If you really feel the need to go, though, they’re buryin’ him at Holy Cross."
    Jay checked his watch and then looked back to Gene with a smile.
    "Well, I’d better get going, you know?"
    Gene met his smile with a smirk and a grunt as he stepped back from the car.  The look stayed on his face as he watched the black Jetta slip off into the distance toward town.

 
                                                            CHAPTER 7
     
     
    His conversation with Gene gave Jay more second thoughts about this trip home.  Gene had seemed just a little off.  He shrugged his shoulders and told himself to get over it.
    There was one last rise in the road before the two-mile-long drop down into the valley.  From it, he could see all of Haddonfield.  It was like a tree, with streets branching out from Main Street, which was firmly rooted at the bridge over Spindle Creek.
    He’d gotten that image from his father.  To him, it had meant that the town was a living, growing thing.  Here, in the depth of winter, under the oppressive grey sky, it was changed to a dead, leafless black and white image for Jay. It was the place where his youth had ended with the deaths of his father and of his best friend.  Where he learned earlier than he should have that life wasn’t the carnival fun ride that children are led to believe it is.
    Jay rolled through the gates of Holy Cross Cemetery just as the graveside service had ended.  He stood next to his car as the mourners filtered through the headstones toward the line of cars parked at the edge of the roadway.  A lot could be determined from observing the vehicles in someone’s funeral entourage.
    Everyone who died got the obligatory black limousine.  Usually a Cadillac.  It was funny how life made this one concession to the desires of the middle class when they couldn’t appreciate it themselves.  Well, maybe they did.  Maybe it made the deceased feel better to know deep down that all their striving for a better life would at least leave those who survived them with a sense of the luxury they could never provide while they were alive.  Maybe it gave them some final relief and respite as they wandered off into the light, if they believed in that sort of thing.
    If the loved one were exceptionally lucky, he got a flower car.  But that was just for those who had enough friends with the money to afford the inflated prices for the all too familiar arrangements of mums and gladioli.
    After the flower car came the average middle class stiff’s life, writ in the cars of their friends and relatives.  It wasn’t merely the length of the snake’s tail behind the hearse, but what its bones looked like that gave an indication of social standing.  Not just for the deceased, but also for those they had known in life.
    A lot of the discomfort for people saying their goodbyes doesn’t come from the actual death of someone they knew.  It comes from having all pretense stripped in the parade to the grave.  Any man can spiff up for the event by buying a designer suit cheaply at an outlet mall, but he can’t hide the fact that he has to drive a twelve-year-old Toyota with rust eating holes into the doors and fenders.
    Jay’s dad’s funeral parade had been a long line of big, solid middle class mainstays.  Cadillacs, Lincolns; big, full-sized family luxo-cruisers, even the sheriff in his black and white interceptor.  It was the kind of display which befitted the town’s mayor.  As he looked down the line at the group of vehicles at curbside for Jack, the short row of old and compact cars told him that here had been a man with few friends and not a lot of money.  Jay wondered what his own death would tell others about his life.
    He looked back to the stream of figures dressed in black and caught sight of a couple of familiar faces crossing the road up near the head of the