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shoulder and cut out of line, circled her brothers and father and fell in beside Fay. She took her mother’s hand, much like Liz Sunday had taken hers the day before. Fay tilted her head sweetly.
    “We looked for you at the service,” Aunt Ellen said to Fay. She wiped her eyes.
    “We were delayed. Almost an accident on the way here. Was the service beautiful?”
    “It was what I’d always hoped,” Ellen said, and pressed her fingers to her eyes.
    Gwen shuffled forward. The line approached the casket. Her other aunt, matriarch-in-waiting Meredith, had joined Grandmother beside the casket. Meredith’s eyes were red and the bags below were swollen. Meredith raised her hand to hip level and wiggled her fingers at Fay, an unconvincing and almost unwelcoming welcome.
    “She loved the son of a bitch,” said Ellen.
    “She never believed us.”
    The sisters continued as if Gwen was not near.
    Aunt Ellen’s tears had stopped falling. As the women passed the casket, Ellen kept her back to it and aimed her face to the back of the parlor. Guinevere imagined Ellen looking above the mourners’ heads, as nervous speechmakers are taught to do. Gwen turned. Fay passed the wrinkled gray man in the coffin without looking and dragged her hand along the casket edge. Let her fingertips linger at the corner, as if savoring its smooth finish.
    The line progressed. As her mother knelt quickly before Gwen’s seated grandmother, Gwen studied her grandfather’s face. It was the same as in her vision. The same hair and wrinkles. His eyes were closed and in her vision he’d studied the future, but it was the same face, only pasty with death make-up.
    Months later, Gwen remembered her mother’s face the morning she told Gwen that her grandfather was dead. Recalled the smoothness at the edges of her mother’s mouth, the relaxed crow tracks at her eyes. Her father’s death had washed away the harshness. As if his death had tied strings to her worries and floated them away.
    His death freed her.
    Guinevere had known the night of her vision that her grandfather had died. Fay’s announcement merely confirmed what Gwen had intuited by having stood between her grandfather and the place he was going. That’s how she came to think of it. She’d witnessed him on his path to meet his maker.
    When Gwen considered Fay’s response to his death, and illuminated her mother’s face with the light of Gwen’s own suffering at her father’s…hands…she realized the face in the vision belonged to an irredeemable man—worried, yet not contrite, looking ahead to profound suffering.

CHAPTER SIX
    Seems the fire could blaze like the Hindenburg and not warm the rest of the house. I’ve emptied the bin beside the hearth and if there isn’t more outside I’ll end up burning the kitchen table and chairs. Moving around warms me. If I can get some wood and find food, maybe things will be okay.
    The carbine is above the mantle, where I found it. Save the two holes in the ceiling and the carbon in the tube, it’s like I didn’t try to blow my head off a few minutes ago.
    I spot a brass fireplace kit: shovel, broom, poker, and tongs. I thrust the poker into the fire, rest the tip on the reddest embers. For later.
    Jesus still floats above the paint. His look says He’s seen it all, and whoever painted Him was an expert at capturing nuance. Whoever painted that had to have actually seen Jesus, because I’ve never seen that look on a real person.
    Well, maybe one: Mister Sharps, of the Youth Home.
    There’s a closet opposite the front door. On the other side of the wall is the kitchen and I’ll explore that in a minute—that and maybe first I’ll prowl about the roll-top desk for any letters that will tell me whose hospitality I’m enjoying. Firewood comes first. I take a heavy winter parka, a hat, and leather work gloves with woolen inserts from the closet. They feel so good I could sit on the sofa and sweat, if it wasn’t for fear of having no fire