Read Digging Out for Free Online Page B

didn’t own a tie, except for one of his father’s, which he’d worn to our wedding.
    We file past the doors leading into the auditorium. There is a “before performance” feel in the room. People are setting up speakers, pushing a grand piano to one corner of the stage, placing dozens of flower arrangements everywhere. The stage is covered with them. My nephew, Morgan, is passing out copies of a CD Marc put together only weeks ago highlighting his film music. Party favors. I wonder who made the copies. A photo of Marc on the cover has been added, and a poem called “Loving,” which I wrote years ago, is on the back. I grimace and look away. I hear a high-pitched laugh, an octave on the piano, a few notes on the trumpet. Someone drags the lectern across the stage.
    “Eddie. Give me more blue in the lights,” says a voice backstage. “Testing …” The microphone. Marc would absolutely hate this to-do. He hated any fuss being made over him. I contemplate trying to stop it but can’t think of how.
    We sit in the third row. In front of us, all the cousins, uncles and aunts have turned around and are trying to get my attention: Marc’s sister, his brother, their children. I want to escape the eyes on me, the grieving widow—to disappear from feeling or facing all of the difficulties that I know lie ahead.
    The room is beginning to quiet.
    “Mommy,” Hannah says. “I have to pee.” Behind me are the hundreds of people who have gathered and are now sitting down. I cannot ask her to hold it. She takes my hand and we inch our way out of the row and up the aisle. Almost everyone I have known since I’ve come to America is in this audience. People touch me, my arm, my hand.
    Through the years, when I’d thought about which one of us would go first, it was never Marc. I have imagined Hannah’s death in a million scenarios, and Dafydd’s—but Marc was reliable, indestructible. Even though his father had a heart attack at thirty-three, Marc seemed ever present, indissoluble. I teased him about what he would do after I died, the kind of woman he’d end up with: big breasts, small waist, tight-bodice dresses and full skirts; a “Makola” woman buying all her clothes from that pricey shop on Madison Avenue in New York. She would be slow-moving, soft, easy, languid—the exact opposite of the intellectual, with my thrift store clothes andoveranxious attitude. I was the one who pressed for wills, guardians for Hannah. I was supposed to be the one to go first. I don’t want to be the one always left behind.
    A week after the service, Dafydd goes back to New York. He will have his knee operated on there. “It will be easier,” he says. “For the first couple of weeks, I’ll have Barbara bring my work to the apartment. I’ll be back in the office in no time.” But he is back in L.A. with us the following weekend. “It’s too hard being away from you right now,” he tells Hannah. I know he also means it is too hard for him to be away from the town where the remains of Marc reside.
    He takes a month off from work and has his knee operated on in Los Angeles. This is a good excuse not to get back to my own work. I have gone way beyond my editor’s deadline on the poetry book. I can’t face rewriting poems written when Marc was alive. I cannot work lines like:
“He moves toward the October of life” or “Setting ourselves like bulbs deep in hard ground …”
They mean nothing now. They are light, frivolous, stupid and empty.
    Rather, I drive Hannah to school most mornings, come home and draw a bath for Dafydd, shop for food, cook breakfast and lunch for him, pick Hannah up at school, prepare dinner for all of us. I make extravagant meals, concoctions Marc would like: spicy shrimp with arugula; farfalle with zucchini, yellow peppers and spicy chicken sausage; chicken breasts stuffed with broccoli rabe; grilled lamb chops with roasted green figs; and pot after pot of mint chicken soup. This is something I can do.