The ham came in a foil tray with somebody else's name Sharpied on the bottom, which meant it had to go back.
That was the part nobody warned you about. You bury your mother at eleven in the morning, and by two in the afternoon you are standing in a church basement holding a tray that belongs to a woman named B. DELGADO, doing math about when you are supposed to return it. Not too soon, because that looks ungrateful. Not too late, because then you become the boy who died along with his mother, and people talk.
Noah Reyes was nineteen years old and had become, over the course of a single Tuesday, an expert in casserole logistics.
He had also started keeping score.
He had started at the funeral home, somewhere around the third handshake, because the alternative was screaming in a room with an organ in it. It was a simple system. He kept it in his head, next to the pill schedule he no longer needed.
*She's in a better place.* Six.
*Everything happens for a reason.* Four.
*God doesn't give you more than you can handle.* Two, one of them from a man who had also, ninety seconds earlier, taken four of the good cookies off the tray and put them in a napkin in his jacket. Noah respected the hustle. Noah did not respect the theology.
*Let me know if you need anything.* Eleven.
Eleven was funny, because eleven was also how many people had signed the guest book. He had counted that too. Twelve lines were printed on the page and eleven of them had names, and the twelfth was blank, and Noah kept looking at that blank line the way you look at a chipped tooth with your tongue. Somebody had almost come. Somebody had thought about it.
Above the coffee urn hung a felt banner left over from Easter. HE IS RISEN, it said, except the second S had peeled and curled, so it actually said HE IS RIEN, which Noah was pretty sure meant *he is nothing* in French. Three months that banner had been up. It was going to outlive all of them.
Next to it, screwed into the cinderblock, was a wooden sign that said LIVE LAUGH LOVE, in a church basement, where they put the dead people's sandwiches. Noah stared at it for a long time.
His aunt Marisol cried the way people cry in movies, loud and wet and unashamed, with her whole chest, and Noah envied her so much it made his teeth hurt. He had not cried yet. He had gotten close in the car that morning and then a radio ad for a mattress sale had come on, twelve months no interest, and the moment had passed, and now here he was, dry as a receipt, shaking hands with a man named Rick who claimed to have worked with his mother at the dental office. Nobody could confirm Rick. Rick ate two plates.
The priest, at the graveside, had said the line about how in the midst of life we are in death. Noah had thought that was backwards. For fourteen months it had been the other way around at his house.
His mother had done her dying in the living room, because the bedroom was upstairs and the stairs stopped being a thing she could do in March. So they had put the hospital bed by the window, where the light was good, and Noah had learned a whole trade nobody pays you for. He learned pill schedules. He learned how to change the sheets with a person still in them. He learned that the sound a morphine pump makes is almost exactly the sound the fridge makes, which meant he woke up eleven times a night for a year.
And when the hospice nurse said *she's gone* at 4:12 on Saturday morning, the very first thing Noah felt, before grief, cutting the line in front of it, was relief.
Clean. Quiet. Enormous.
He had not told anyone that. He was not going to tell anyone that. He figured he would carry it the rest of his life like a rock in his shoe, and every so often he would take a step and remember it was in there.
He returned the tray to Mrs. Delgado at four. She held his face in both hands and told him his mother was watching over him now, and he said thank you, and did not say the thing he was thinking, which was that if she was watching, she had just spent her first afternoon in eternity observing her son negotiate the ownership of a ham.
*****
The Corolla was a 2003 and had a check engine light that had been on since roughly the Obama administration. The driver's window went down. It did not go up. Noah had solved this problem with a trash bag and a roll of packing tape from work, and had solved it so well that the car now looked exactly like what it was, which was a vehicle owned by someone the world had stopped checking in on.
He had never named the car. You don't name something that's going to leave you.
On the passenger seat sat the folder from the funeral home. They gave you a folder. It was navy blue and had gold foil on it and it looked like something you would get at a hotel, and inside it, past the laminated prayer card and the brochure about grief with a photograph of a beach on the front, was the invoice.
Six thousand, three hundred forty dollars and eighteen cents.
It was the eighteen cents that did it. Somewhere in that building was a man who had run those numbers, looked at the eighteen cents, and decided to leave it. Twenty four month payment plan. The finance woman had called it a *compassion discount* and Noah had said thank you like a person who had been handed a gift, and he had been thinking about that phrase ever since, turning it over, holding it up to the light. Compassion discount. Fifteen percent off. Terms and conditions apply.
His phone buzzed in the cupholder. Gary, from the warehouse.
**sorry for ur loss. dock at 10. can u do a double?**
Gary had approved exactly one day of bereavement leave, and today was the one day, and it was almost over. Noah looked at the invoice, and then at the phone, and typed back **yeah** because six thousand three hundred forty dollars and eighteen cents does not care what happened to you on Saturday morning.
There was a second phone in the cupholder. Hers. He had been carrying it around for four days for no reason he could explain to anybody, including himself.
At 9:30 it went off.
Not a call. An alarm. She had set it a year and a half ago, back when she could still work the settings, and it repeated every weeknight, and it had been going off every weeknight since, and he had let it, the way you let a light stay on in a room you don't go into anymore.
The label read: **TELL NOAH GOOD LUCK.**
The passcode was his birthday. It had always been his birthday. He unlocked it, and his thumb hovered, and he thought about how he was going to have to shut this off eventually, because someday the phone would die for good and it would be worse if it happened by accident.
So he did it. He turned off the repeat.
It took about one and a half seconds and then it was gone, and the screen said nothing, and Noah sat in a funeral home parking lot with a dead woman's phone in his hand and understood, immediately and completely, that he had made a mistake. He tried to set it again. Same time. Same words, typed out letter for letter.
It was not the same. Of course it was not the same. He had built it himself and it knew it.
That was when it finally came, and it came sideways, over a phone alarm, in a parking lot, with a foil tray receipt still in his pocket. He put his forehead on the steering wheel and made a sound he did not recognize as his own, and the horn went off, one long stupid honk into the empty lot, which somehow made it worse and also, weirdly, a little better.
*****
He did not drive to the warehouse. Not yet. He had thirteen minutes and he spent them wrong.
The cemetery gate stayed open until ten. Her plot did not have a stone yet, because a stone was another eleven hundred dollars and that was a next-year problem, so what it had was a plastic marker with a printed card slotted into it, exactly like the tag on a grocery store shelf. Rosa Reyes. Two dates and a dash. All of it, the whole thing, everything, in that dash.
Dinner was a gas station taquito he had bought at 8:40 and forgotten about. He ate it standing on the fresh dirt because there was nowhere else to stand.
"So that happened," he said.
The dirt did not say anything.
"Rick came. Nobody knows who Rick is. Rick had two plates."
He waited. He had thought maybe he would feel something out here, some presence, some sign, the way people described it. What he felt was cold, and full of taquito, and due at work in nine minutes.
His mother used to make him pull the car over for sunsets. That was her whole personality, honestly. She would spot one and say *pull over, Noah, pull over, look at it,* and he would groan and pull over, and she would sit there with her hands in her lap like she was in church and say, every single time, *they don't repeat.* And he would say it was just light hitting garbage in the air, because he was seventeen and it was his job to say things like that.
"They don't repeat," he told the dirt. "Yeah. I got it. I got it, Ma."
He looked up, mostly so he would not have to look down anymore.
And the sky, which had held still for every night of his entire life, was moving.
It started as a seam. A hairline, running from one horizon toward the other, like the dark itself was a painted surface and something behind it had finally exhaled. Stars did not go out. That would have been simpler. The stars went *sideways*, sliding along the seam, streaming toward it the way water finds a drain, and where they gathered the black turned a color Noah had no word for, a color that was not on the list, and the whole world went very quiet in the particular way a room goes quiet when the person everyone is afraid of walks in.
Somewhere out past the edge of everything, something enormous took a breath.
Noah Reyes, nineteen years old, who had buried his mother that morning and returned a ham that afternoon and had a double shift starting in six minutes, stood on the fresh dirt with a gas station taquito in his hand, looked up at the end of the world, and said, out loud, to nobody:
"You have got to be kidding me."
Then the seam opened, and something small and blue fell out of it, and it was falling toward him.