Lennie Remembers the Angels

For Jeannette

Lately she’s going back to the two tall sisters in their white choir robes standing next to the box she put her mother in, looking at her, not like somebody you pass on the street, but staring into her, eyes marching right inside her like she’s just a house with the doors flung wide open. The two of them like any other women in her church, wide-shouldered and big-busted, black hair and honey-brown skin shining, the way she’d look someday, she thought then. The women stood there while Reverend Earl was preaching by the grave, robe hems lifting in the hot air, moving like someone sighing, only no one heard them and no one saw them. And it wasn’t no dream. It was what happened, Lennie holding the paper bag one of the women had handed her, the bag gone soft and furry with the sweat of her hand, a bag full of cash, which she used to pay for the box and then the hole in the clay and some flowers, too, even though her uncle, her mother’s own brother, said her mother didn’t deserve flowers. A whore like her.