And so it was. We had a wake for Mr. Fartham, and then we played Bingo for mementos. The wake was not about drinking out of pewter or any hope of Mr. Fartham rising again. Rather, we reminisced around him while we all got used to the idea of him dead. For although he’d had a cluster of small strokes a few years back and had become progressively more forgetful, frail and fearing, no one had expected the massive heart attack that grabbed him while he slept. His wife awoke to discover herself a widow while Valerie, who had lumbered downstairs and started the Sunday pancakes, had her father’s sudden death announced to her with hysterical shrieks.

The wake lasted that day and most of the next. We didn’t have the body but we had the time till the burial. Mrs. Fartham tried to stay in her room; she might have resisted the effect but for her older daughter. For Valerie got into it. She sat by her father’s stuff weeping at first but she was susceptible to the recollections of most of us around her, and gradually she became more composed than I’d ever seen her, and her face lost the grief-engorgement, and I saw for the first time that she was actually attractive within all the fat. Valerie O. performed little services for her, bringing her hot tea or warm slippers, rubbing her rounded strap-dented shoulders and the wide nape of her neck below her lifted lobes, and when she rose they went upstairs together, apparently to see Mrs. Fartham, who was better for their visits, but also (we learned later) to seek time alone together, for mutual consolation. The Valeries became a couple.

Elizabeth was not so lucky. My phony old friend tried to have everyone and lost us all. She flirted with Jimmy, teased Valerie O., even tried to vamp my brother John. She batted her eyelashes at her fathers’ old colleagues, and attempted to pad her dad’s obituary with references to herself (she elbowed me out of the way to tell the local reporter that her father’s pet peeve, as well as her own, was rudeness!). She made bulldyke disparagements about Valerie O. and then tried to gulp them back when her sister came out. She flirted so aggressively with Jimmy that I saw him blush; I overheard her promise him that he wouldn’t have to do anything – he could just lay back and enjoy.

She saw me overhear. She blushed redder than a redhead and retreated after that. And I’ll admit I got a thrill. It was a cheap thrill, yes, but powerful enough.

The burial was a brief ceremony between the wake before and the games after. We caravanned there in the traditional dark, slow-moving sedans, placards in the windows and headlights on, but we’d all said so much at the wake that the speeches were short at the graveside. Then we returned to the Fartham abode and more food, and Jimmy as promised ran Bingo games for the miscellany.

I took the classic Playboys when I won, and some of my old friends looked a little askance. But me behaving oddly wasn’t that strange to them. They knew me for weird. They did agree with me though: we did it right; we honored Mr. Fartham; we had fun.