Three women from down the road heaped forkfuls of revised memories into my newly widowed grandmother. They consoled her into remembering a different marriage as other women had done for them. They called it the rites of a light heart. Their husbands’ rigid fists became hands glib with plant soil, and instead of bruises down their thighs, they saw hickies planted like booby-traps along their collarbones. Soon my grandmother no longer remembered the liquor steaming from grandpa’s skin like smoke at the end of a cigarette, and could only picture him in the brown suit he wore to look nice. At his funeral, she spoke of his invisible burdens as if finally seeing them clearly. Lucifer was misunderstood, just needed compassion, she elegized, and gave a copy to every mourner. She put one in her husband’s grave should he come to her in a dream.
