SAL
No grass grew on the graves at the Marzen Baptist Church. The church couldn’t afford irrigation, and the deacons thought the wild hill grasses too uncouth for reverence, so twice a month Alvira Menendez, the church’s groundskeeper, raked the sand and plucked out anything that grew. She did this for Grace Prentiss’s grave even after Sal lined it with a neat rectangle of stones that made raking it difficult.
On Christmas, eleven weeks before Mr Merkel died, Sal stood beside his mother’s grave with his uncles. The lines Alvira’s rake left in the sand looked like the claw marks of Catellus’s demons, and Sal slammed his mind shut against an image of his mother, six feet and six months into the ground. Instead he remembered how pretty she’d been in the metal casket in the church, with her
