The singing started before the funeral was over.

Lily heard her own voice first - soft, halting, working through the words her father had taught her when she was very small. Down in the meadow in an itty-bitty pool, swam three little fishies and a mama fishie too. She'd sung it at the graveside without realizing she was doing it until Mrs. Patterson from the church leaned over and put a firm hand on her knee, and Lily's mouth closed around the melody like water over a stone.

She hadn't cried. She knew better than to cry in public, here, in front of people Calvin Mercer considered important. She'd held herself still throughout the service, throughout the burial, throughout the procession back to the house - her back straight, her hands folded, her face the careful blank of a girl who has been practicing this expression for two years in a household where emotions were only permitted when they were convenient.

Now she was behind the hedge.

The back garden of Calvin's house had one salvageable corner: a strip of overgrown lawn between the tool shed and the property wall, enclosed by a thick privet hedge that Uncle Calvin never bothered to trim. It smelled of damp leaves and cold earth and benign neglect. Lily had discovered it six months after they moved in, when she was five and the alternative was the house, and since then it had been hers by virtue of nobody else wanting it.

She had her back against the stone wall and her knees pulled up and her black dress was going to have green stains on the hem and she did not care even slightly.

She sang until the melody broke in her throat. Then she just sat.

The funeral had been at the Methodist church three streets over - the one Dennis Mercer had attended twice a year, at Christmas and Easter, because he was the kind of man who believed in continuity as a form of courtesy to the community that had been his home for twenty years. Sixty-some people had come. His colleagues from the college, who spoke about him in the past tense with the slightly formal sadness of people who had liked him and were now going back to their offices. Neighbors who had known him through his illness in the way neighbors knew things - through the periodic appearances of home health aides and the week the medical van came twice in one day. His old students, a surprising number of them, some of whom had driven from Boston or Providence, young people in their twenties who had sent cards he kept on the shelf above his desk until the shelf was full and he started tucking them into the front of books instead.

Lily had watched them all from the third pew, her hands folded in her lap. She had been aware, throughout, of Calvin and Sandra two rows behind her - Sandra's hat, Calvin's shoe scraping the kneeler at irregular intervals. She had been aware of the calculation happening in their row: the insurance policy, the children's trust, the value of appearing grief-stricken versus the competing cost of maintaining appearances.

She was seven. She was already very good at reading rooms.

Her father had been a quiet man with a dry wit and the kind of patience that came from a genuine belief that people were mostly trying their best. He'd taught at a community college - English and composition - and his students brought him succulents and thank-you cards and he kept all of them on his windowsill, dozens of little plants that Lily had watered every Thursday when she visited him in his office. He had loved old jazz and early morning coffee and the kind of detective novels that were really about loneliness. He had told her, in the year before the bone cancer made talking difficult, that the single most important thing she could do was figure out what she loved and then do it with everything she had.

He had never been specific about what happened if the world didn't cooperate.

She pressed her palms flat against the cold ground and breathed.

At the graveside, someone had played a recording of Coltrane - A Love Supreme, which her father had played on Sunday mornings while he graded papers. Lily had not expected this. It arrived in her chest like an ambush. She'd had to look at the sky and count: one, two, three, four, breathe - until the music ended and she could look at the ground again without the particular dissolution she had been fighting all morning.

The minister had said some things. They were good things, probably. She retained very little of them, which she thought her father would have understood. He had not been a man who needed others to say things about him; he had been a man who showed up, every day, for the things he was responsible for, and did them with care. The summary of a life like that didn't fit neatly into a eulogy.