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lamp over Mommy’s head. Another guy is moving a hinge on one end of the casket, another guy at the other end is doing the same thing. They lowering the lid over Mommy’s face. “She won’t be able to breathe!” I tell Rita.
    “She’s not breathing, Abdul. She’s dead. They’re closing the casket so we can take it to the graveyard and put her body in the ground.”
    “No!” I throw my arms around Rita, push my face in her dress, crying. The material of her dress gets all stiff when it’s wet.
    “It’s OK, it’s OK,” Rita say over and over. Someone picks me up from the bench, I don’t know who, I’m still crying. I bury my face in his clothes squeeze my eyes shut. I open them again as a big guy is setting me down on the sidewalk on Lenox Avenue next to Rita. It’s gotten colder outside than it was, but the sun is still shining bright.
    “Come on, boobie,” Rita says, “get in the car.” I scoot in next to her. I like riding in cars. We pull out from the other cars and get in back of the black Lincoln with Mommy in it. I don’t know where we’re going. I’m just reading the signs on the highway. The world is zipping by like when you on the computer playing a game in your car. I feel a little sleepy. I like cars. Mommy, why we don’t have a car? Mommy, I’m talking to you, why we don’t have a car? Well, is what she would say, because we can’t afford one right now, Abdul. But she don’t say nothing now. We turn off the freeway, houses out here got grass and swing sets. I’m gonna live out here when I’m grown.
    Coffins? Graveyard? Spooky place from Halloween movies on television. Dracula climbing out the casket with spiderwebs and stuff. Dark, scary stuff. But when the car stops, it’s like a pretty park, green grass, sky blue with fluffy white clouds. I lean back on the seat close my eyes, hear car doors open people talking, hear this car door open, open my eyes, get out. Me and Rita walk behind the pallbearers and Reverend Bellwether up the white gravel path sparkling in the sunshine. Then we turn off the path onto grass. I like walking on grass. It’s like a city out here! Green grass, the gravestones are little houses; a person is under each one? First a person then they turn to bones? We go up a hill, there’s some chairs, a big pile of dirt; get up closer see the big hole. I look up at an airplane disappear across the sky.
    On one side of the big hole is a big pile of dirt. The casket is on the other side. Reverend Bellwether is holding the Bible but she don’t open it. She look at everybody then up at the sky then at everybody again.
    “Heavenly Father—” she say.
    “Amen!” Rhonda shout. Why? All she said was Heavenly Father.
    “Heavenly Father,” she say again, “Great Spirit, what we know you taught us, where we are you brought us. And from our mother’s body we are brought forth and to the body of the Great Mother we shall return.”
    Guy in dirty overalls wave his hand and the pallbearers move the casket over the hole on top some ropes and like strips of canvas. Then he go to the end of the grave and turn a handle. When he turn the handle, the coffin go down.
    “Ashes to ashes!” Down, down, handle go round and round. “Dust to dust!” Lurch, bump. I look up at the sky. Blue. The sun shining bright. I look for another airplane. None. The man in the overalls picks up a shovel, shove it down hard in the dirt.
    “Come on.” Rita pulls my hand. “It’s over.”
     
     
    RITA ASK THE MAN driving to drop us off on 125th Street at the Harlem State Office Building instead of the funeral home.
    “What’s here?”
    “Some friends of your mother’s have cooked some food. People gonna eat some, talk, and then go home.”
    “Home?”
    “Come on!”
    “I’m not hungry!”
    “Yes you are, stop acting silly!”
    “I wanna go to McDonald’s!”
    She laughs. “I thought you wasn’t hungry!” She points across the street. “See that.”
    “What?”
    “The Hotel