Free The Beautiful Bureaucrat by Helen Phillips Page B

precious name once she managed to write it legibly?
    Leg ably.
    Beg lily.
    “Hush!” she said out loud, realizing what she had to do, the only way to still her shaking.
    *   *   *
    The Pesaventos lived in an old brick row house in a painfully quiet neighborhood bordering the cemetery, the sidewalk out front meticulously swept, the graffiti across the street only mildly offensive. A few slim, troubled trees fought upward from the squares of soil allotted them. The sound of a bouncing ball echoed down the empty block as though it were being dribbled by the last living person on earth, though Josephine didn’t see anyone dribbling a ball.
    Arturo Pesavento was sitting on the cement stoop of the house. A plump ten-year-old boy with thick black hair in a bowl cut and a chin sticky with recent Popsicle. He held a portable video game.
    She was overjoyed. It had been so easy, to find the address online, to come here, to see him, to reassure herself. She had to stop staring, she knew that, but she couldn’t help it.
    “What you staring at?” he said, glancing up from his video game.
    She was tongue-tied, deluged with relief. She would stand guard here the rest of the day, make sure no truck veered up onto the sidewalk, make sure he went to bed tonight in the same impeccable shape in which she now found him.
    “You got a staring problem?” he barked.
    “The … trees,” she said. “I’m doing research on the cherry trees.”
    “Okay,” he said, relaxing a bit, returning to his video game, “but they’re crapapple trees.”
    “Okay,” she said. He looked so healthy, so vibrant, punching away at his little machine, a million miles removed from his death.
    “Die, dude!” he muttered victoriously at the screen. “I won,” he informed Josephine, arching his back to crack it.
    “And how old are you?” she said, awkwardly.
    He seemed to consider not replying.
    “Eleven,” he finally said.
    “Eleven?” Her throat tightened. “Aren’t you ten?”
    He wrinkled his forehead and looked at her.
    “No,” he said, almost patient. “I’m eleven.”
    “I’m sorry,” she said. Perhaps she’d made a mistake with the dates. “I thought you were ten.”
    “I’m not ten,” Arturo Pesavento said darkly. “My brother was about to turn ten.”
    “Your brother,” she repeated, as the Pesaventos’ home became extra-vivid before her. How had she failed to notice the sagging GET WELL ! balloons tied to the window bars, the altar surrounding the miniature blue Virgin cemented into the pavement beside the stoop, the soggy teddy bear and the ribbons and the notes and the soccer trophy? Why hadn’t she wondered why a kid his age wasn’t in school at this hour on a Monday?
    Arturo Pesavento’s older brother grabbed his video game and marched up the steps to the front door.
    “Go away,” he snapped. “Please!”
    As she turned away from the Pesaventos’, a man in a gray sweatshirt strolling down the sidewalk across the street looked over at her and smiled.

FIFTEEN
    The cemetery was strangely hot, Indian summer loitering over the graves. Even the marble angel spewing water into the pond looked dehydrated.
    And it was hurtfully beautiful: the soft undulating hills like those in the hinterland, the motionless trees, the orderly lawns. Four hundred and seventy-eight acres of grass and death, half a million bodies beneath her feet, her molecules presumably engaged in some sort of exchange with their molecules. The soles of her feet buzzed.
    Names, endless names, names given an instant of attention before attention slid elsewhere; a familiar enough sensation for her, to be alone with thousands of names. The headstones glittered in the sun. Acanthus Path, Monarda Path, Spirea Path, Laburnum Path, Woodbine Path.
    Lub burn em.
    Would bind.
    By the time she noticed her thirst, she was already dizzy. She forced herself to the top of a hill and sank down woozily in the shade of a family tomb.
    She was going to vomit; she