Free Object lessons by Anna Quindlen Page A

capital letters was visible, the “Anna 1890–1963” and “Angelo 1880–” hidden beneath the leaves of the plants. The grave was in the back, near the wall, and today there was a tan canvas tent not far from it. Paul Fogarty and his mongoloid brother, Leonard, had just finished digging and were standing, sweating, leaning on shovels.
    “Who’s getting buried?” Maggie said.
    “Mrs. Romano,” her grandfather said. “She died in her sleep.”
    “Her daughter was a friend of Mommy’s.”
    “Her niece,” Angelo Mazza said, running the sponge down one long green stem, the paler green bugs leaping before him. “This one, only boys.”
    They worked together under the hot sun for half an hour, but Maggie was restless and her hair kept falling into her eyes. She went inside to wash her hands and pull her hair back from her face with a rubber band, but instead of returning to the plants she began to wander around the cemetery grounds. The older graves were in the back, the pale gray headstones blackening where the letters were cut and the roses were sculpted in the granite. Maggie’s landmark had always been an angel on a pedestal, blank-eyed as a blind man, a spray of flowers slanting over one arm as if the angel was a beauty queen, to mark the grave of a woman who had died forty years before. Her grandfather had planted azaleas around its base, but they lasted only through the beginning of May; their white flowers turned mocha-colored, then curled and dropped to the ground. The green leaves of the plants looked as though they were perspiring in the July heat. A man squatted by a monument against the back wall.
    “Hello, sweetheart,” said Mr. Gennaro, who carved the inscriptions in the stones. “You’re getting big. Bigger than your mama, I bet, by now.”
    “Two inches,” said Maggie. “She says I’m a Scanlan.”
    “Never mind that crap,” the old man said, unstrapping his leather tool belt and placing it at the foot of a square pink marble stone with nothing on it but the name JESSUP in capital letters. Maggie remembered that when she was first learning to spell she thought this was the place where Jesus was buried, and she was punished in school for insisting that the Holy Sepulchre was in the Bronx and wasn’t half as big as Joe the greengrocer’s mausoleum.
    “Who’s Jessup?” she said.
    “Old guy lived a couple blocks up the avenue, over his office. A lawyer. Nice man, no family, did house closings and things during the day, upstairs in three rooms at night. About ten years back the doctor told him he was sick and he came here and picked out a plot. Your grandpop found the guy a nice space. The stone went up about five years ago. I’m doing name, date of birth.”
    “He’s not dead yet?”
    “Nah. You know doctors. He wasn’t really that sick.”
    Mr. Gennaro squatted down and began to measure the stone. He pulled a wax pencil from behind one ear, hairy as a coconut, and made a mark here and there. Maggie jiggled her legs.
    “You look more like a Mazza than a Scanlan to me,” he said after a while, outlining letters with his pencil. “You look a lot like your mama did when she was your age. She was smaller than you are and she didn’t have so much hair. But your faces look alike.”
    “You’ve been around here a long time,” said Maggie, squinting in a shaft of sun that had suddenly cut through the trees, trying to think about a girl her age, looking like her, hanging around the cemetery, jiggling her legs in the light.
    “God, yeah,” Mr. Gennaro said. “I know your grandfather almost my whole life. Your grandmother, too, may she rest in peace. She was a tough cookie. And your mother. I remember the day she was married. There was a funeral coming in and your mama coming out of the house in her dress, some shiny stuff with all kinds of lace, and she almost got in the wrong limo. You think they look at you funny, a kid in the cemetery, you should have seen the people in that limo