Free The Burning Plain by Michael Nava Page B

was beautiful. Her eyes were sky blue.
    “Sit down,” she said. There was a green mesh bag at her side with a thermos in it. She reached for it. “Have some tea.”
    I sat down, still clutching the map I’d been given when I had driven into the cemetery.
    “Thank you,” I mumbled, accepting a plastic glass of cloudy liquid.
    “It doesn’t do any good if you don’t drink it,” she said kindly.
    I took a swallow. It was cold, strong and sweet. “This is good.”
    “My mother was English,” she explained. “She taught how to brew real tea, though it would’ve killed her to see me drink it cold. Ah, well, one must adjust. Are you visiting someone?”
    Three of the walls of the Columbarium of Radiant Destiny held rows of niches where the ashes of the dead were interred behind marble plaques. The fourth wall, behind us, was a doorway that led out to the other vaults and columbaria of the Courts of Remembrance and from there to the green hillsides of Forest Lawn with its view of the freeway and Warner Brothers.
    “No,” I said. “I was looking for someplace to put my friend’s ashes.”
    “Oh, he’d like it here,” she said. “My husband does.” She pointed a bony finger. “That’s him.”
    “Gregory Slade,” I read.
    “Yes, and I’m Amiga.”
    “Amiga?”
    “I know it’s an odd name, but as I said, my mother was English. She married a Texan, who took her to live in a small town down by the Gulf where people were terribly prejudiced against the Mexicans, but my mother thought they were wonderful people and that Spanish was the most beautiful language she had ever heard.” She squinted at me. “You’re of Mexican descent, if I’m not mistaken. Finish your tea. There’s more.”
    “How do you know your husband’s happy here?”
    “I know,” she said.
    “I don’t think the dead are either happy or unhappy,” I said. “They’re just dead.”
    “If you truly believed that,” she replied, “you wouldn’t care about your friend’s ashes. You really do look unwell. Are you sure you’re all right?”
    “There’s a religion that believes the world was created by the devil, that this is hell.”
    “Of course, it’s hell,” Amiga Slade said cheerfully. “It’s also heaven. It depends entirely on how you look at it.” She touched my hand. “Whatever you think you’ve done, it’s not so terrible that you deserve to be condemned to hell.”
    “I’m a homosexual.”
    “What does that matter to God? He made you.”
    “My friend died of AIDS.”
    “I’m so sorry,” she said, grasping my hand. “I am so sorry.”
    “I can’t let go of him.”
    “But Henry you don’t have to,” she said. “You can put him here with Greg, and the four of us can visit.”
    “I didn’t tell you my name,” I said.
    She touched the center of her forehead. “I have second sight. Another gift of my English mother.” She reached into her mesh bag and brought out a slab of yellow cake wrapped in wax paper. “You’re hungry,” she said. “Eat this.”
    It was dense and moist and sugary. I wolfed it down. “What do you do?” I asked her between bites.
    She smiled, “I’m a fortune teller at a coffeehouse in Venice. Madame Helene. The kids love me. One of them even designed a Website for me.”
    I licked the crumbs of the cake from my fingers. “What’s my fortune?”
    “Nothing that can’t be survived,” she said, “but be careful who you trust.”
    It was late in the afternoon when I returned home. After I had left Amiga Slade and Forest Lawn, I looked at the adjacent Jewish cemetery, Mount Sinai, but I wasn’t sure that interring Josh’s ashes there wouldn’t strike his parents as adding insult to injury. At any rate, by the time I pulled into my garage, it no longer seemed as urgent that I dispose of Josh’s ashes as it had when I’d left, after dumping his medicines and cleaning out the closet of the last of his clothes. I was still unable to think about the previous night