'I liked the service.'

Emmeline's grandmother is driving the car. Her bracelets (oversized, aggressively so) stack against each other and slide down her arms as she shifts to the next lane. They'd made the beads together one afternoon a couple of months ago. She's everything Emmeline is not: colourful, flamboyant, radiant. A presence designed to be looked at. Something to be given attention to - something that demands it.

'It was nice.' Emmeline feels vacant. She thinks about how the seats will be wet when they leave the car and whether or not they'll stain. 'There should've been more music, though.'

'Hmmm.'

The sun has decided to come out, though the clouds remain. It refracts inside the water left on the windscreen and turns each drop into a prism. Prism is a good word.

Her grandmother has always been good at quiet. She looks like a storm but her unpracticed self is a peaceful one, her mind a bit like Emmeline's in that she could spend hours inside it, but where Emmeline thinks, she dreams. They sit for a while, accepting the company of the other without needing conversation. The cusp of evening splits the sky in two, one half orange and the other a greying blue. After the rain, it's a bittersweet recompense. Undeniably close to perfect, unusual enough that it tugs on the desire to capture it, to hold it between palms and keep it there, like a firefly. She wishes she could hold the sunset.

Debussy's 'Deux Arabesques' begins to play. It's a favourite of both of them, though Emmeline has no idea what kind of radio station they're listening to for it to have come on. Maybe her grandmother made a CD. She does that sometimes. In many ways she's a Luddite, disregarding technology and claiming its influence to be poisonous, preferring meditation and weekly ballet classes. (Emmeline halfway agrees with her, but would never admit to it. She argues the other side every time, feeling a strange allegiance to her own generation.) The other, disconcerting proportion of the time she knows more about it than Emmeline, up to the end of the 1990s when she apparently stopped paying attention to the rest of the world. Her knowledge of CD players and early versions of Facebook is startling.

'Did you learn this one yet? I can never remember.' It's an innocent enough question but. It makes her trip up against things she doesn't want to think about. 'Lina?' A nickname, based on the Spanish variation. Emelina.

'No.' She clears her throat, looks out of the window. 'We were going to. We started to, but.' She finds that the words stop there.

'I'm sorry,' her grandmother says, soft. The car has been parked. How long has it been parked?

'It's fine.' It's not. Why does she always say it is?

'Not it's not.'

She looks up. She's not seen her grandmother since Adelaide died until now. It only happened two weeks ago, but that's still longer than they usually spend apart. Her parents had wanted her at home, had been concerned for her. They didn't realise that time with her always helped. Her eyes are forgiving when she makes eye contact and Emmeline doesn't know why this makes it unbearable but she suddenly can't breathe. Her mind blanks and she tries to hide it. She knows she fails.

'Oh, darling-' Arms go around her, a tightness to match the one compressing her organs, making her skin feel like a cage. She hates this. She lets her knees come to her chest, holds them in place, fingers awkward and painful. Her grandmother rubs one shoulder and tucks her chin over the other. Emmeline tries not to drown. There is far too much to be sad about. She's been greyed-out, numb for months, swallowed by herself, but this is new. Her sadness - depression, apparently she's supposed to use the word (though that one makes her think of thumbs in flesh, clay being sculpted - she doesn't feel like a work of art. This doesn't feel like something that could revert itself, change back to an unbroken surface. Depression is the dent in a plastic water bottle, not this steady loss of her entire identity. She feels replaced with a ghost.) - began without cause, so to be given one is alien. Now people assume she's grieving. They don't seem to understand that she feels like she's been in mourning for aeons. She can't remember the last time she woke up and was glad of it.

Then: 'Tea?'

'What?'

'Do you want to come in for tea?'

'In?'

Her grandmother smiles. 'Yes. For tea. And I made cake earlier, too. Well. That's not strictly true. I bought it. From Morrison's. Are you coming in, darling?'

Emmeline loosens her chest. This is okay. 'Yes.'

'I thought so. Undo your seatbelt and- you know what, it's too late for the seats. Where did you- I thought you had an umbrella?'

Oops.

An eyebrow raises. 'You. Come on, in.'

There is nothing to do but obey. The click of the seatbelt releasing feels like relief, the pressure alleviated greater than just the fabric against her stomach. Her reflection catches her eyes in the rearview mirror - the grey pea coat hangs off of her like a shroud and combined with the colourless pallor of someone who has only been sleeping when her body has succumbed to exhaustion (no-one told her how heavy death is, she can't carry it with her without feeling drained). She would make a far better corpse than the one she's just seen buried. Even two weeks gone, Emmeline thinks of her body as as lovely as ever. She can't help it. Adelaide's whole face looks - looked? (Past tense feels disrespectful, somehow)- as though it was designed for curiosity: an always-quirked mouth, eyebrows slightly raised like she was both bewildered and delighted by everything. She was beautiful in a way that existed entirely apart from how she looked. Her body contained her, and it was warm and now Emmeline wishes she still possessed it but- that wasn't all she was. Maybe this is why she can't believe she is gone, not really. She's seen the evidence, has seen the way the loss has soaked into her son (Oh, Otho, she thinks; a prayer)- but she misses her more than she mourns her. Oh. The arrival of this realisation untangles the knot in her line of thought. That was the thing she'd not figured out yet.

'Emmeline!' Her grandmother is holding her newest foster cat in her arms. It doesn't look particularly happy- it really just looks heavily, heavily pregnant, but it doesn't attempt to escape. She breathes, in, out, and presses her fingertips to her eyelids briefly. Their weight is like the magpie. The magpie. In focusing more on enduring than processing the funeral, she'd forgotten. This is a strange day. The memory of it landing on her arm fits uncomfortably. Like a dream from years ago, one that feels equally real and imagined.

'Em-a-li-na, come and say hello please or I will revoke my offer of cake. I do not say so lightly but you're making Margaret feel unimportant and that is not the correct way to treat a cat. They're very prideful creatures, it's dangerous to disrespect the frightening size of their egos.'

One more breath: she straightens her shoulders, lifts her head and goes inside.