IN ALL my mother's many residences, the refrigerator has been a museum of leftovers and old food, and my stepfather will eat anything. Out of whatever has gone off or is going, he mixes up his meshka-peshka and, feeling virtuous, spoons it down without complaint. Though I love my stepfather, I can see he regards himself as a sort of paragon, and on occasion he can be as humorless as a minor saint to whom one must pay homage should one find oneself in the shadow of his modest church. A lapsed Catholic who has never attended Mass for as long as I have known him, he makes a great show of believing. Yet when he had to undergo a biopsy, he kept repeating Inshallah. Perhaps he is a promiscuous serial monotheist who calls on no-matter-what God so long as He is regarded by the faithful of that faith as the one God (and I mean He— my stepfather is of the old school: God is male). Insofar as anything can be known about his wishes, I understand that he will not go to his final rest in consecrated ground. Instead, a retired Air Force captain, he will go to Arlington, to be buried in ground captured from the South during the Civil War, on land once belonging to Robert E. Lee, the Rebellion's preeminent military commander and, coincidentally, the namesake of my grandfather, father, and eldest brother.
My mother refuses to go into the ground—so vehemently it might be a phobia—and insists on cremation, her ashes to be sown in the sea. I see my brothers and me at Agate or Cannon Beach, taking turns, the urn under our left arms, and with our right hands (because we are all right-handed) attempting to sow handfuls of her remains in the Pacific at low tide. The wind will be coming off the water, as it almost always does, so her