Skip to content 
“Liver failure.” He said it plainly, the way you’d report the score of a game. “It’s been coming a while. Went to the clinic when I couldn’t keep anything down. They ran their tests. Gave me the number.”
“Larry.” My throat closed up. “Larry, I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t make that face.”
“What face?”
“The one people make when they’re already standing at your funeral.” He took a sip of his black coffee. “You’re doing it right now. Cut it out.”
Even then, dying, he could make me laugh. A wet, terrible laugh, but a laugh.
But the sign wasn’t funny. The sign was still sitting there on his knees.
“Why marriage?” I asked. “Of everything. Why that?”
His eyes dropped to his coffee. For the first time in two years, Larry looked like he didn’t want to talk.
“I don’t want to die belonging to nobody,” he said finally.
“You don’t belong to nobody. You’ve got—” I stopped, because I realized I didn’t actually know who he had. “You’ve got people who care about you.”
“That’s a nice thing to say, Sarah. It’s a different thing on a form.”
He explained it to me then, in that quiet voice. He told me that a man with no legal family, no wife, no children on record, doesn’t get buried by someone who loved him. He gets processed. Some county clerk, some overworked stranger, signs him over to a city plot. No name that means anything. No one to say the words.