Jamey and his family sauntered up the road like a troupe of weird birds, Maurice first, a tall man with a receding hairline and thin body, except for a bulbous paunch that put the buttons of his white sleeve-rolled shirt under pressure. Dee followed a half-step behind dressed in a sort of trouser suit, her tired blond hair loosened about her shoulders. As for Jamey, he was an eye-opener in his blah-coloured slacks, hair slicked back from his face with some sort of oily gunk, holding Ollie’s hand. They crunched across the pebbles, Dee sort of shooing the boys inside while trying to keep abreast of her husband. Jamey stopped to scrutinise the coloured stones arrayed across one side of the path. He peered a bit, lip-synced what they spelled out— MERDE A DIEU —and a grin split his face. Dee snapped at him to hurry on, so he scrambled the pebbles with his shoe and tramped into the chapel, where hymn-singers had already started to hail the queen of heaven. I was watching from among the headstones, hunkered under the great granite archangel, chuckling to myself.
