Death Bliss
She goes where she has always gone.
"I found a ledger," I say, and my voice comes out in the low careful dialect I have learned from listening to her, the register of a woman asking another woman to carry what she cannot carry herself. "In the chapel vault. It has an authorization code for a death that happened two years ago, a death that was ordered from inside this family, and the code matches the payroll sheets I transcribed in my first week. The same block letters. The same purple ink. A single initial."
Nonna Carmela taps her forefinger twice on the stone lip of the well.