American Gods by Neil Gaiman Page B

voice was calm, emotionless. “Your wife died with my husband’s cock in her mouth, Shadow.”
    He went back in to the funeral home. Someone had already wiped away the spit.
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    After lunch—Shadow ate at the Burger King—was the burial. Laura’s cream-colored coffin was interred in the small nondenominational cemetery on the edge of town: unfenced, a hilly woodland meadow filled with black granite and white marble headstones.
    He rode to the cemetery in the Wendell’s hearse, with Laura’s mother. Mrs. McCabe seemed to feel that Laura’s death was Shadow’s fault. “If you’d been here,” she said, “this would never have happened. I don’t know why she married you. I told her. Time and again, I told her. But they don’t listen to their mothers, do they?” She stopped, looked more closely at Shadow’s face. “Have you been fighting?”
    â€œYes,” he said.
    â€œBarbarian,” she said, then she set her mouth, raised her head so her chins quivered, and stared straight ahead of her.
    To Shadow’s surprise Audrey Burton was also at the funeral, standing toward the back. The short service ended, the casket was lowered into the cold ground. The people went away.
    Shadow did not leave. He stood there with his hands in his pockets, shivering, staring at the hole in the ground.
    Above him the sky was iron gray, featureless and flat as a mirror. It continued to snow, erratically, in ghostlike tumbling flakes.
    There was something he wanted to say to Laura, and he was prepared to wait until he knew what it was. The world slowly began to lose light and color. Shadow’s feet were going numb, while his hands and face hurt from the cold. He burrowed his hands into his pockets for warmth, and his fingers closed about the gold coin.
    He walked over to the grave.
    â€œThis is for you,” he said.
    Several shovels of earth had been emptied onto the casket, but the hole was far from full. He threw the gold coin into the grave with Laura, then he pushed more earth into the hole, to hide the coin from acquisitive grave diggers. He brushed the earth from his hands and said, “Good night, Laura.” Then he said, “I’m sorry.” He turned his face toward the lights of the town, and began to walk back into Eagle Point.
    His motel was a good two miles away, but after spending three years in prison he was relishing the idea that he could simply walk and walk, forever if need be. He could keep walking north, and wind up in Alaska, or head south, to Mexico and beyond. He could walk to Patagonia, or to Tierra del Fuego.
    A car drew up beside him. The window hummed down.
    â€œYou want a lift, Shadow?” asked Audrey Burton.
    â€œNo,” he said. “And not from you.”
    He continued to walk. Audrey drove beside him at three miles an hour. Snowflakes danced in the beams of her headlights.
    â€œI thought she was my best friend,” said Audrey. “We’d talk every day. When Robbie and I had a fight, she’d be the first one to know—we’d go down to Chi-Chi’s for margaritas and to talk about what scumpots men can be. And all the time she was fucking him behind my back.”
    â€œPlease go away, Audrey.”
    â€œI just want you to know I had good reason for what I did.”
    He said nothing.
    â€œHey!” she shouted. “Hey! I’m talking to you!”
    Shadow turned. “Do you want me to tell you that you were right when you spit in Laura’s face? Do you want me to say it didn’t hurt? Or that what you told me made me hate her more than I miss her? It’s not going to happen, Audrey.”
    She drove beside him for another minute, not saying anything. Then she said, “So, how was prison, Shadow?”
    â€œIt was fine,” said Shadow. “You would have felt right at home.”
    She put her foot down on the gas then, making the engine roar, and drove