Norfolk, Virginia, to New York City, June 2, 2015

★ Gray clouds gathered in a glare-y morning sky. A woman in shorts cut shorter than her buttocks walked a pit bull out the side door of the hotel and over to an aging red Pontiac. A mockingbird perched on a caution sign while some other bird sang out of view. A light rain was falling on the walk across the wide, curving pedestrian-unfriendly street from the Denny’s to the funeral parlor. In the middle of the service a blast of thunder shook the anodyne chapel space, the way no stone or brick church would shake. A downpour was strafing the parking lot after, pelting the limousine all the way to the cemetery, battering the Garden of Faith and the Garden of Serenity. Water poured out of a pipe, flooded the gutters. Rain drenched the black suits and black hats and black raincoats of the funeral-home staff as they labored up the steps with the casket. Inside the door of the mausoleum, cemetery staff warned about marble floors. Rain beaded on the casket. The officiant had audibly sprinkled it with holy water back at the chapel; he sprinkled it once more. The rain abated to a mere shower, then stopped. In a corner of a parking lot behind an abandoned Pier 1 store, the suit went back into the suitcase, suit and case both only slightly wet from flopping around the open hatch of the rental car. More clouds were coming, navy blue and smoke gray rolling up in appalling bulk behind a crow perched on a Popeye’s sign. Then new rain crashed down on the trellises outside the Olive Garden. The clouds swelled like risen dough, lumpy and dimpled where someone had started poking it down. On the narrow two-lane back road Google Maps was choosing to get to the airport, the right-hand lane was flooded all the way to the yellow line. The rental-car return workers were wearing slickers and storm pants in safety green. They suggested sheltering in the car till a ride to the terminal could be arranged. A housefly was sheltering there too. The gate clerk wouldn’t even talk about the Philadelphia flight, with the previous flight’s passengers still backed up at his desk. It rained. It stopped. Who cared. The plane was located, after some time, and boarded, after some more. A little brightness came through and shone in the sheeted water by the baggage handlers’ feet. The clouds seen from above were a loose weave, clumping and pulling apart. It took minutes to remember the specific old bedspread, 20 years ago, whose synthetic batting had clumped and pulled exactly that way. A pale blankness filled the window till the eyes lost focus and little hot white bursts of sparks bloomed on the retinas. It was still blank out, darker blank, when the wheels clunked into position to descend into Philadelphia. The rain falling there was different because it was much colder. The suitcase handle was wet when it arrived on the jetway. Dark clouds hastened the fall of night, the sun’s departure time as notional and unknowable as an airplane’s. Was it raining now? Was it not? At no particular time, the next plane was airborne, its lights strobing fuzzily on the clouds. The puddles of Newark were still, undisturbed by falling drops. The city air, up out of the subway, was clean and cool and rainless, though the gutters were too full for a roller bag and as the eye looked ahead to those gutters, the shoe soles skidded on the wet metal of the subway grate. A gust of wind threw down a splash of drops from a tree, where they’d been held in reserve for a passerby who might have missed out on the rain.