The Mothers by Keith Botsford

Old father and young son climbed the bare hill directly behind the convent buildings and there they finally found a tall plain cross in the middle of a plot with hedges on three sides. Jim said to his son: "I think this is it. Somewhere here. And if it isn't, your grandma will forgive you."
The Kid - fair and slight himself, still sporting his summer freckles and making sure his hair was parted in two neat waves - stood there figuring out what his nonna might want to hear about. For instance, Mrs. Wojtyla's cat, Mrs Wojtyla being his piano teacher and a neighbor to both Jim and me. "Her cat's deaf," he said to his invisible but present grandmother, Feli.. "You can drop a plate or something and he doesn't even move."
This struck him as a wonderful attribute: to be ever calm and more inscrutable than cats were. It was also logical to talk to the dead. He talked to his dead sister Rory, why not to his nonna? As one talked to oneself.
Wishing to be both calm and inscrutable, he said nothing about what he felt. He was being Mrs. Wojtyla's deaf cat. It was better that way. Grown-ups, even dead ones, had a way of asking dumb questions.
Maybe he felt nothing at all. After all, they were looking down at a patch of snow like any other patch of snow. There was no real grave. No stone, no name. If she lay down there under the ground it was no longer as a real body but as ash.
Jake said his prayer as his mother Francine had taught him. Then when he'd done with that, his hand in Jim's was deeply restful and confident.
I often wished Jake were my child, and Jim my man, which would have made him our Jake. Not in this life, Aissa, I said to myself. My Dakota grandma I can still see as she stood before me, sternly making a sharp gesture with her land before her mouth. That meant say no more. She didn't want to hear what I was about to do. And I must never tell Jim. Fifty odd years have gone by and I still haven't said a word.
It was All Hallows Eve, when the dead shake hands with or embrace the living. Not hobgoblins from scare-flicks but the people who'd gone before us and were glad to renew acquaintance on their annual day off.
Wherever you come from, you know Hallowe'en can often be a beautiful day. The last day of the year to Celts, who feared it. A fall day. On which leaves crisp and can be stripped from the trees by wind and rain, but the air might still be smokey, cool and clean. Less so where I've always lived, right here in Chicago. A little ways out, now.
All Jim's oldest friends - myself, Frank, Milo, Igor, Otto and Heda - knew Hallowe'en was a tough time for him, and I knew better than most, since I'd been tracking his, our, disasters since we played fatal boy-and-girl games on the South Side.
Hallowe'en was when he and his latest wife Francine swayed, mentally, like highwaymen on a gibbet. Every candle-lit pumpkin on a sill reminded Jim and Francine that All Hallow's Eve was when they had lost their daughter.
True, Jim liked to weep anyway, that was the Italian in him, and his good heart, which had so hard a time showing itself. As far as I could make out from a distance, Francine, who was all French in the head, didn't and couldn't cry. She just withdrew. Which was understandable. What happened in Pisa on that night that was bad stuff. You shouldn't die two, pretty and smart. The idea of All Souls Day, October 31, was that the dead and the living could get back together, and families after all were the only dependable community the dead had: who else but their descendants would remember what they had been? As Milo had started saying, shaking his head, what was the point of spending a whole lifetime storing up memory and knowledge if death then rips all that careful accumulation off and kids like Jake, Jim's last son, all have to start off from scratch again?
Jim and I, we started off Catholics. On the last day in October we learn what it's like for the dead, who no longer have any need of a calendar or any fear of death.
And deep in her little box of ashes, by a stir in her spirit, Jim's mother Feli knew this was the day she had been looking forward to. She was expecting her twelve-year-old grandson Jake, the Kid. And with him, her son Jim. The dead have only an even-steven chance of getting what they want, but if she'd had a choice, Feli would have wanted to see her Jim, too, as a child, when he had been still loveable and nice. Luckily, anyone could come along and put flowers on her grave, far away from her progeny as it was.