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file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htm“Be well, Louis,” she whispered.David Dandridge shook his hand and muttered something inarticulate, his prominent, arrowhead-shapedadam’s apple bobbing up and down. Then he followed his wife hurriedly down the aisle for the ritualexamination of a coffin which had been made in Storyville, Ohio, a place where Gage had never beenand where he was not known.Following the Dandridges they all came, moving in a shuffling line, and Louis received them, theirhandshakes, their hugs, their tears. His collar and the upper sleeve of his dark gray suit coat soon becamequite damp. The smell of the flowers began to reach even the back of the room and to permeate the placewith the smell of funeral. It was a smell he remembered from his childhood—that sweet, thick, mortuarysmell of flowers. Louis was told how merciful it was that Gage hadn’t suffered thirty-two times by hisown inner count. He was told that God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform twenty-fivetimes. Bringing up the rear was he’s with the angels now, a total of twelve times.It began to get to him. Instead of losing what marginal sense these little aphorisms had (the way yourown name will lose its sense and identity if you repeat it over and over again), they seemed to punchdeeper each time, angling in toward the vitals. By the time his mother-in-law and father-in-law put intheir inevitable appearance, he had begun to feel like a hard-tagged fighter.His first thought was that Rachel had been right—and how. Irwin Goldman had indeed aged. He was—what? Fifty-eight, fifty-nine? Today he looked a graven and composed seventy. He looked almostabsurdly like Israel’s Prime Minister Menachem Begin with his bald head and Coke-bottle glasses.Rachel had told Louis Goldman had aged when she came back from her Thanksgiving trip, but Louishad not expected this. Of course, he thought, maybe it hadn’t been this bad at Thanksgiving. The oldman hadn’t lost one of his two grandchildren at Thanksgiving.Dory walked beside him, her face all but invisible under two— possibly three—layers of heavy blacknetting. Her hair was fashionably blue, the color favored by elderly ladies of an upper-classAmerican persuasion. She held her husband’s ann. All Louis could really see behind the veil was theglitter of her tears.Suddenly he decided it was time to let bygones be bygones. He could not hold the old grudge anylonger. Suddenly it was too heavy. Perhaps it was the cumulative weight of all those platitudes.“Irwin. Dory,” he murmured. “Thank you for coming.”He made a gesture with his arms, as if to shake hands with Rachel’s father and hug her mothersimultaneously, or perhaps even to hug them both. Either way he felt his own tears start for the firsttime, and for an instant he had the crazy idea that they could mend all their fences, that Gage would dothat much for them in his dying, as if this were some romantic ladies’ novel he had stepped into wherefile:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20St...20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htm (190 of 333)7/28/2005 9:21:49 PM