Sam Koplovitz was a bookbinder and died poor, and so a burial society called the Sons of Maccabee dug him a grave at Waldheim, a fallow field west of Chicago on the banks of the Des Plaines River. For years he’d been paying that outfit seven dollars annually for a two-plot. As long as he paid up, he figured, he wouldn’t croak. This wishful thinking was effective until March 1941. But here’s the thing: when the time came near for his wife, Rose, thirty-plus years later, she flat out refused to go to Waldheim. It wasn’t that she hadn’t loved him. She had. His dumbo ears, his monologues from the toilet. The way he never sat in a chair without taking his belt off first. But she said now that her daughter’s husband had money, they’d have to kill her first before she stuck one dead toenail way the hell out there at Waldheim. They buried her in Skokie near the new mall in the early seventies. Of course, Sam doesn’t know this, and by his calculations Rose must be getting on near a hundred and thirty, and he continues to marvel at the strength of her constitution and the progress of modern medicine while at the same time chastising himself for being lonely and wishing that it would end so she would come to him.