Cindy was a friend of a friend. Her family lived in Lindstrom and she’d come to the city to study at the U. We went out a few times. She was nice but kind of boring.
         Oh, she was a Swede all right. Almost six feet tall, with hair like a stack of hay. When we walked over the bridge together, I’d have to hurry a little bit to keep up with her. She loved the Mississippi, said she liked how it threaded all the way down through the country. She liked swimming and running and in general just being outside. She studied Agricultural Science and wanted to feed the world. She didn’t do drugs and barely drank, just a glass or two of beer when we all met up after class. Eventually I kind of forgot about her.
         My last semester I ran into her at a club. It had been a year or so and now she dressed differently, less like a hick. Makeup. She’d cut her hair, it looked good. I asked her if she’d want to go out again or something but she shot me down. I didn’t feel bad. I was kind of proud of her.
         Then I didn’t see her for twenty years. I dialed into a Zoom meeting with my insurance company and there she was, sitting right next to Robert, my agent. She looked good, dressed professional. She had a new last name because she’d gotten married. I knew the guy actually, we’d all been in school together, but I hadn’t seen him for twenty years either. Anyway, we couldn’t really catch up with Robert right there wanting to talk about my home loan, so I just connected with her on LinkedIn and left it at that. We’d message each other now and then, mostly job networking stuff.
         A few years after that, I get a text message from an old friend telling me Cindy’s died. What? I went online and sure enough, dead at forty-two, leaves behind a husband and et cetera, no kids. No cause of death, which always makes me think, especially when a person is so young… yeah.
         Should I go to the funeral? I didn’t want to make it awkward for her husband, I had dated her once, but that was a long time ago. I didn’t want to force him to have to make catch-up small talk with me either. On the other hand I’ve always figured that unless you have some serious beef with the deceased or their family, people are always basically glad to see you at a funeral even if they don’t really know why you’re there. I always overthink it. Honestly, I just hate funerals and I was looking for an excuse not to go.
         But I went. Boy, you could tell who her family was: Tall and yellow-haired, like a bunch of autumn trees, and half of them had to duck down to get through the funeral home doorways. Seeing them seated there in rows at the service, and then standing with heads bowed at the gravesite, it was the whitest thing I’d ever seen. I don’t mean it in a bad way, I just mean I’d never felt more Minnesotan than at that moment.
         After the priest was finished and the casket was lowered, the family walked up to the grave one by one. Each of them, and the husband too, I noticed, took a little object from their pocket and dropped it into Cindy’s grave. When I took a closer look I saw that they were mice, small gray mice, not moving around much or making any noise, alive but really passive. The family must have dropped two dozen of these mice into the grave, and they each spoke some sort of Swedish phrase while they did it. I didn’t have a mouse so I just stood at the grave for a moment and lowered my head. Down there, the mice were moving all over the lid of the casket, listlessly, like a bunch of stoned things.
         At the reception there were sausages, lutefisk, palt, fiskbullar, surströmming. I wasn’t hungry. The gossip confirmed what I’d suspected: Cindy had taken a header off the Washington Avenue bridge. They’ve put up fencing there now to stop that. Why’d she? Financial improprieties. Whose? Who knows.
         Her husband came over to talk to me. He seemed like he was more or less keeping it together. We caught up a little. At one point a mouse crawled out of his sleeve and wobbled drunkenly across the table until one of her relatives—an uncle, I think—picked it up and swallowed it.
         Cindy had such a good heart, her husband said, cracking a little. Such an innocent heart. Fuck this place, fuck this city, fuck these people here, she never should have left home.
         But then you’d’ve never met her, I said.
         A small price to pay, he said. What did she ever get from me except grief and trouble.
         He gave me a hug when I left. Standing there, almost vibrating with grief, among all those giant Swedes, he looked kind of like a mouse himself, but that was just my imagination being unkind and I reminded myself that everyone is different and grief affects people in lots of different ways.
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