An Earnest Cross – Tanner Burke
Mom forgot to brush her teeth before we left for her father’s funeral. Technically, yes, he is my grandfather, but we don’t call him that. He’s lucky we even referred to him as Mom’s Dad, but she insisted. Though, to herself, I’ve no idea what she would’ve called him. Probably something awful and crass. I think she might’ve forgotten to brush her teeth on purpose, just to make sure her father’s funeral had as little dignity as possible.
“Carrol, do you have any gum?” Mom asked her newest new boyfriend.
Carrol was a man with a woman’s name who acted like a man with a woman’s name. I think that’s why Mom picked him.
“You could check the glovebox, maybe,” Carrol muttered, eyes hyper-focused on the road.
My sister, whose name is Shelby, started digging in her purse next to me, rattling all the Jesus bracelets and bands she wore on the hand she smoked with. She had nicorette gun in there for sure, and I wanted to tell her to offer some of that to Mom. Not really a time for joking, though. I sat between her and my brother Mike, who was scrolling through some alt-right conspiracy theory account on Twitter and complaining about a headache, in the backseat. Shelby moved enough to bug both of us boys, digging around in her purse until she was up to her elbow and she called out.
“I’ve got some, Mom,” she said and offered a silver stick up to Mom’s seat. “What kind is it?” Mom asked.
“I don’t remember. Mint something. It’ll smell like you brushed.”
“Is it spearmint?”
“It might be.” And she paused for a second to let Mom think. “Is that the one you don’t like?”
Mom, who thought too long about which lace overlapped which when she tied her shoes and thought too little about whether or not her next job would have dental insurance, scratched her head. Then, she grunted and reached a hand back. “It’s fine. Thanks.”
“You don’t have to take it if you don’t want it,” Carrol chimed in, hand over the console and onto her thigh.
“Yes I do.”
And she unwrapped it, put it in her mouth and chewed.
Mom was always careful about chewing with her mouth open, about looking people in the eye when they spoke and only giving moderate enthusiasm to anything so as to not look like a “cretin”, as she said. That was inherited, we knew that, not something that came natural. But she wouldn’t ever shake it. So, she chewed with her eyes on the window, at the landscape of rotting telephone poles and low-hanging wires. We didn’t hardly hear her groan through how much she hated the taste of spearmint.
Carrol did, though. He patted Mom’s thigh, then rubbed it up and down and smiled that therapy kind of smile and said, “Are you doing okay?”
“I’m alright, yeah. I just don’t like the taste.”
“Sorry, Mom. I don’t have anything else.” Shelby was looking out the window, too. Probably to look ahead at Mom’s reflection in the rearview and make sure she wasn’t in trouble. “It’s fine, babe. Thank you. I’m sorry I didn’t say thank you.”
Carrol smiled back at Shelby, who didn’t look away from the mirror. Next to me, Mike had stopped scrolling and tapped me on the leg. I looked over at him and he was grinning, a sly and sort of evil kind of grin, and then he said, “Well, Shelby, that’s not true about not having anything else. You’ve got that special gum, don’t you?”
“Shut up, douche,” she answered.
“Hey!” Carrol called back, like we’d listen to him.
“Here I was thinking you’d turned over a new leaf, chewing Nicorette.”
“Yeah,” I said, “It’s another tobacco leaf, though.”
“Give her a break, guys,” Mom said. She’d always been partial to her only daughter, her first kid. Us boys should’ve been thicker skinned, she said, so we got less attention, less concessions, less love. But, we obeyed because we were conditioned to and the car went quiet again. The rumble of the frigid, rough road beneath us was the only reminder that we were moving at all on that long, lonely road to the funeral.
Mom spit out her gum after a few minutes, back into the aluminum wrapper with a little crinkle and it went into her purse.
“That wasn’t so bad, was it? And I bet your breath is a lot–” Carrol started. “I love you to death, Carrol, but we don’t have to talk to know that, okay?” Mom said. She was still looking out the window. The first couple of small buildings began to grow out of the horizon, next to wilting chain-link fences and gutters like open mouths swallowing up the scum of the city.
“That sounds like something your father would say.” Immediately, his gaze went down to his lap.
Now, Mom turned away from the window. She stared red-hot daggers through Carrol and slapped his hand away from her thigh. “It’s bad enough I have to see his dead body today. I thought I could go without thinking of him alive.”
“I’m so sorry.” Carrol tried to put his hand back on her thigh, but was slapped away again, harder this time, like she was really trying to hurt him.
We kids had no words for this. We knew about this kind of territory, the forbidden realms of conversations that didn’t make anybody feel good, that only served to dredge up old, rotting wounds. Carrol was still learning, but we couldn’t teach him this. These were things you learned on your own, as you learned Mom. The ins and outs of her trauma, the places that she was trying so hard to forget.
Mike went back to his scrolling, Carrol to his driving, Mom to her brooding. Everyone back to their original mark, the place we were most comfortable with each other. Silent, independent. Mom took the gum out of her purse and rolled down the window at a red light. There was one of those endless gutters beside us, where everything flows down forever, and Mom threw the gum in there. When the light turned green, the little silver speck had turned brown and soggy and then disappeared altogether.
Early last year, when Shelby moved back home from Houston with a couple thousand-dollar psychology degree and no job, and Mike was trying out for the baseball team with a hand-me-down mitt, Mom got a call from a hospital clerk at Saint Something-or-Other’s. The clerk said that Mom’s father had been admitted long term.
“Okay,” Mom groaned on the phone, “So is he asking for money? Because I don’t have any either.”
“Uh, no ma’am,” I heard the clerk say through the phone. I was on the couch, but Mom’s phone was on speaker. She’d had her ears boxed by her father when she was eleven and they never worked the same. Our house was loud not as a quirk, but out of necessity.
“Then, what? What have I got to do with any of this?” Mom groaned.
“He has stage four prostate cancer, ma’am.”
Just the sound of those words made my heart ache. Until I remembered who it was that was sick. Then, I felt like he’d gotten his dues. I could tell Shelby and Mike felt the same when I saw them cautiously escape from their rooms to eavesdrop with a sick look on their faces.
Mom had these old glasses that she wore at the tip of her nose and she took them off and swirled them around in her hand. She sighed, a long, heavy and telling breath. It was a sound like she was taking in just as much as she was breathing out, like she might’ve been kind of choking on something and couldn’t get it out of her throat.
“Alright,” Mom said. “Call me again when he dies. Thank you.”
And she hung up.
Creeping slowly around the corner of the hallway and towards the kitchen, Shelby worked her face into a frown just in case. I saw Mike retreat back to his room quietly. “You alright, Mom?” Shelby asked, reaching out a hand to touch Mom’s arm. “You don’t have to do that,” Mom said, replacing her glasses and looking down at her computer. Shelby pulled back her arm and turned to look at me. Like, what do I do, how can I help her, I know how to fix this and I knew that she didn’t, so I just left it. Eventually, Shelby did, too.
Mom, though, was almost completely unbothered. She looked down through her glasses, squinted at her computer and said, “Looks like I overdrew. Can’t believe I forgot that.”
“You need money, Mom?” I called.
“No, thanks. I’ll work it out,” she muttered. She always told us that she was taught never to accept help. Or show any weakness at all.
My mother’s father was the type of guy who would go to Mom’s basketball games just to find new ways to critique her. Or make Mom sit outside to eat dinner when she got sick because he couldn’t afford to miss a day of work. Mom told me she grew up hating the guy and didn’t think he had any remorse about how he raised her. And that she didn’t have any forgiveness in hers. So she never did forgive him for any of it.
I’d never met him because my Dad demanded that I didn’t ever see the man. Then, when Dad walked out and it was Mom’s decision again, she said it was up to us, but she didn’t advise it. And we love her and we listen so we didn’t ever call him, send him any letters, or even friend him on Facebook. He was just as much a stranger to us as the woman who called and told us he was on his way out.
I never saw Mom so thoughtful as when she knew he was dying. Every day I saw her stare at a stain on the tablecloth or forget she was biting her nails until it started to bleed into her teeth. If I hadn’t known better, I would’ve thought she loved him despite herself. That all those years of torment stuck to her and that he was a part of her and she had a bad case of the blues because no matter how much she hated him he was still her daddy. Maybe that thought abused her more than the others.
Then, the woman called and said he died and Mom was back to normal again, mostly graceful and gentle and trying to work all the worst parts of her father out of herself and, thus, out of us. She told us it was her own Mom’s dying wish to see the old weasel finally kick it. “I’m sure she’s at peace, now,” Mom told us after she got the news.
“You think they’ll see each other on the other side? If he makes it over there?” Mike asked.
“I doubt that,” she answered.
“Which one?” I asked.
She just shrugged. I thought that was fitting.
When we pulled into the church parking lot, there were only five cars, one of them being the hearse, another we weren’t sure of that had to be the pastor’s. We figured it to be the Lexus. “I guess they sold this one out,” Carrol joked.
No one laughed. But, the church did look more barren after he said it.
We all squeezed ourselves out of the backseat, mumbles and grumbles turned to fog in the thick cold outside. There were no trees around, no garden in front of the church, just a little sign that said “Presbyterian” and nothing else. A probably useless telephone line ran parallel with the street and quiet crows sat on top of it trying to relish in what everyone else was enduring.
“Is it an omen, you think?” I asked.
“Well, he’s already dead.” Mom spit her gum out into the wrapper and tucked it into her purse. “Okay. Let’s go.”
So we followed her inside. Single-file, we entered the one door that still opened and found a seat on one of the stiff maple pews in the back of the chapel. The ceiling was lower than I remembered, but it had been a while. The stained-glass windows were stained in ways I don’t think they ever intended. At the front of the chapel, the cross looked to be tilted a little to the right. Someone, probably the pastor’s wife, had found an old picture of Mom’s father and printed it in the lowest resolution possible and framed it at the front of the chapel. There were plastic daisies rimming the frame and a few more nestled beneath his casket.
“You guys don’t have to go up if they ask us to pay our respects,” Mom whispered.
“Are you going to?” I asked.
She didn’t answer, apparently embarrassed by the eyes that were now glued on us. A few old people in the front rows turned and looked at us. I recognized most of them as regular church attendees: the Nelsons who were too nice not to invite everyone over for brunch when the service ended. Mr. Beasley who wore a hat like he thought we couldn’t tell he was bald. The Valentines with their matching coats, and a lady I didn’t know. Her hair was tucked into a bandana and she wore glasses that she looked over to read her program. Then, the pastor came out from his office and took his place at the pulpit. Carrol postured up next to Mom, but the rest of us slumped into our seats to listen.
“Welcome all,” he began, reading from cards on the podium. “Today, we honor the life of Robert Mason Everett the Fourth. The Good Book says that nothing can separate us from the love of God. We are always worthy of love, it says in…” and he ruffled some pages trying to find a reference.
“Did this guy ever meet your father?” Carrol whispered.
Again, Mom didn’t reply. She was digging through her purse until she pulled out an aspirin and downed it dry. Her eyes were red and swollen as she watched the pastor dig around in his book. From all the way down the pew, I could feel the tension in her hands.
For a minute I wondered what it would be like if my own Dad died, then remembered that he left all of us and probably took some younger woman away to Mexico or something. If he died, I think I’d only know by some unlucky miracle and I’d forget just as soon as I knew it. Mom didn’t get that luxury. Much as I’m sure she wished for it.
Mike leaned over to me and said, “Jeez, this fella’s old.”
The pastor spoke with a raspy voice and had age spots on his hands that we could see as he waved them around. I just nodded to Mike.
“You think he’s due up next?” Mike pointed towards the casket.
“Probably. He’s probably prepared, anyway.”
“What does that even mean? Prepared to die?”
I guess Sunday School didn’t make a dent in either of us. Because I shrugged, then looked back at the pastor who continued to speak and wave his hands and slowly march towards his own black casket by pretending he knew what it all meant. Hell, maybe he did know and I was just in the dark.
The pastor continued, “We knew him only briefly, but he made an impression. An earnest man and genuine in all he said and did, and in all the people he knew. I think, though, that I may not know nearly as much as his daughter who is here with us today.”
All heads spun to us. My instinct was to hide behind my collar or the pew in front of me or a sibling, but it was impossible. Then, I looked over at Mom who just bowed her head really low like she was trying to bury it into the space above the floor.
“Maybe she would like to say a few words for us,” the pastor said smiling. Expectant eyes all turned on us and I saw Carrol distance himself from my mom on the pew. It was like a blank spotlight was waiting to blind Mom and she wouldn’t look up at it. Until she did and she waved all the eyes away from her. Shaking her head and her hands and away the burden of having to create something nice to say about her father.
The pastor coughed to bridge the silence, even tried to summon a hack, but it was too hollow to fill the church. So Mom raised a finger and rolled it around so that he could move on.
“Then, I guess, we can…end with a quick blessing of the dead.” And the pastor bowed his head.
I don’t remember the blessing. Because down the pew I could see Mom trying to straighten the cross with her gaze. It didn’t work.
When the service ended, everyone sort of went off in different directions; Shelby went out the front door to smoke away from the building so she could watch the crows. Mike played football on his phone behind the podium. The pastor’s wife went to the office and returned with a tray of store-bought cookies, a variety pack enough for maybe forty people. I think I could count on one hand the people that ate any, but they were there, ready and capable for anyone willing to forget about the dead body someone had just carted out the front door. Carrol had three and talked to Mr. Beasley in a hushed voice about how great Pastor So-And-So was.
I thought the pastor was kind of indifferent during the service, that the whole church stunk of apathy, but I didn’t say anything. Couldn’t say anything, really. The whole church felt too small for me and still too big for the small crowd of people inside. I felt like nothing I said to anyone would resonate at all. Not even with the Guy who owned the building. So, I kept my mouth shut.
Until the lady I didn’t recognize came up to me. Her eyes were sunk deep into her head and she had dark teeth like they’d been used for all the wrong things. She patted my arm lightly and tried to give me some look of comfort or something else, but it just looked sad. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said because that was the correct thing, but not what I wanted to say. “You all must be heartbroken.”
And then I really didn’t know what to say. I nodded but not because I felt what she said. Pretend mourning is all black like the night and I couldn’t stand it.
“I’m Holly,” said the woman and she offered her hand.
I took it, shook and dropped it.
But, she didn’t leave. She just stood there looking at me like the burden of conversation wasn’t her fault.
“How did you know him?” I finally asked.
“Oh, I didn’t.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“No, I just came to pay respects to the dead. I do this a lot, actually, especially when I’m sure his importance is in question. And not that many turn up,” she said, gesturing to the mostly empty chapel.
For some reason, I was irritated. Mad, even, that she would shame his funeral like that. It wasn’t her place to do so, even if her thoughts were almost exactly my own before she said them. I crossed my arms and looked over to my Mom. Mom crossed her legs in the front row, chewing on the inside of her cheek.
“We don’t need your pity,” I said.
“It’s not pity,” she said, apologetically. “No, I’m so sorry. I’m not trying to be disrespectful at all. No, I do this for me.” She paused for a while, eyed me like I was going to validate her, then said, “I think that grief is kind of romantic. Don’t you?”
Suddenly, I decided I was done talking to this woman. I said, “We aren’t grieving.” I left the woman, who managed to disappear into a crowd of less than ten, and went to sit next to Mom. She hadn’t moved since I last saw her, just breathed and breathed and breathed.
When I sat down she smiled, exhausted. Then, the pastor came and sat next to her, patting her leg. Mom scooted away from him, cleared her throat and said, “Thanks for all this.” “Of course,” the pastor said, not really humbly, “It’s the least we can do for Bob. How are you holding up?”
“I’m fine.”
Carrol appeared behind the pastor, the last bite of an oatmeal cookie in one hand, spilling crumbs on the pew below him. He patted Mom’s shoulder. “You know, it’s okay not to be fine. Of all people you can really express yourself in front of, God and I are two great options.” “Uh-huh. Thanks, Carrol.” She patted his hand back.
“Yes, death is a difficult thing. It is best dealt with head-on,” the pastor said. “My mom died a few years ago, actually. And all of my grandparents and aunts and uncles. And a dog, just last winter. Dog cancer. Didn’t know that was a thing. Anyway, I know death pretty well, now. I think I’m well-equipped.”
The pastor smiled, that pity kind of smile that said he didn’t believe Mom worth a damn and if he did, he thought she was only trying to cause trouble. “And your family? Are they well, too?”
Mom looked over at me, eyebrows raised. It looked like she was relieved to be redirecting. I had my hand in my pocket turning my phone from mute to loud until my fingers started to hurt and I only stopped when I remembered that no one would care. He asked if I was well and I wanted to tell him that I was well enough to head home, but Mom’s face told me to be kinder. I think she earned that much.
“We’re fine, too,” I said.
“That’s good to hear. You’ll let us know if you need anything, okay? God be with you,” the pastor said, then left without giving us time to tell him that we wouldn’t and He wasn’t. “He did a good job, didn’t he?” whispered Mom.
I opened my mouth like I might say something, but I had no answer to that. It was weird to me. Not that she wasn’t generous or appreciative ever, but I don’t think she would ever spare any sympathy for her dad. When I looked over at her, she was still looking above her dad’s photo right at the cross. It was still crooked.
“Are you doing okay? Really?” I whispered back.
“Oh, yeah,” and Mom looked back at me, a melted plastic kind of smile.
“Was he right about him being earnest? And genuine?”
“Genuine, yes. Not earnest. Well…I don’t know. I don’t think he was.”
“Earnest is like sincere, I think. Like the Cross,” I said and I pointed at the Cross, tilted a little to the side and old, “It still means Jesus and blessings and stuff even if it kinda doesn’t. It tries hard, I guess you could say.”
“I know what earnest means,” Mom scoffed at me, then she stopped. Again, she studied the cross, looked like she was chewing the inside of her cheek to nothing. I guess I could’ve gotten her another stick of gum to stop all that, but it felt like she needed me there. Like she needed someone to understand all of it with.
“I guess not. He was never earnest.” Mom stood up and went to the tray of cookies, broke one in half, and put part of it back. The rest she ate in three bites as she picked up her purse to head out.
On the way home, we listened to the radio too loud to hear each other’s thoughts and that was good for us. Carrol bobbed his head to the songs he knew, but drove slowly and made complete stops at all the intersections. Mom just looked out the window, tracing the shapes of the sky with her finger. More telephone poles and wires flew past, frozen in space as we blew through it.
“Is he really the fourth?” Shelby asked while an ad was playing.
“He was. I think he was the third to die, though. His dad is in…I don’t know.” Mom didn’t look away from the window.
“What did you think, Mom?” Shelby asked.
“About the funeral?”
“Yeah.”
“It was fine. I think they did a good job.”
Carrol nodded, patted Mom’s thigh like he’d been doing all day, then went back to his ten-and-two position. I felt a little confused, though, and asked, “Didn’t you hate him?” Shelby elbowed me, but my question stood. We all knew the answer; I just wanted confirmation that we were all still hating him in solidarity. I thought she wanted us to hate him because she did. If her mind had changed, though, I’d have to reevaluate the feelings I had for my family.
“I did,” Mom said, and she rolled down the window a crack even though it was cold outside.
“She hates him and it’s nice to see him dead, I think,” Carrol blurted out.
“No,” Mom said.
Carrol went beet-red. His eyes didn’t stray from the long, lonely blacktop ahead of him again.
“I think it was fine, that’s all,” Mom said. “I can still hate him and think his funeral went okay, don’t you think?”
The car started to get colder and the wind whipping through the small crack in the window made it hard to hear Mom. But, no one complained because Mom had a lot to say and the cold was kind of welcome because we were all scrunched together. Everyone listened.
“I remember when I was nine we went to that same church for an Easter service and he did my hair in little pigtails. Then, he told me I looked ridiculous and didn’t even change them. I looked ridiculous because of him, I kept thinking. But I couldn’t say it. I don’t know why I couldn’t say it. Maybe I was scared.” Mom rolled down the window a little more. Bits of frozen, flaky sky whistled in through the crack. The cold wasn’t so nice anymore.
“There was one time, maybe at my graduation, when I looked up in the stands after I got my diploma and your guys’ Grandma was screaming and jumping for me. And Dad didn’t stand up. Didn’t even smile.”
The window kept going, more of the world outside coming in. When the window was all the way down, the wind and the cold blew Mom’s hair all over, twisted up into a bird’s nest but without the care and respect. Us kids in the back, irritated earlier, huddled tight together to keep warm and gritted our teeth against Mom’s release. The wind howled like a dying animal.
“Oh, man, I hated him. He was never nice or loving or anything good. Always sour and rude and just regretted that I couldn’t be a boy. Or regretted that I glued him to Mom or something. He didn’t ever have to be there, though. And I wish he wasn’t because I hate him so much.” And then she started crying. Hard cries that the wind picked up and rattled against the unforgiving walls of the car, and then outside and up to the Heavens where they vanished. “I hate him for being so mean to me and my mom, I hate him for never smiling, I hate him for never trying, I hate him for being such a bitter man, I hate him for neglecting me and never loving me and I just hate him. I hate him so much,” she cried and cried and cried. And no one answered.
Then, almost too quiet for us to hear over the pitiless wind, I heard her say, “But, I hate him the most for dying.”
The cold was stuck to me now. It tore through my clothes, stung my cheeks red. My teeth chattered, but I clamped my jaw shut to listen some more. I knew she was done, but I wanted to listen to the frigid wind wrap itself all the way around her dead silence. Like a hug, a bitter cold one. A marriage of two miseries.
Her shoulders shook. Her hair continued to twirl and jerk. Her open hands lay facing up in her lap, expectant. Empty. Carrol went to the heater beneath the radio and turned it all the way up, then corrected his position again. Mom didn’t notice. Just shuddered with heavy sobs, all the memories she just recounted weighing her down.
The sky outside was gray, soulless. It was all I could see past Mom, her sobbing silhouette absolutely still against the world. When she finished crying, she rolled up the window and gave us all a little kindness, some small relief. Sniffling, she took a long breath and brought down the visor to clean her face in the mirror.
Outside, it started drizzling, bigger drops than the tiny flakes the clouds were shedding a minute ago. They tapped lightly on the windows through which Mom just emptied herself. It looked to me like she didn’t have any room in her for the rain right then.
She turned around to us and said, “I’m sorry, guys. I’m so sorry.”
The rain fell all around us, but we didn’t pay much attention to it.
We got home a few minutes later, warmer and more solemn than we were when we left. Or harrowed is more like it. We saw death and family and tried our best to feel nothing, despite ourselves and our natural tendencies. And now that we were home, we learned to feel nothing again. Or tried to.
But, again, despite myself and what was best for everyone in the house, I followed Mom to the kitchen table and sat down next to her. Carrol went to his recliner and started tapping away at the world on his phone. Shelby followed suit and Mike vanished into the hall, probably to his room, but I didn’t know.
Mom set her hand on my forearm, then tapped it a couple times, like she had something to say. When I looked up at her, she was silent. Nothing left to say.
So, she got her glasses from the little pouch in her purse and set them on the edge of her nose, that same way where I thought they’d fall into whatever she was eating. The pads on the edges of her nostrils, sticking to her and holding on to the very edge of dropping and shattering and losing their purpose. Right there where they were either immensely helpful or doomed.
With those resilient glasses, Mom pulled out her phone and went through her photos. She went to an app I’d never seen, started scrolling through photos. They were all scanned ones, all actual photographs from generations past. Mom was a girl wearing a sequin dress in front of a sycamore in a city park. She was a girl shooting a free throw with a tight ponytail and a baggy uniform. She was a daughter standing in front of Mount Rushmore with a dad, smiling with gaps in her baby teeth and holding her Dad’s hand.
“This is the one time he was nice to me,” Mom said, pointing at the photo of them at Mount Rushmore.
He looked to me like he was happy, too. Her Dad, I mean. Even if he would go on to pull her hair and criticize her weight and her intellect and her choices at every family restaurant. He looked like an actual Dad for a minute. Easy to confuse them, I guess.
Mom tapped the trash icon in the corner and deleted the photo. It got sucked into the void, her youth and all her happy memories. Setting down her phone and taking off her glasses, she sighed.
“How are you, Mom?” I asked.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter. Not at all.”
I just nodded because I didn’t know what it meant, what it could mean.
“Would you get me a glass of water? Please?” she asked.
I did as she asked. Then, when she finished it, I put it in the sink. I had the strong urge to remind Mom that I loved her. That she was a good Mom. She looked like she was thinking hard, though. And feeling too much. So, I walked past her without looking at her, down the hall and went into my room. I turned out the light and laid in my bed, thinking about that crooked cross, trying hard to bend that mental image until the cross stood up straight.
Hi, I’m Tanner Burke (he/him), a writer living in Provo, UT. I have won four university writing prizes. Above all else, I love contemporary fiction and thrillers. In my free time, I love hiking and seeing movies with my wife. You can follow me on Instagram @the_tburke.
