Mail Automatically Opens Next Email?

how Mail works with the iPad2. When you open the mail app there is a portion of the screen that lists the messages in your mailboxes. Behind this is the last email you looked at loaded in the window. As it currently works on my machine if I delete an item from the list of emails on the left, the app automatically moves to the next message, loads the message, and marks the email as being "read". Is there a way to make it not do this? Basically I don't like it automatically moving the next unread message and marking it as read.