Bag of Bones

I was thirty-six, remember. You don’t expect to have to bury your wife when you’re thirty-six and she herself is two years younger. Death was the last thing on our minds. “If a guy gets caught taking your stereo out of your car, they call it theft and put him in jail,” Frank said.

The Arlens had come from Massachusetts, and I could still hear Malden in Frank’s voice—caught was coowat, car was cah, call was caul. “If the same guy is trying to sell a grieving husband a three-thousand-dollar casket for forty-five hundred dollars, they call it business and ask him to speak at the Rotary Club luncheon. Greedy asshole, I fed him his lunch, didn’t I?”

“Yes. You did.”

“You okay, Mikey?”

“I’m okay.”

“Sincerely okay?”

“How the fuck should I know?” I asked him, loud enough to turn some heads in a nearby booth. And then: “She was pregnant.” His face grew very still. “What?” I struggled to keep my voice down.

“Pregnant. Six or seven weeks, according to the… you know, the autopsy. Did you know? Did she tell you?”

“No! Christ, no!” But there was a fu

“They can tell.

As for checking, I don’t know if they do it automatically or not. I asked.”

“Why?”

“She didn’t just buy sinus medicine before she died. She also bought one of those home pregnancy-testing kits.”

“You had no idea?

No clue?” I shook my head. He reached across the table and squeezed my shoulder. “She wanted to be sure, that’s all. You know that, don’t you?”

A refill on my sinus medicine and a piece of fish, she’d said. Looking like always. A woman off to run a couple of errands. We had been trying to have a kid for eight years, but she had looked just like always.

“Sure,” I said, patting Frank’s hand. “Sure, big guy. I know.”

It was the Arlens—led by Frank who handled Joha

“She told me a lot of stories.”

“Good ones?” “Yeah, real good.”

“I’m going to miss her so much.”

“Me, too,” I said. “Frank… listen… I know you were her favorite brother. She never called you, maybe just to say that she missed a period or was feeling whoopsy in the morning? You can tell me. I won’t be pissed.”

“But she didn’t. Honest to God. Was she whoopsy in the morning?”

“Not that I saw.” And that was just it. I hadn’t seen anything. Of course I’d been writing, and when I write I pretty much trance out. But she knew where I went in those trances. She could have found me and shaken me fully awake. Why hadn’t she? Why would she hide good news? Not wanting to tell me until she was sure was plausible… but it somehow wasn’t Jo. “Was it a boy or a girl?” he asked. “A girl.”

We’d had names picked out and waiting for most of our marriage. A boy would have been Andrew. Our daughter would have been Kia. Kia Jane Noonan.

Frank, divorced six years and on his own, had been staying with me. On our way back to the house he said, “I worry about you, Mikey. You haven’t got much family to fall back on at a time like this, and what you do have is far away.”

“I’ll be all right,” I said. He nodded.

“That’s what we say, anyway, isn’t it?”

“We?”

“Guys. I’ll be all right.’

And if we’re not, we try to make sure no one knows it.” He looked at me, eyes still leaking, handkerchief in one big sunburned hand. “If you’re not all right, Mikey, and you don’t want to call your brother—I saw the way you looked at him—let me be your brother. For Jo’s sake if not your own.”

“Okay,” I said, respecting and appreciating the offer, also knowing I would do no such thing. I don’t call people for help. It’s not because of the way I was raised, at least I don’t think so; it’s the way I was made. Joha

That startled me. The combination of heat and grief had made me feel as if I had been living in a dream for the last few days, but that got through. “Careful of what?”