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She didn’t mind looking old. It wasn’t a real concern of hers. Her face had grown slightly puffy and her body had softened and slumped, but when she studied the family album she thought that her younger self seemed unappealingly puny by comparison — pinched and tight, almost starved-looking. And Red seemed downright frail in those photos, with his Adam’s apple poking forth too sharply from his too-long neck. He weighed no more now than he had then, but somehow he gave the impression of greater solidity.
Abby had a little trick that she used any time Red acted like a cranky old codger. She reminded herself of the day she had fallen in love with him. “It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon,” she’d begin, and it would all come back to her — the newness of it, the whole new world magically opening before her at the moment when she first realized that this person that she’d barely noticed all these years was, in fact, a treasure. He was perfect, was how she’d put it to herself. And then that clear-eyed, calm-faced boy would shine forth from Red’s sags and wrinkles, from his crumpled eyelids and hollowed cheeks and the two deep crevices bracketing his mouth and just his general obtuseness, his stubbor
“I bought a goat,” she sang as she walked. “His name was Jim.” Then she broke off, because she caught sight of someone approaching up ahead. But he turned left at the corner, so Abby resumed singing. “I bought him for …” Clarence trudged next to her in silence, every now and then accidentally or maybe deliberately bumping against her knee.
Wasn’t it interesting how song lyrics stayed in your memory so much longer than mere prose! Not just the songs of her teens—“Tom Dooley” and “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore”—but ditties from her childhood, “White Coral Bells” and “Good Morning, Merry Sunshine” and “We’re Happy When We’re Hiking,” and her mother singing something that began “I’ll come down and let you in,” and even jump-rope chants—“Joh
Abby used to worry about becoming forgetful, because her maternal grandfather had ended up with dementia. But that wasn’t turning out to be her particular problem. She had a better memory than most of her friends, they all agreed. Why, just last week Carol Du
Or Ree, who kept losing the names of things. “Next summer I think I’ll plant some of those … Maryland flowers,” she said, and Abby said, “Black-eyed Susans?” “Yes, right.” It always seemed to be Abby who had to fill in the blanks. She should tell Dr. Wiss that.
“In some ways,” she should tell him, “my memory’s better now than it was when I was young. The most surprising details suddenly show up again! Tiny things, infinitesimal things. The other day I all at once recalled the exact turn of the wrist that I used to give the handle of the CorningWare saucepan I got for a wedding present. I got a whole set of CorningWare with one interchangeable handle that you twisted to lock into place. That was almost fifty years ago! I used those for only a little while; they kept scorching things on the bottom. Who else could remember that?”
She might suddenly smell again the bitter, harsh, soul-dampening fumes of the chopped onions and green peppers her mother fried up most evenings as the base for her skillet di
For years, she had been in mourning for the way she had let her life slip through her fingers. Given another chance, she’d told herself, she would take more care to experience it. But lately, she was finding that she had experienced it after all and just forgotten, and now it was returning to her.
What street was this? She hadn’t been paying attention.
She stopped at the curb and gazed around her, and Clarence sat down on his haunches. To her left was the Hutchinsons’ house, with that beautiful huge magnolia tree that always seemed freshly enameled. She was surprised that she had walked this far; she’d thought Clarence would have protested by now. She made a clucking sound and he rose with a groan, the weight of the world on his shoulders, his head sagging so that it nearly touched the ground. “We’ll take you home,” she told him, “and you can have a nice long nap.”
Just then, though — how could this happen? — a little mosquito of a chihuahua minced past on the sidewalk across the street. No owner anywhere to be seen, and no leash and not even a collar. Clarence sprang up instantaneously, as if his weariness had all been for show, and with a startlingly loud roar he leapt forward, yanking the leash from Abby’s hand. Somehow she had time to see his entire life streaming by: his soft, pudgy belly and giant paws when he was a pup, his old fondness for playing fetch with te
“Oh!” she thought. “Why, this must be—”
And then no more.
7
WHITSHANKS DIDN’T DIE, was the family’s general belief. Of course they never said this aloud. It would have seemed presumptuous. Not to mention that some non-Whitshank would have been sure to point out that after all, Junior and Li
Abby died on a Tuesday, and on Wednesday she was cremated as she had always said she wanted to be; but the funeral wouldn’t be held until the following Monday. This was so they could collect themselves and figure out what a funeral entailed, exactly. None of them had had any experience with such things except for Nora, and she came from such a different background that she really couldn’t be much help.
Putting the funeral off for so long might have been a mistake, though, because it meant they were all suspended in a kind of limbo. They hung around the house drinking coffee, answering the telephone, sighing, bickering, accepting covered dishes from the neighbors, trading comical Abby stories that somehow made them end up crying instead of laughing. Both of the Hughs were there, because their wives required support. Stem fielded the occasional work-related call on his cell phone, but Red didn’t even bother asking what the issue was. The grandchildren went to school as usual but gathered at the house in the afternoons, looking awed and stricken, while little Sammy, stuck at home all day with the grown-ups, seemed to be going slightly crazy. He gave up using his potty — an iffy business in the best of times — and started throwing spectacular tantrums. When Nora asked him, in a too-calm voice, what was troubling him, he said he wanted Clarence. This made everyone stir uneasily. “Brenda, you mean,” Nora told him. “Brenda has gone to be with Jesus.”