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“I want him to come back from Jesus.”
“Her,” Nora said. “You want her to come back. But she’s happier where she is.”
“She was old, buddy,” Stem said.
An embarrassed silence fell over the room. Luckily, though, Sammy failed to make the obvious co
She’d been singing, Louisa Hutchinson said. Louisa was the one who had rushed out to the street when she heard the crash, and then called 911 and later had phoned the family. Thank heaven, because Abby hadn’t been carrying any identification. “She walked toward our house singing,” Louisa said, “and I went to our front window and I said to Bill, I said, ‘Somebody’s in a good mood.’ I don’t know as I’d ever heard Abby singing before.”
“Singing!” Jea
“Something about a goat; I don’t know.”
Jea
Louisa said, “The dog lay so far from where Abby lay, I guess he must have been thrown. The driver found him, poor woman. The driver was beside herself. She found him lying close to where her car had knocked the lamppost over. I’m just thankful Abby didn’t have to see him.”
“Her,” Jea
“Pardon?”
“The dog was a her.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“She was old,” Jea
“Still, though,” Louisa said.
Then she held up the casserole she’d brought and told them it was gluten-free, in case anybody cared.
And how did it happen, pray tell, that Abby had chanced to be off serenading the neighborhood with none of the family any the wiser? Amanda was the only one who came right out and asked, once Louisa was gone, but no doubt the others were wondering too. They sat around the living room listlessly, with the light coming in all wrong — sunshine filtering through the rear windows on a weekday morning, when most of the family should have been at work. “Don’t look at me,” De
“I’ve asked myself and asked myself,” Nora said. “You don’t know how many times I’ve asked. When the boys and I left for school, she was sitting on the porch. When I came back she was gone. But Brenda was in the house still, so where was Mother Whitshank? Was she up in her room? Was she in the backyard? How did she leave for a walk without my knowing?”
“Well, you couldn’t keep an eye on her every single minute,” Jea
“I should have, though! It turns out I should have. I am so, so sorry. The two of us had a very special bond, you know. I’m never going to forgive myself.”
“Hey,” Stem said. “Hon.”
Which was about as far as Stem could ever go when it came to offering comfort. Nora seemed grateful, however. She smiled at him, her eyes brimming.
“We’re not mind readers,” De
Oh, everybody was true to form — De
“Whoa!” he said, and drew back in his chair, holding up both hands.
“Anybody would think you’d worn yourself out with hard work,” Amanda said.
“Well, it’s not as if you’ve been over here slaving away.”
“Stop it, both of you,” Jea
“What is the subject?” Amanda’s Hugh asked.
“I have this really, really awful feeling that Mom wanted us to play ‘Good Vibrations’ at her funeral.”
“What?” Hugh said.
“She used to say as much. Didn’t she, Mandy?”
Amanda couldn’t answer because she had started crying, so De
“We need to find her instructions. I remember she wrote some.”
“Dad?” Stem asked. “Do you know where her instructions could be?”
Red was staring into space, both of his hands on his knees. He said, “Eh?”
“Mom’s instructions for her funeral. Did she tell you where she put them?”
Red shook his head.
“We should check her study,” Stem told the others.
“They wouldn’t be in her study,” Nora said. “She cleared out those shelves when De
“Oh!” Red said. “She did. She asked if she could put her stuff in one of my drawers.”
Amanda sat up straighter and dabbed her nose with a tissue. “We’ll look there,” she said briskly. “And, Jea
“You must not know Mom, then,” Jea
“My only fear is, she’s requested ‘Amazing Grace.’ ”
“I like ‘Amazing Grace,’ ” Stem said mildly.
“So did I, till it got to be a cliché.”
“It’s not a cliché to me.”
Amanda raised her eyes to the ceiling.
At lunchtime they just foraged in the fridge instead of cooking. “I can’t find a thing in here but casseroles,” De
“I eat casseroles,” Nora told her. “I serve them several times a week.”
Amanda sent De
“I was thinking when I woke up this morning about the next-door people,” Jea
“Will we still go to the beach?” Stem wondered.
“Of course we’ll go,” Amanda told him. “Mom would expect us to. It would kill her if we didn’t go!”
There was a silence. Then Jea
Nora stood up and walked around the table, Sammy straddling her hip, to stroke Jea
Jea
“Actually, that’s not true,” De
Nora glanced at him, still smoothing Jea
“He gives people more than they can handle every day of the year,” De
The others turned to Nora for her reaction, but she didn’t seem to take offense. She just said, “Douglas, could you find Sammy’s juice cup, please?”
Stem rose and left the room. The others stayed as they were. There was something disjointed about all of them, something ragged and out of alignment.
Stem was the one who searched Red’s desk for the funeral instructions, while Red just watched from the couch with his hands resting slack on his knees. It turned out that Abby had taken over his bottom drawer. Her papers filled it to the brim — her poems and journals, letters from needy orphans and old friends, photos of long-ago classmates and her parents and various strangers.
All of these Stem leafed through in a desultory way and then handed over to Red, who took longer with them. The photos alone consumed several minutes. “Why, there’s Sue Ellen Moore!” he said. “I haven’t thought of her in years.” And he gazed lingeringly at a laughing young Abby hanging on to the arm of a sullen boy smoking a cigarette. “I fell for her the first time I saw her,” he told Stem. “Oh, she was always talking about the day she fell for me, I know. ‘It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon,’ she’d say, but that was when she was almost grown, she was grown, whereas I, now … I had been mooning over Abby all along. That’s my friend Dane you see her with there; Dane was the one she liked first.”