“She was old, buddy,” Stem said.
An embarrassed silence fell over the room. Luckily, though, Sammy failed to make the obvious connection. He hadn’t mentioned Abby once, although she used to spend hours at a time reading him his favorite, unutterably boring dinosaur book over and over and over.
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!” Jeannie and Stem said at exactly the same time. Then Jeannie asked, “What was the song?”
“Something about a goat; I don’t know.”
Jeannie looked at Stem. He shrugged.
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,” Jeannie said.
“Pardon?”
“The dog was a her.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“She was old,” Jeannie said. “The dog, I mean. She’d had a good long life.”
“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,” Denny told Amanda. “I wasn’t even up yet”—interrupting Nora, who was wearing a troubled expression and had started to speak also.
“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,” Jeannie said.
“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,” Denny said. “She should have told us she wanted a walk. She had no business taking off like that!”
Oh, everybody was true to form—Denny angry, Nora remorseful, Amanda looking for someone to blame. “How could she have told you,” Amanda asked Denny, “when you were snoring away in bed?”
“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,” Jeannie said. “We’re getting off the subject.”
“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 Denny stepped in. He said, “I don’t know if she meant that literally, though.”
“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 Denny moved in. She said she was going to borrow some desk space from Father Whitshank.”
“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, Jeannie, I’m sure she didn’t really want ‘Good Vibrations.’ Not when it came right down to it.”
“You must not know Mom, then,” Jeannie said.
“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,” Denny complained, and Amanda said, “Isn’t it interesting: people never seem to bring liquor when somebody dies, have you noticed? Why not a case of beer? Or a bottle of really good wine? Just these everlasting casseroles, and who eats casseroles nowadays?”
“I eat casseroles,” Nora told her. “I serve them several times a week.”
Amanda sent Denny a guilty glance and said no more.
“I was thinking when I woke up this morning about the next-door people,” Jeannie said musingly. “The people at the beach. They’ll tell each other next summer, they’ll say, ‘Oh, look at that! They don’t have their mother anymore!’ ”
“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 Jeannie gave a wail and buried her face in her hands.
Nora stood up and walked around the table, Sammy straddling her hip, to stroke Jeannie’s shoulder. Sammy hung out at an angle and gazed down at her with interest. “There, there,” Nora told her. “This will get easier, I promise. God never gives us more than we can handle.”
Jeannie only cried harder.
“Actually, that’s not true,” Denny said in an informative tone of voice. He was leaning back against the fridge with his arms folded.
Nora glanced at him, still smoothing Jeannie’s shoulder.
“He gives people more than they can handle every day of the year,” Denny told her. “Half of the world is walking around just … destroyed, most of the time.”
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 sm
oking 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.”
A desiccated violet flattened in waxed paper made him first frown in perplexity and then smile, but without saying why, and he spent some time studying a typewritten list of what must have been New Year’s resolutions. “ ‘I will make myself count to ten before I speak to the children in anger,’ ” he read out. “ ‘I will remind myself daily that my mother is getting old and will not be with us forever.’ ” The folder of Abby’s poems, though, he laid aside without a glance, as if fearing he would find them too painful, and he didn’t so much as crack open any of her little black-and-red bound journals.
Some of the items were mystifying. A wrinkled, flattened Hershey’s-bar wrapper; a piece of tree bark in a tiny brown paper bag; a yellowing two-page newsletter from a nursing home in Catonsville. “ ‘Five Tasks for Dying,’ ” Stem read aloud from the newsletter.
“For dieting?”
“Dying.”
“Oh, what’s it say?”
“Nothing to do with a funeral service,” Stem said, passing it over. “Telling people you love them, telling them goodbye …”
“Just—please, God—don’t let her ask for a ‘celebration,’ ” Red said. “I don’t much feel like celebrating just now.” He let the newsletter drop unread onto the couch beside him. Stem didn’t seem to have heard him, though. He was studying a sheet of onionskin covered with blurred typewriting—a carbon copy, obviously; the one and only item in an unmarked manila envelope.
“Found it?” Red asked.
“No, just …”
Stem went on reading. Then he raised his head. His lips had gone white; he had a drawn, almost dehydrated look. “Here,” he said, and he handed the paper to Red.
“ ‘I, Abigail Whitshank,’ ” Red read out, “ ‘hereby agree that—’ ” He stopped. His eyes went to the bottom of the page. He cleared his throat and continued, “ ‘—hereby agree that Douglas Alan O’Brian will be raised like my own child, with all attendant rights and privileges. I promise that his mother will be granted full access to him whenever she desires, and that she may reclaim him entirely for her own as soon as her life circumstances permit. This agreement is contingent upon his mother’s promise that she will never, ever, for any reason, reveal her identity to her son unless and until she assumes permanent responsibility for him; nor will I reveal it myself.’ ” He cleared his throat again. He said, “ ‘Signed, Abigail Dalton Whitshank. Signed, Barbara Jane Autry.’ ”
“I don’t understand,” Stem said.
Red didn’t answer. He was staring down at the contract.
“Is that B.J. Autry?” Stem asked.
Red still didn’t speak.
“It is,” Stem said. “It’s got to be. Barbara Jane Eames, she started out, and then at some point she must have married someone named Autry. She was right there in front of us all along.”
“I guess she found your listing in the phone book,” Red said, looking up from the contract.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Stem demanded. “You had an obligation to tell me! I don’t care what you promised!”
“I didn’t promise,” Red said. “I knew nothing about this.”
“You had to know.”
“I swear it: your mom never said word one.”
“You’re claiming she knew the truth all these years and kept it from her own husband?”
“Evidently,” Red said. He rubbed his forehead.
“That’s not possible,” Stem told him. “Why on earth would she do that?”
“Well, she … maybe she was worried I would make her give you up,” Red said. “I’d tell her she would have to hand you over to B. J. And she was right: I would have.”
Stem’s jaw dropped. He said, “You’d have handed me over.”
“Well, face it, Stem: this was a crazy arrangement.”
“But still,” Stem said.
“Still what? You were B. J.’s legal offspring.”
“I guess it’s a good thing she’s not around anymore, then,” Stem said bitterly. “She died, right?”
“Yes, I seem to remember she did,” Red said.
“You ‘seem to remember,’ ” Stem said, as if it were an accusation.
“Stem, I swear to God I had no knowledge of any of this. I barely knew the woman! I can’t even figure how your mom could get a lawyer to go along with it.”
“She didn’t get a lawyer. Look at the language. Oh, she tried to sound legal—‘attendant rights and privileges,’ ‘unless and until’—but what lawyer writes ‘never, ever’? What official document is a single paragraph long? She cooked it up herself, she and B. J. between them. They didn’t even have it notarized!”
“I have to say,” Red said, looking down at the contract again, “I’m a little bit … annoyed by this.”
Stem gave a humorless snort.
“Sometimes your mother could be … I mean, Abby could be …” Red trailed off.
“Look,” Stem said. “Just promise me this. Promise you won’t tell people.”
“What, not tell anyone? Not even Denny and the girls?”
“No one. Promise you’ll keep it quiet.”
“How come?” Red asked him.
“I just want you to.”
“But you’re grown now. It couldn’t change anything.”
“I mean this: I need you to forget you ever saw it.”
“Well,” Red said. And he leaned forward and handed it over.
Stem folded the contract and put it in his shirt pocket.
It emerged that not even Red’s bottom desk drawer had provided quite enough space for Abby’s papers. Where her funeral directive showed up, finally, was the cupboard beneath the window seat, interleaved with programs from other people’s funerals—her parents’ and her brother’s and a “ceremony of remembrance” for someone named Shawanda Simms whom none of the rest of the family had heard of. And no, she did not request “Good Vibrations,” or “Amazing Grace,” either, for that matter. She wanted “Sheep May Safely Graze” and “Brother James’s Air,” both to be sung by only the choir, thank goodness; and then the congregation should join in on “Shall We Gather at the River?” Friends and/or family could give testimonials, supposing they cared to (this wording struck her daughters as pathetically tentative), and Reverend Stock could say something brief and—if it wasn’t asking too much—“not too heavy on the religion.”
The mention of Reverend Stock threw everyone into a tizzy. First, they couldn’t even think who he was. Then Jeannie figured out that he must be the pastor at Hampden Fellowship—the little church that Abby had gone back to from time to time, having belonged to it in her childhood. But the Whitshanks’ official place of worship, at least on Christmas Eve and Easter, was St. David’s, and St. David’s was what Amanda had booked for eleven o’clock Monday morning. Did it really, really make any difference? she wondered aloud. Red said it did. Perhaps reasoning that Nora was their expert on religious matters, he commissioned her to place the necessary calls to St. David’s and to Reverend Stock. Nora went off to the sunroom phone and came back some time later to report that Reverend Stock had retired several years ago, but Reverend Edwin Alban was saddened to hear of their loss and would pay a visit that afternoon to discuss the particulars. Red blanched at the mention of a visit, but he thanked her for arranging it.
By now, everybody in the family was unraveling around the edges. The three little boys kept waking at night and crossing the hall to climb into bed with Stem and Nora. Stem forgot to cancel an appointment with a Guilford woman who was thinking of adding a major extension to her house. Jeannie and Amanda got into a quarrel after Amanda said that while Alexand
er might indeed have held a special place in Abby’s heart, it was only to be expected because “Alexander is so … you know.” “He’s so what? What?” Jeannie had demanded, and Amanda had said, “Never mind,” and made a big show of clamping her mouth shut. Not ten minutes later, Deb gave Elise a black eye for claiming that their grandma had once confided that she loved Elise the best. “Now, how to amuse them today?” Red asked—a line from a Christopher Robin poem that Abby used to quote whenever some new family catastrophe arose. Then he got a stricken look, no doubt at the sound of Abby’s merry voice echoing in his head. Meanwhile Denny, true to form, started spending long periods shut away in his room doing no one knew what, although occasionally he could be heard talking on his cell phone. But to whom? It was a mystery. Even Heidi was acting up. She kept raiding the garbage container under the kitchen sink and leaving disgusting knots of chewed foil beneath the dining-room table.
“You girls have to tell me if I start looking seedy,” Red told his daughters. “I don’t have your mother around anymore to keep me up to par.” But as the week wore on, and his shirts developed food stains and he never got out of those slippers, he shrugged off any suggestion they made. “You know, Dad,” Jeannie said, “I believe those pants of yours are ready for the rag bag,” and he said, “What are you talking about? I’ve just now got them properly broken in.” When Amanda offered to take his suit to the cleaner’s in preparation for the funeral, he told her there was no need; he’d be wearing a dashiki. “A what?” Amanda asked him. He turned and walked out of the sunroom, leaving his daughters staring at each other in dismay. A few minutes later he came back carrying a blousy sort of smock in a teal blue so brilliant, so electrically vibrant, that it was painful to the eyes. “Your mother made this for our wedding,” he said, “and I thought it would be appropriate if I wore it to her funeral.”
“But, Dad,” Amanda said, “your wedding was in the sixties.”
“So?”
“Maybe in the sixties people wore these, although I can’t quite … but that was almost half a century ago! All the seams are fraying, just look. There’s a rip under one arm.”
“So we’ll fix it,” Red said. “It’ll be just as good as new.”