It was Judy who remembered, about two exits up the road. Though Nelson floored the accelerator, it seemed to take forever getting to the next exit and reversing their direction on 95. His whole body went watery with guilt and hurry. The black desk clerk, who had just come on duty, looked dubious at Nelson's panting explanation, but let them have the key again. It was strange to be let back in, as if into an empty tomb-as if they all had died or been abducted. The beds were still unmade, the towels wet outside the shower stall. They found a child's toothbrush in the bathroom as well as Grandpa's remains sitting docilely on the cabinet shelf, the square urn blending in like one of those combination safes motels sometimes give you. Nelson felt this tremendous rush of reunion at the time, taking the canister into his arms, a bliss of wiped-out sins. Afterwards, with schooled hindsight, he saw that there had been a certain unconscious vengeance in their leaving Dad behind, as he had more than once left them behind.
Nelson doesn't remember if they all laughed about it, forgetting the head of their family like that, but he does remember that Aunt Mim wore too much black at the funeral, all black, gloves and hat and big sunglasses, more a style statement than a proclamation of mourning. She stood out like a swish vampire among the quiet orderly rows of the hillside cemetery, on the back slope of Mt. Judge, where Earl W. (1905-1976) and Mary R. (1904-1974) Angstrom rested beneath a rose-colored polished double headstone one grassy stride away from the smaller, older, duller dove-colored stone saying.
REBECCA JUNE ANGSTROM
1959
His sister. He has always blamed himself somehow. If he had been more pleasing to Dad he wouldn't have left and Mom wouldn't have gotten drunk and it wouldn't have happened. At Dad's funeral Aunt Mim seemed an animated, irreverent slash of black among the dowdy mourners (there were some aging male strangers, even, who showed up, having worked with the deceased at Verity Press or the Toyota agency or played with or against the dead man in his teen-age prime and who felt enough connection to take a morning out of their own remaining lives) but Dad had loved her, and she him, with the heavy helplessness of blood, that casts us into a family as if into a doom.
"The funniest thing, Aunt Mim," Nelson says over the phone. "It turns out Dad had a baby by the woman he lived with that time and she's showed up. It was a girl baby, and she's thirty-nine, and a nurse living right here in Brewer. She grew up on a farm. I had lunch with her. She looks a little like Dad before he got really fat but when his face was turning round-kind of, you know, sleepy-eyed, with very white skin. So as well as a nephew you have a niece."
"Damn," the phone crackled after a pause. "I'll have to rewrite my will. How come she showed up now? Did Harry know she existed?"
"He guessed, I guess, but didn't know for sure. Her mother wouldn't tell him. She died this summer and told Annabelle before she did. She came to us."
"Who's us?"
"The family. Me and Mom and Ronnie."
"I bet Ronnie's just thrilled. And Janice even more so. I think it was you she came to, Nelson. So what's your thought?"
"Well, it's not as if she's not managing, she makes better money than I do, but she seems awfully alone. I think she should get to meet some people. But I don't know so many people since I kicked coke, except for the clients at work."
At her end of the line, Aunt Mim considers. "How long since you've known about this girl?"
"Since September."
"And you're just calling to tell me now?"
"I've been sitting on it, I guess."
"You're embarrassed," the woman concludes. "Don't be embarrassed, kid. Your father didn't understand birth control. You were born some months early, as I remember. It's not your funeral. Want some advice from your old aunt, whose life is no model for anybody?"
"Sure."
"This little nursie's not your problem. At thirty-nine, everybody's their own problem. You have a family-how are they?"
This is getting to be a disappointing conversation. If there was anybody he thought would see with him the wonder of his having a sister it was Aunt Mim, his father's sister. "They're good, I guess. Pru finally had enough of me and a year and a half ago took the kids back to Akron. She works for a Greek lawyer downtown, near the old Goodrich factory."
"Oh, those Greeks," says Aunt Mim. "They invented democracy,they'll tell you."
"And Judy's out of school and thinking of becoming an airline stewardess."
"flight attendant, they like to be called. Some of them, the way they carry on is legal only in Nevada."
"I know. She worries me. She's kind of wild."
"You worry too much. Life is wild. When it isn't a total bore."
"And my little boy, Roy, is almost fifteen. We communicate by e-mail. He's bright, it turns out."
"You sound surprised. Your father wasn't stupid, he just acted stupid. So. And now a sister to fill in the gaps. You're quite a family man, Nelson, I don't know where you get it from. The
Springer side, I guess. They were good Germans. The Angstroms never quite fit in."
"I thought you might have some ideas."
"Ideas about what?"
"What I should do, about having a sister."
"Well, your father used to hold my hand crossing the street, and he liked to watch me pee, but maybe she's beyond that. What's her name, did you say?"
"Annabelle. Annabelle Byer."
"Who was Byer?"
"Her stepdad. He was the farmer."
"He's dead, too."
"Right."
"More and more is dead, are you old enough to notice? Vegas is dead, the way it was-a sporting town. The people used to come here had a little class-the gangsters, the starlets. A little whiff of danger, glamour, you name it. Class. The guys used to pay cash for everything, off a big roll of fifties. Now it's herds. Herds and herds of Joe Nobodies. Bozos. The hoi polloi, running up credit-card debt. Gambling is legal in half the states so they've built these huge moron-catchers along the Strip, all the way to the airport. A Pyramid, the Eiffel Tower, Venice-it's all here, Nelson, all for the morons. It's depressing as hell. Sometimes I think of going back east, but where would I fit in?"
"You'd fit in here, Aunt Mim," he hears himself saying. "The house is too big as it is."