"Whatever."
"I meant to ask you about the dog."
"Horrible Henry?"
"Did you ever talk to your dad about taking him?"
"No. I thought you were going to get him once you were settled, and I figured it had already happened."
"He's missing. And speaking of missing, do you know if your father has a will?"
"It's in my suitcase. He sent it to me a few months ago in a sealed envelope that said, 'To be opened only in event of death.' It gave me the creeps. He sent Susanna a copy, too."
"How many months ago?"
"I don't know, a few."
We had just turned onto the dirt road, and the car was wobbling over the ruts. "Did you open it?"
"This morning. I'll give it to you when I unpack. I think Daddy mentioned you in it."
"Really?"
"Yeah, but I can't remember how it went."
I am still not sure whether she was telling me the truth. Did she really not remember what her father had said about me in that document, or was she doing exactly what I was doing to her: withholding unpleasant information until it was impossible not to?
"The only thing we can rule out now is a stroke," the coroner said while Ginny took a shower upstairs. "We can't determine if it was a coronary. Too much decomposition. Next, we test for substances in the system." Flossie was sleeping under the dining room table, her furry chin on my bare foot. "But to tell you the truth, it doesn't look good."
"Good for what?" It was an unexpected word, under the circumstances.
"A conclusive answer."
"Because?"
I heard an unprofessional sigh. "We normally test the blood, and there's not much of it to test."
I understood this was a euphemism for "none," but something made me ask the next question; my stubbornness, my refusal to believe that every inquiry would lead to darkness and more darkness. "I think I know the answer, but if my husband's daughters want to see him, you know, to say good-bye-"
He did not let me finish. "There's nothing much left to say goodbye to."
I have since parsed that sentence clean. I have had dreams about it, have thought, in lighter moments, that it would make a decent refrain in a country-and-western song, but I have no idea precisely what it means. It is not in the least descriptive; it simply deters intruders by not inviting a single clarifying question: What exactly do you mean by "nothing much"? A skeleton picked clean, like a Thanksgiving turkey two days later? And if not that-
"I'll tell them," I said to the coroner. "Or maybe I won't. One other thing; I'm not sure what happens next."
"We'll call you with the results. Sometime next week."
"No, I mean, the body. Are you finished with it?"
"Yes. The funeral home will pick it up."
"But we're not having a funeral home service, and he's going to be cremated." I saw Ginny come down the stairs in fresh shorts and a white T-shirt, her long blond hair wet and ruler-straight. I watched her gaze around the sunlit showpiece room as if she were visiting a Moroccan bazaar.
"You'll have to talk to the funeral home about all that, Mrs. O'Rourke. I assume you have the number."
As Ginny crossed the room, I saw she held an envelope, and when I hung up the phone, I was surprised to see her glare at me. "That's not going to happen," she said sharply.
"What's not?"
"He's not going to be cremated."
"He told me last summer that's what he wanted. Did he tell you something else? Is it in his will?"
"That's not what we want. Where's the phone book?" She found the slim island directory on one of the end tables and began flipping through it, biting the inside of her cheek, right at the V of her mouth where her upper and lower lips met. The instant I realized she would do that until her anger abated, and that she'd been angry for all the years I had known her, I got up and walked across the vast space into the kitchen, which was connected to the big room by a cut-out in the wall. I tried not to storm off or bang around angrily. It was too soon for that, and it was not my style. In a calmer moment, I would tell her again what Will's wishes were. In the meantime, I would do my best to take care of her.
"Are you hungry?" I called out. "Mavis left us chicken salad and peach pie from Sharon Asher's farm stand. Can I fix you a plate?"
"I don't eat meat," she mumbled. "Or chicken. Or fish."
"I thought you'd started again."
"Then I stopped." On and off the wagon. It sounded as if she had a speech impediment, still chewing on her cheek.
"What about peach pie with vanilla ice cream? That's what Jack Kerouac and his buddies ate at truck stops in On the Road. Cheapest way to get all that protein; in the ice cream, I guess. Though it may have been apple, not peach."
"I don't eat dairy either."
"It doesn't hurt the cows when you milk them, Ginny. They actually kind of like it."
Silence, then more silence from the other room. I guess I had sounded sarcastic, when I only meant to sound playful. "There are also some grilled vegetables, let's see, and a loaf of homemade bread."
"Anything's fine, Sophy."
But of course nothing was fine, not what I'd said about cows or cremation or probably peach pie. This kid and I had a history or maybe it was only the future we wanted to steer clear of, the upcoming forty-eight hours spiraling across the prairie like a tornado. Disasters. Disaster metaphors. The Christmas she was nineteen, in a blazing non sequitur, she accused me of wishing that it had been she who died in the car accident, instead of her brother, whom I had never known.
I carried food and plates into the dining room, expecting that she would dislodge herself from the armchair, where she was still studying the phone directory. She did not budge.
"Who you looking for?"
"Father Kelly."
Not a name I knew. "Are you thinking of having a Catholic funeral?" I asked this with as little inflection, and astonishment, as I could.
"Of course."
"Your father hadn't been to church in thirty years. Maybe forty."
"Except when Jesse died."
Here's what you don't know about shock until its insulating effects fall away like chunks of plaster from a walclass="underline" it acts not only as a painkiller, a mega-Klonopin, but it deadens years of long-term memory, your history, and perhaps your spouse's, which you have come to know so thoroughly, it has become your own, the way property does in marriage.
Until that moment I had not remembered Will's accounts of the civil war that had erupted over Jesse's funeral.
Will's history. He had wanted his son to be cremated, the ashes scattered in the sea, and a secular service to be run by a Berrigan-type former priest who would have let the college kids speak about their friend and classmate. Jesse's mother, Clare, no longer Will's wife, had wanted the Roman Catholic ritual, the coffin with white-satin lining, the procession of limos to the cemetery. "Haven't you done enough damage?" she was unkind enough to say when Will described the ceremony he wanted. That cruelty and his guilt were enough to make him submit to Clare's funeral arrangements. That's what he used to call it: Clare's funeral.
Will's funeral. Across this vast room, the late-afternoon light slanting in against the couches and kilims in trapezoidal shapes, Ginny looked up from the phone book and said, "I forgot to tell you. My mother's coming tomorrow afternoon from Chicago. She's trying to rent a house for a week so that Susanna and I have a place to stay. Hotels are all booked. Do you know if Saint Anne's by the Sea is the church with the Gothic fretwork near the saltwater taffy place, or is that the one by the elementary school that looks like a bank?"
"Can't say that I know."
Those were the only words I could utter right then, and just barely. I closed my eyes and must have sighed in self-defense, as I do now, remembering the cumulative force of this news. Clare's Funeral Redux? Clare the real estate agent, Clare of the deep pockets and the religious right, Clare the mother of his children who had endured the sufferings of the Virgin Mary. Was this going to be Clare, who worshipped money and property and God with a capital G, versus me, who had spent the last three weeks in bed with another man? This was not a competition I could win.