Bag of Bones Read Free Page A

still hear Malden in Frank’s voice— caught was coowat, car was cah, call was caul. “If the same guy is trying to sell a grieving husband a three-thousand-dollar casket for forty-five hundred dollars, they call it business and ask him to speak at the Rotary Club luncheon. Greedy asshole, I fed him his lunch, didn’t I?”
    â€œYes. You did.”
    â€œYou okay, Mikey?”
    â€œI’m okay.”
    â€œSincerely okay?”
    â€œHow the fuck should I know?” I asked him, loud enough to turn some heads in a nearby booth. And then: “She was pregnant.”
    His face grew very still. “ What? ”
    I struggled to keep my voice down. “Pregnant. Six or seven weeks, according to the . . . you know, the autopsy. Did you know? Did she tell you?”
    â€œNo! Christ, no!” But there was a funny look on his face, as if she had told him something. “I knew you were trying, of course . . . she said you had a low sperm count and it might take a little while, but the doctor thought you guys’d probably . . . sooner or later you’d probably . . .” He trailed off, looking down at his hands. “They can tell that, huh? They check for that?”
    â€œThey can tell. As for checking, I don’t know if they do it automatically or not. I asked.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œShe didn’t just buy sinus medicine before she died. She also bought one of those home pregnancy-testing kits.”
    â€œYou had no idea? No clue?”
    I shook my head.
    He reached across the table and squeezed my shoulder. “She wanted to be sure, that’s all. You know that, don’t you?”
    A refill on my sinus medicine and a piece of fish, she’d said. Looking like always. A woman off to run a couple of errands. We had been trying to have a kid for eight years, but she had looked just like always.
    â€œSure,” I said, patting Frank’s hand. “Sure, big guy. I know.”
    *   *   *
    It was the Arlens—led by Frank—who handled Johanna’s sendoff. As the writer of the family, I was assigned the obituary. My brother came up from Virginia with my mom and my aunt and was allowed to tend the guest-book at the viewings. My mother—almost completely ga-ga at the age of sixty-six, although the doctors refused to call it Alzheimer’s—lived in Memphis with her sister, two years younger and only slightly less wonky. They were in charge of cutting the cake and the pies at the funeral reception.
    Everything else was arranged by the Arlens, from the viewing hours to the components of the funeral ceremony. Frank and Victor, the second-youngest brother, spoke brief tributes. Jo’s dad offered a prayer for his daughter’s soul. And at the end, Pete Breedlove, the boy who cut our grass in the summer and raked our yard in the fall, brought everyone to tears by singing “Blessed Assurance,” which Frank said had been Jo’s favorite hymn as a girl. How Frank found Pete and persuaded him to sing at the funeral is something I never found out.
    We got through it—the afternoon and evening viewings on Tuesday, the funeral service on Wednesday morning, then the little pray-over at Fairlawn Cemetery. What I remember most was thinking how hot it was, how lost I felt without having Jo to talk to, and that I wished I had bought a new pair of shoes. Jo would have pestered me to death about the ones I was wearing, if she had been there.
    Later on I talked to my brother, Sid, told him we had to do something about our mother and Aunt Francine before the two of them disappeared completelyinto the Twilight Zone. They were too young for a nursing home; what did Sid advise?
    He advised something, but I’ll be damned if I know what it was. I agreed to it, I remember that, but not what it was. Later that day, Siddy, our mom, and our aunt climbed back into Siddy’s rental car for