Bag of Bones Read Free Page B

the drive to Boston, where they would spend the night and then grab the Southern Crescent the following day. My brother is happy enough to chaperone the old folks, but he doesn’t fly, even if the tickets are on me. He claims there are no breakdown lanes in the sky if the engine quits.
    Most of the Arlens left the next day. Once more it was dog-hot, the sun glaring out of a white-haze sky and lying on everything like melted brass. They stood in front of our house—which had become solely my house by then—with three taxis lined up at the curb behind them, big galoots hugging one another amid the litter of tote-bags and saying their goodbyes in those foggy Massachusetts accents.
    Frank stayed another day. We picked a big bunch of flowers behind the house—not those ghastly-smelling hothouse things whose aroma I always associate with death and organ-music but real flowers, the kind Jo liked best—and stuck them in a couple of coffee cans I found in the back pantry. We went out to Fairlawn and put them on the new grave. Then we just sat there for awhile under the beating sun.
    â€œShe was always just the sweetest thing in my life,” Frank said at last in a strange, muffled voice. “We took care of Jo when we were kids. Us guys. No one messed with Jo, I’ll tell you. Anyone tried, we’d feed em their lunch.”
    â€œShe told me a lot of stories.”
    â€œGood ones?”
    â€œYeah, real good.”
    â€œI’m going to miss her so much.”
    â€œMe, too,” I said. “Frank . . . listen . . . I know you were her favorite brother. She never called you, maybe just to say that she missed a period or was feeling whoopsy in the morning? You can tell me. I won’t be pissed.”
    â€œBut she didn’t. Honest to God. Was she whoopsy in the morning?”
    â€œNot that I saw.” And that was just it. I hadn’t seen anything. Of course I’d been writing, and when I write I pretty much trance out. But she knew where I went in those trances. She could have found me and shaken me fully awake. Why hadn’t she? Why would she hide good news? Not wanting to tell me until she was sure was plausible . . . but it somehow wasn’t Jo.
    â€œWas it a boy or a girl?” he asked.
    â€œA girl.”
    We’d had names picked out and waiting for most of our marriage. A boy would have been Andrew. Our daughter would have been Kia. Kia Jane Noonan.
    *   *   *
    Frank, divorced six years and on his own, had been staying with me. On our way back to the house he said, “I worry about you, Mikey. You haven’t got much family to fall back on at a time like this, and what you do have is far away.”
    â€œI’ll be all right,” I said.
    He nodded. “That’s what we say, anyway, isn’t it?”
    â€œWe?”
    â€œGuys. ‘I’ll be all right.’ And if we’re not, we try to make sure no one knows it.” He looked at me, eyes still leaking, handkerchief in one big sunburned hand. “If you’re not all right, Mikey, and you don’t want to call your brother—I saw the way you looked at him—let me be your brother. For Jo’s sake if not your own.”
    â€œOkay,” I said, respecting and appreciating the offer, also knowing I would do no such thing. I don’t call people for help. It’s not because of the way I was raised, at least I don’t think so; it’s the way I was made. Johanna once said that if I was drowning at Dark Score Lake, where we have a summer home, I would die silently fifty feet out from the public beach rather than yell for help. It’s not a question of love or affection. I can give those and I can take them. I feel pain like anyone else. I need to touch and be touched. But if someone asks me, “Are you all right?” I can’t answer no. I can’t say help me.
    A couple of hours later Frank left