Grave Concern Read Free

— let up for a second and you would pay, one way or another, to the gods of either nature or commerce.
    In the event, Kate got a nasty jolt, which in turn necessitated the wearing of a distinctly unfashionable neck brace for the better part of three hellish months. The Cadillac captain’s response to the damage? From the pilot house in the sky had emerged a finely gloved middle finger along with a rude reference to female anatomy, culminating in a treatise on the obvious defects of a Toyota owner.
    And yet, and yet. To retreat from her carefully wrought scaffold — to run back east, for instance — felt to Kate like cheating, as though some malfeasance were out to break her will.
    In a dark hour one April night, abed in the howling city, the delicate fabric of Kate’s light sleep was rent: the phone ringing like hell’s fire alarm. All the way from Ontario, clear as black ice, a voice informed her that her parents, driving home from visiting friends Monday night of the Easter weekend, had been smashed head-on by a drunk careering over a hill into their lane. Nothing they could have done. Both killed instantly. Kate’s loud silence prompted the caller to stop speaking officialese and say gently, “I’m so sorry. If it’s of any help, I can supply you with the number of a crisis counsellor in your area.”
    A crisis counsellor. Wasn’t that what they sent into schools when some disgruntled former student returned and shot up a bunch of kids? Was this a crisis? It wouldn’t have occurred to Kate to call it that. Godawful. Horrific. Heart-squeezingly, throat-achingly, stomach-churningly sad. But a crisis ?
    Kate was pitched headlong into funeral planning. In a fug of grief, she began to pack a suitcase. As she packed, Kate considered the word “crisis” again. One of her more optimistic employers, in an effort to bring Kate into the corporate fold, had once sent her for management training. The keynote speaker was all about Crisis (this was the eighties). The word “crisis,” he said, came from a Chinese character meaning “ opportunity riding on the wings — or was it winds ? — of a storm .” Bullshit, most likely. But it won over the crowd. True or not, it certainly made a person feel better.
    Maybe that’s what this detestable news was — opportunity evilly disguised. Within five days, Kate had packed up her apartment, rented a Drive-Away and — despite her friend Gladys’s wry observations, dark warnings, and, finally, bald entreaties — moved back across the country into her parents’ house.

    From the highway, Kate planned her entrance to a driveway that hadn’t seen a shovel in some time. She signalled and began braking. The Impala shuddered mightily as Kate slowed enough to turn but not so hard as to be rear-ended by the semi looming in her rear-view. At the last possible second, she turned the wheel and plunged through the bumper-high drift into a shadowy indentation in the whiteness she could only hope would yield. Whew, close! The logging truck flew by, horn blaring.
    Opening her door proved a challenge, as the snowbank, stiffened by numerous passages of the county’s ploughs, held its own. Kate wiggled the Christmas table display out of the car and post-holed through the snow to the front door. There she waited, and waited, her bouquet-decked hand growing numb. Finally, she heard the tremulous sound of a latch, and, oh God, if it wasn’t old man Marcotte who opened up. Since when had the Marcottes moved out here? And now it came to her that this was the old shop , Marcotte Antique & Fine Upholstery. Everyone knew the place. You couldn’t miss it: An old rocking chair hung up on a high pole — it looked like a gallows — right next to the highway. Kate used to wonder whether big trucks clipped it as they passed.
    Kate and her mom hadn’t gone to the “shop on the highway”