Say Nice Things About Detroit Read Free

met in New York, Trudy Schembler, also German. She said there was plenty of money in Detroit. Lots of Germans also. So we came. I didn’t like New York. I came from a small town. New York was . . . pfft. Crazy. Too many people.”
    â€œAnd you thought Detroit was a small town?” Carolyn asked.
    â€œWhat did I know?”
    Carolyn walked to the counter and poured herself more coffee.
    â€œHow old are you now? Forty-seven?” her mother asked.
    â€œThanks, Mom. Forty-two.”
    â€œYou look good. You’ve taken care of yourself. How’s my grandson?”
    â€œPretty full of himself, actually.”
    â€œWhy don’t you bring him to visit me?”
    â€œMom, why don’t you come to us? I have a job. Marty has a job. Kevin’s in school. We’re three and you’re—” She stopped herself. Oh, God, she thought. She hadn’t seen Dirk and Natalie in over a year, and now she would never see them. She looked at her mother, who was carefully sipping her coffee, her blond hair (dyed now) helter-skelter on her head. You’re alone, Carolyn thought, but she didn’t say it, and that was okay, because her mother was always happy with a little silence. She thought of Kevin and the impossibility of losing him, the horror of losing a child; her mother had lost two and there were simply no words for that. Silence would have to do.
    â€¢ • •
    T HE FUNERAL HAD taken place two days before, Catholic per her mother’s wishes. When Carolyn tried to count the times she’d been to church, other than for weddings and funerals, she couldn’t get to five. At the cemetery the bodies were buried next to each other, beside Arthur. Their mother’s plot was there, too. Very German, Carolyn thought, to have a plan like that right to the end.
    The funeral took place on a warm day, the leaves on the beech and several oaks full and fluttering. Carolyn stood by her mother. It seemed that almost half the crowd was dark-suited men, FBI agents, more men than she would have guessed her brother knew, though she didn’t know Dirk that well; they didn’t have the same father and had never even lived in the same house, didn’t come from the same neighborhood, had only this odd connection of German blood. She reached over and touched her mother’s arm.
    At the end of the service she and her mother threw dirt on the graves. Carolyn felt the finality of it then. The priest held her as she sobbed. It had always been up to her to be the stoic one, the responsible one, though what she’d done was to run as far away from her family as she could get. Now Dirk and Natalie were dead. It felt as if she’d had some hand in it, as if by her absence she had allowed it to happen.
    â€¢ • •
    S HE WAITED TILL almost eleven, then called Marty on his cell, knowing he’d be driving Kevin to camp. It was only eight there, probably cooler than a summer day in Michigan, though it would stay that same lovely temperature for months. It never really got cold. If there was anything she missed about Detroit it was the fall, the special smell the air got as the leaves came alight, then fell. “Football weather,” it was called, a phrase that had no meaning in southern California.
    â€œHey,” Marty said. “How’s it going?”
    â€œGreat,” she said. Marty and Kevin had flown back home for work and camp the day after the funeral. Carolyn planned to stay on—“Ten days or so,” she told Marty—to see her mother through.
    â€œIt couldn’t even be good,” Marty said. He’d warned her she wouldn’t make the week and a half, but then again, he’d never much liked her mother, a sentiment that was returned. “He lacks a deep soul,” her mother had warned her before the marriage, but Carolyn had ignored this, as she did all her mother’s warnings.
    She asked to talk to Kevin.
    â€œHey,