Shaking out the Dead Read Free Page B

what Lee would do with Margaret’s things — her clothes and her saved mementos. Though there would be no raffling of Margaret’s belongings, at least one item should have been. Rachael. Tatum suspected that Margaret would have been more comforted by a raffle to the general public than her husband’s decision.
    By the time she emerged from the den, the mourners had dispersed, leaving crumpled napkins and glasses of melting ice. Tatum collected some glasses and dropped them off on the kitchen counter. Margaret’s friends filled Tupperware and washed the dishes brought full of microwaveable comfort to swallow and digest along with the immutable facts. Tatum couldn’t detect an opening in the kitchen’s traffic pattern, a way to jump in with dishtowel or sponge, so she said good night.
    Tatum stepped out the front door and looked at the sky. Reluctant reds and golds crushed down into the horizon. It was her time. Vincent always knew that dusk was her moment and would put his arm around her as she gravitated to the window, the porch, wherever she had to go to witness, to see the cars opening their eyes, waking to their true and secret selves. The stars emerging, twinkling with sly. Vincent told her on one of the first nights they were together that she was born with a broken heart, and she believed he knew her for that one line.
    What was it? Six months? A year? Before his tenderness turned to a sigh and an exasperated, “Lighten up.”
    Alas, love is not unconditional. Like all living things, it thrives when conditions are right, withers in a drought or if it is cut off from light.
    Tatum sat on the concrete step and looked out at a strip of deep purple squeezed between the darkening sky and horizon. Sunset on the day of Margaret’s funeral. Tatum’s stomach turned.Sick with grief, she thought, though her eyes stayed dry.
    Death. Tragic and unfathomable. Yet, Tatum found in it something satisfying. It was, in many ways, a relief. In every other part of our lives we have options. We make choices, and we get second chances, opportunities to correct choices poorly made. We lose things but know there’s the remote possibility of getting them back, finding them in a forgotten drawer or pocket, of seeing them at an airport in Denver or Salt Lake. But not when someone is dead. Dead is done. That person is gone. Nothing you do, no corrective actions or changes of mind or personal transformations will alter that fact. It is final. Something where the only option is to let it be.

3
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    Paris arrived at Tatum and Geneva’s duplex and turned the key in the lock of the front door. Inside, there were two more doors, Tatum’s on the right, Geneva’s on the left. The old brick building was worn but not dilapidated. The crown molding in the hall was dark and heavy; the baseboard, faded and scratched. The hardwood floors were unrestored but far from shabby. There was nothing new and nothing flimsy about any of it.
    He tended to his chores at Geneva’s first, buying time to see if he could concoct a reason for entering Tatum’s apartment, even if just for a second, to breathe in its scent, which was the scent of Tatum. But in fact, it was hardly a smell at all. It was more like the promise of one, or one just missed. Something fresh and wet.
    But there would be no reason to enter. Last time he had the key, he had snooped through Tatum’s things, all the while skin prickling with the electricity of doing wrong and feeling watched. But God wasn’t watching Paris from an unseen place. Paris was watching Tatum. He opened bedroom drawers to untidy piles of clothing. He didn’t rifle, but he touched. At her nightstand drawer, he let his fingers shuffle past the flashlight, broken necklace, and Canadian money to the file folder. He lifted a corner of it and, upon seeing the black-and-white photo within, withdrew the folder from the drawer. The picture inside was of Tatum