She Loves Me Not Read Free Page B

can’t quite grasp the finality of it.
    They had a conversation about death the year before, when Rose was so sick. She told Sam that if anything happened to her, she wanted to be cremated. Sam shuddered.
    â€œDon’t ever do that to me, babe, he said. When I die, I don’t want to be shoved into an oven and burned. I want an open casket like my grandparents had, so that everyone can take one last look and give my hand a little good-bye pat before they stick me in the ground.”
    That didn’t happen. He wasn’t cremated, but the burn marks on his face were so bad that the mortician advised a closed casket. She never got to touch his hand and wish him a safe journey.
    It’s all a blessed blur to her now, and was even as it unfolded. The crowded wake. The funeral at Blessed Trinity, where Sam was once an altar boy. The stirring eulogy by his oldest friend, Scott Hitchcock, who said Sam was the main reason he had moved back to eastern Long Island only a few months earlier, and who vowed to watch over his family. The burial, beneath a weeping gray sky, in the cemetery across town.
    Rose hasn’t visited his grave since last Father’s Day, when she brought the children. The experience frightened them, and it saddened her.
    She didn’t feel Sam’s presence there, anyway. She doesn’t feel it anywhere, except in her heart. A heart that spent three decades beating in another woman’s chest before finding a permanent home within Rose—only to be broken.
    T he pipes groan as Leslie Larrabee turns on the tap at the kitchen sink, but at least they aren’t frozen. The first spurts of water are rusty brown. She leaves it to run, then walks through the chilly, eerily empty rooms to do the same thing in the hall bathroom, between the bedrooms that once belonged to her and to Sam.
    As she runs water in the unfashionable gold porcelain tub, Leslie can almost hear her brother’s fist banging on the door, and his newly masculine adolescent voice calling, “You’re not going to take another one of those two-hour baths, are you Les? Because I’m late for practice . . .”
    Oh, Sam. What I wouldn’t give to go back in time and see you again . . .
    She sighs and leaves the bathroom behind, the tub and the sink running freely. Dad said to open the taps for at least five minutes a day in cold weather. Mom, perpetually on the other extension during their twice-weekly long-distance phone calls, promptly told Leslie not to worry about it.
    â€œShe has other things to do, Doug,” she scolded her husband. “She’s working full-time at the gym now, and she’s planning a wedding. She doesn’t have time to go running over to the house to turn faucets on and off all winter.”
    â€œIt’s no problem, Mom, really. I don’t mind,” Leslie lied.
    The truth is, she does mind. It isn’t easy to return to the deserted ranch house, with its haunting memories and its unfamiliar scent of abandonment. She wouldn’t tell her father, but there are cold days when she skips the visits altogether.
    Today, she couldn’t do that. She had to shovel the walks and the small rectangle of driveway in front of the attached garage, to make it look as though somebody were home when nobody has lived here in well over a year.
    She wanders back to the living room, which is just the way they left it, complete with framed family photos on every spare inch of wall and table. There are Olan Mills baby pictures and yearly school portraits from Leslie and Sam’s childhoods culminating in graduation caps and gowns, and a number of formal photographs from Sam and Rose’s wedding. And of course, there are countless photos of Leo and Jenna, the cherished grandchildren. But none are more recent than the ones taken two summers ago—the last summer her parents spent at home.
    Before that they spent only winters in Florida, ever since the year Sam