Sweet Life Read Free Page B

again, the girl distance had kept him from knowing. At her wedding he’d thought her too young to be a bride and now too young to be a widow, although she’d managed to make herself look matronly the way she’d clipped her hair to the top of her head.
    Michael appeared at Johnny’s elbow and in a low voice reminded him it was time to leave for the airport. When Johnny hugged Angie in good-bye, she forgot to ask if he would take her with him; after he disappeared up the stairs, she forgot he’d been there.
    Bernice was busy filling Angie’s plate with a suitable assortment of nourishing food. Her dark dress accentuated her hourglass figure and, even with her face mottled from weeping, she still managed to look alluring.
    Sexual attraction had not been the reason Bert proposed to Angie. A rigid believer in forthrightness, he made it clear that he didn’t want a wife who attracted other men. “You have other, more valuable attributes.” It took several years for her to realize he’d been talking about her sexual naivety.
    Mrs. Warner, an elderly widow, compressed her lips and doggedly threaded her way through the mourners toward Angie, who rushed up the stairs to the vestibule where the coats hung on wire hangers. A man in black lurking by the exit hurried to take her teacup, helped her into her coat and opened the door.
    She stepped into a dull drizzle, snapped open her umbrella. A spurt of energy enabled her to walk briskly, determined to reach home before Bernice commandeered someone’s car and began searching for her. Meddlesome, tiresome Bernice couldn’t understand how there was a limit to her usefulness.
    Angie strode along the wet pavement between two stands of firs and didn’t notice the rain had stopped until a blue, Stellar Jay swooped across her path.
    “Life goes on,” Mrs. Warner had told her at the graveside.
    What was it about her life with Bert that could survive?
    She hurried along the gravel drive leading from the paved road to her house, passed the double garage standing on its own and facing the road. Inside the house she dropped her wet things, took an open bottle of Bert’s favourite Scotch from the cabinet and filled a glass halfway.
    Upstairs, she yanked the dress from her shoulders and heaved it across the bedroom. She slid into a cotton nightgown, dropped onto one of two straight-backed chairs and raised the glass to the wedding photo on the dresser.
    “Here’s to you, Bert.”
    The drink tasted like gasoline, but she kept sipping at it. She was asleep when the phone rang. She listened to the answering machine pick up, and then lurched across the room in time to interrupt it. “Bernice I’m going to bed.”
    And she did collapse, struggling to haul the duvet over her shoulders. The phone rang again, a muffled sound travelling through water. Angie slept through the night.
    ~

    Next morning Bernice arrived early, armed not only with leftovers from the reception, but a stoic resolve to steer Angie through the roily waters of grief. Bernice found her sitting on the back patio with a crocheting magazine and a pot of tea.
    In a voice Bernice later described to Michael as sounding nothing like her sister’s, Angie stated she had no time for visits, she was starting the to-do list Bert left her.
    Item #1: Wash or dry-clean each item of clothing but not my underwear, which you will throw out.
    It took a week before Angie finished fitting polo shirts, buttoned cardigans, pleated slacks and brown loafers into several cartons. These she stacked inside Bert’s SUV and dropped off at the Sally Ann. She’d dealt with Item #3 when she mailed Bert’s gold watch and tie pins to Johnny.
    Next, she packed the books in the living room, beginning with the six-volume set of A History of the English Speaking People. She fanned through the volumes first, not to look for hidden money, but because she’d a vague notion Bert could’ve left something between the pages, a few words meant only for