The Cousins Read Free Page A

a Scandinavian person speaking in some foreign accent. Most deaf people Olivia had seen had very expressive faces to enhance their communication, but Taylor always had a look of forced calm, except when she was talking to Grady. She had learned to wear a mask—they both had.
    “I love you, Grandma,” Taylor said. “You took care of us, you were always there. I will miss you very much. I love you.” She sat down. Her husband, Tim, leaned over and touched his cheek to hers.
    It was over. Short and simple. Outside, the cousins hugged hard.
    On the way to find the limousines Olivia saw a woman who looked familiar, but she couldn’t remember who she was. She was a large woman with gray-streaked fair hair and a face wrinkled and puffy from years of obvious dissipation. There were faint signs that she had once been very pretty, and Olivia tried to picture her as she had been in the past; it was annoying not to know, some memory nagged at her. The woman was hanging back diffidently, being ignored. It was as if she knew no one liked her, that they were annoyed that she was there.
    Then suddenly she knew. It was Earlene—Big Earl, as Grady called her behind her back, Grady and Taylor’s mother. Stan’s widow. Aunt Julia’s daughter-in-law. Olivia had heard that she was living in Santa Fe now, but no one ever saw her but Grady and Taylor, and they as infrequently as possible. Olivia didn’t know why Earlene had made the long trip, since she didn’t seem to even much like Julia.
    When they all finished piling into the limousines to go to the cemetery, Earlene had disappeared.
    * * *
    Olivia had not been to the family’s cemetery in years, in fact none of them had, except when they had to bury somebody. It was so far away, in Queens. The family paid for Perpetual Care. When Julia’s coffin had been lowered, Olivia wandered around, looking at the weathered gravestones that belonged to their clan. She supposed there was a space for her somewhere if she wanted it. She turned around to see that her cousin Melissa had detached herself from the others and was now walking with her.
    In every family there is the Pretty One—in theirs it had been Olivia, and later Melissa. When Melissa was growing up she looked uncannily like Olivia, but now that she was grown they looked quite different, although Melissa was still a beauty. She was very thin, nervous, intense; she never ate. She was now Melissa Ardon, a well-dressed suburban Houston, Texas, wife and mother of three young children; she was very sweet, and she would never be caught in a bathmat coat with Mickey Mouse on it.
    “How do you feel having your parents buried in two separate cemeteries?” Melissa asked sympathetically. “It must be strange.”
    “It’s awful,” Olivia said. She remembered how she had hated leaving her father in that big empty plot all by himself. “But it was what Grace wanted. She said since it was a second marriage for both of them, neither of them could be buried with their first spouse; they had to get a new place. She said it was a religious law.”
    “What law?”
    “I don’t know. I can’t decide if I want to be buried with my mother or my father, so I’d rather be cremated and have my ashes scattered in the ocean.”
    “Maybe you’ll get married again.”
    “I doubt it.”
    “Well,” Melissa said cheerfully, “you’ve been with Roger longer than with either of your husbands.”
    “Longer than the total of the two of them,” Olivia said. “I think that was the point of our arrangement.”
    They walked on in companionable silence. Her mother had died of cancer when her father was already quite old, and when he had remarried people were at first surprised. Her mother had spent the final years of her illness teaching her father how to make his own meals, and it had never occurred to her that when she was gone he would prefer to find a younger woman to dine out in restaurants with him. Grace immediately got rid of all the furniture