The Funnies Read Free

you’re wearing?”
    â€œIt’s the best I’ve got.”
    â€œJesus, Tim.” His face was puffy and his eyes red, and I felt more shame at my own lack of evident grief than I did about my mussed blue suit. Bobby’s suit was black, and crisp as crackers. I was sure he had more where that came from.
    He plucked a hanky from his breast pocket, wiped his hands on it and folded it with one hand back into the pocket. “Where’s that mechanic?” I followed him to the office, which Mr. Mustache now presided impassively over.
    â€œHe threw a rod,” Bobby told him.
    Mustache nodded.
    â€œWe have to attend a funeral. He’ll be back later.” He jabbed his thumb at me.
    â€œClosing at five.”
    Bobby wrote something on the back of a business card. “Here’s the number we’ll be at. Contact us when you’ve looked at the car.”
    Mustache took the card and, without a glance, secreted it in his coveralls.
    â€œAll right, then,” Bobby said, and pushed open the door.
    Outside he inhaled a giant lungful of coppery air. It rose off the asphalt lot in hot waves, creasing the cars and buildings behind it. “You have to be firm with these kind of people,” he said.

    * * *
    It was my brother’s habit to get a new car every three years. The one we were in was a brand-new luxury sedan with real leather and wood all over everything, and air conditioning. I hadn’t been in a car with working air conditioning in a long, long time, and in the absence of things to talk about I took a lot of deep, theatrical breaths, enjoying the cool. Bobby kept his eyes on the road. He looked almost exactly like our father—square-faced, tan, smooth-skinned—though there was something soft about him, something gentle and resigned, that didn’t come from Dad. Oddly, though, he lacked any of our mother’s wariness, her sharpness of eye. He would be thirty-six in August, a strange month for a birthday.
    â€œHow’s Mom?” I said.
    He spared me a glance. “What do you think, Tim? She’s a mess.”
    â€œWorse than before?”
    â€œI’d say so,” he said.
    Big, heavy branches passed low over us. I thought about my mother, on her birthday months before: alone in her room watching television, a big cache of cheap, cheerful presents crowded onto the bureau. Hair rollers, a hand mirror, dried fruit. Things the staff could afford. I stayed a good hour and never encountered my siblings, although, in their defense, it was a weekday afternoon. I said quietly, “So where’s the burial?”
    â€œBurial?”
    â€œDad’s. Where are they burying him?”
    â€œThey’re cremating him.”
    Cremating! “Really?”
    â€œIt’s what he wanted.” His expression was forthright and strained, like an expert witness’s.
    â€œI didn’t know that,” I said.
    â€œNow you do.”
    Bobby owned a medical waste treatment plant, the largest in central Jersey. Hospitals sent him their garbage—everything from latex gloves and syringes to amputated arms and legs—and he decontaminated them using a secret process developed by his partner, a college buddy of his. I guessed that this was no simple marriage of convenience for my brother; he had long been compulsively sanitary. When we were kids, he was always tying his food waste up in plastic bread bags before throwing it out. The sight of garbage dumps and cemeteries tightened him up like a golf ball, an inconvenient affliction if you live in New Jersey. For this reason, his claim about my father’s wishes seemed suspect. I couldn’t imagine my father considering his own death at all, let alone the disposal of his remains. I changed the subject.
    â€œHow’s business?” I said.
    He turned and scowled at me. “That’s sick.”
    â€œWhat!”
    â€œFirst we’re talking about Dad, and then all of a sudden