The Straw Men Read Free Page A

known immediately it would be something like that, I suppose. If it hadn’t involved both of them then it wouldn’t be Mary on the phone. But even now, as I stood with her in the graveyard looking down upon their coffins, I was unable to credit a sentence framing their death with its full weight. I also could not now return the call that my mother had left on my machine, a week previously. I just hadn’t got round to it. I hadn’t expected them to be erased from the surface of the earth without warning, and put below it, down where they couldn’t hear me.
    Abruptly I realized that I didn’t want to be standing near their bodies anymore. I took a step back from the graves. Mary dug in the pocket of her coat and brought out something attached to a small cardboard label. A set of keys.
    “I put out the trash this morning,” she said, “and took a few things out of the refrigerator. Milk and such. Don’t want them smelling it up. Everything else I just left.”
    I nodded, staring at the keys. I didn’t have any of my own. No need. They’d been in, on the few occasions I’d visited. I realized that this was the first time I’d ever seen Mary somewhere other than my parents’ kitchen or living room. It was like that with my folks. You went to their house, not the other way around. They tended to form a center. Had tended to.
    “They spoke of you, you know. Often.”
    I nodded again, though I wasn’t sure I believed her. For much of the last decade my parents hadn’t even known where I was, and anything they had to say concerned a younger man, an only child who’d once grown up andlived with them in a different state. It wasn’t that we hadn’t loved each other. We had, in our ways. I just hadn’t given them much to talk about, had checked none of the boxes that make parents prone to brag to friends and neighbors. No wife, no kids, no job to speak of. I realized Mary was still holding her hand out, and I took the keys from her.
    “How long will you stay?” she asked.
    “It depends how long things take. Maybe a week. Possibly less.”
    “You know where I am,” she said. “You don’t have to be a stranger, just because.”
    “I won’t,” I said quickly, smiling awkwardly. I wished I had a sibling who could have been having this conversation for me. Someone responsible and socially skilled.
    She smiled back, but distantly, as if she already knew this was not the way things worked.
    “You’ll be going soon, I expect,” she said, and then set off up the slope. At seventy she was a little older than my parents, and walked awkwardly. She was a lifelong Dyersburg resident, an ex-nurse, and more than that I didn’t know.
    I saw that Davids was standing by his car on the other side of the cemetery, killing time with his assistant but evidently waiting for me. He had the air of someone ready and willing to be brisk and efficient, to tidy loose ends.
    I glanced back once more at the graves, and then walked heavily down the path to face the administrative tasks created by the loss of my entire family.
     
    DAVIDS HAD BROUGHT MOST of the paperwork in his car, and took me to lunch to deal with it. I don’t know whether this ended up being any less unpleasant than doing it in his office would have been, but I appreciated the courtesy from a man who knew me barely at all. We ate in historic downtown Dyersburg, at a place called Auntie’sPantry. The interior had been designed to resemble a multilevel log cabin, the furniture hand-hewn by elves. The menu offered a variety of organic soups and homemade breads, accompanied by salads largely predicated upon bean sprouts.
    About the same age as my parents, tall and gaunt with a good-sized beak, Davids looks like the guy God calls on when he really wants Hell to rain down. He opened his briefcase and drew out a lot of documents, laid them out in front of him in a businesslike way, picked up the menu, and started to read it. Davids was my parents’ attorney, and had