Fran hadn't been out today, hadn't seen anyone since Gus had come by yesterday afternoon to check on her. She had heard engines a few times this morning, and once the close-together double explosions of a shotgun, but that was all. The steady, unbroken silence added to her sense of unreality.
And now there were these questions to consider. Flies... eyes... pies. Frannie found herself listening to the refrigerator. It had an automatic ice-maker attachment, and every twenty seconds or so there would be a cold thump somewhere inside as it made another cube.
She sat there for almost an hour, her plate before her, the dull, half-questioning expression on her face. Little by little another thought began to surface in her mind - two thoughts, actually, that seemed at once connected and totally unrelated. Were they maybe interlocking parts of a bigger thought? Keeping an ear open for the sound of dropping icecubes inside the refrigerator's icemaking gadget, she examined them. The first thought was that her father was dead; he had died at home, and he might have liked that.
The second thought had to do with the day. It was a beautiful summer's day, flawless, the kind that the tourists came to the Maine seacoast for. You don't come to swim because the water's never really warm enough for that; you come to be knocked out by the day.
The sun was bright and Frannie could read the thermometer outside the back kitchen window. The mercury stood just under 80. It was a beautiful day and her father was dead. Was there any connection, other than the obvious tear-jerky one?
She frowned over it, her eyes confused and apathetic. Her mind circled the problem, then drifted away to think of other things. But it always drifted back.
It was a beautiful warm day and her father was dead.
That brought it home to her all at once and her eyes squeezed shut, as if from a blow.
At the same time her hands jerked involuntarily on the tablecloth, yanking her plate off onto the floor. It shattered like a bomb and Frannie screamed, her hands going to her cheeks, digging furrows there. The wandering, apathetic vagueness disappeared from her eyes, which were suddenly sharp and direct. It was as if she had been slapped hard or had an open bottle of ammonia waved under her nose.
You can't keep a corpse in the house. Not in high summer.
The apathy began to creep back in, blurring the outlines of the thought. The full horror of it began to be obscured, cushioned. She began to listen for the clunk and drop of the icecubes again -
She fought it off. She got up, went to the sink, ran the cold water on full, and then splatted cupped handfuls against her cheeks, shocking her lightly perspiring skin.
She could drift away all she wanted, but first this thing had to be solved. It had to be. She couldn't just let him lie in bed up there as June melted into July. It was too much like that Faulkner story that was in all the college anthologies. "A Rose for Emily." The town fathers hadn't known what that terrible smell was, but after a while it had gone away. It...it...
"No!" she cried out loud to the sunny kitchen. She began to pace, thinking about it. Her first thought was the local funeral home. But who would... would...
"Stop backing away from it!" she shouted furiously into the empty kitchen. "Who's going to bury him?"
And at the sound of her own voice, the answer came. It was perfectly clear. She was, of course. Who else? She was.
It was two-thirty in the afternoon when she heard the car turn into the driveway, its heavy motor purring complacently, low with power. Frannie put the spade down on the edge of the hole - she was digging in the garden, between the tomatoes and the lettuces - and turned around, a little afraid.
The car was a brand-new Cadillac Coupe de Ville, bottle green, and stepping out of it was fat sixteen-year-old Harold Lauder. Frannie felt an instant surge of distaste. She didn't like Harold and didn't know anyone who did, including his late sister Amy. Probably his mother had. But it struck Fran with a tired sort of irony that the only person left in Ogunquit besides herself should be one of the very few people in town she honestly didn't like.
Harold edited the Ogunquit High School literary magazine and wrote strange short stories that were told in the present tense or with the point of view in the second person, or both. You come down the delirious corridor and shoulder your way through the splintered door and look at the racetrack stars - that was Harold's style.