“In some ways,” she should tell him, “my memory’s better now than it was when I was young. The most surprising details suddenly show up again! Tiny things, infinitesimal things. The other day I all at once recalled the exact turn of the wrist that I used to give the handle of the CorningWare saucepan I got for a wedding present. I got a whole set of CorningWare with one interchangeable handle that you twisted to lock into place. That was almost fifty years ago! I used those for only a little while; they kept scorching things on the bottom. Who else could remember that?”
She might suddenly smell again the bitter, harsh, soul-dampening fumes of the chopped onions and green peppers her mother fried up most evenings as the base for her skillet dinners, back when Abby was a toddler whining with hunger and tiredness and just general five p.m. blues. She might hear the long-ago humming in the wires that the number 29 streetcar made when it sped down Roland Avenue without having to stop. And out of nowhere she pictured her childhood dog, Binky, who used to sleep with both paws folded over his nose to keep himself warm on cold nights. It was exactly like a time trip. She was bobbing along in a time machine gazing out the window at one scene after another in no particular order. At one story after another. Oh, there’d been so many stories in her life! The Whitshanks claimed to have only two; she couldn’t imagine why. Why select just a certain few stories to define yourself? Abby had a wealth of them.
For years, she had been in mourning for the way she had let her life slip through her fingers. Given another chance, she’d told herself, she would take more care to experience it. But lately, she was finding that she had experienced it after all and just forgotten, and now it was returning to her.
What street was this? She hadn’t been paying attention.
She stopped at the curb and gazed around her, and Clarence sat down on his haunches. To her left was the Hutchinsons’ house, with that beautiful huge magnolia tree that always seemed freshly enameled. She was surprised that she had walked this far; she’d thought Clarence would have protested by now. She made a clucking sound and he rose with a groan, the weight of the world on his shoulders, his head sagging so that it nearly touched the ground. “We’ll take you home,” she told him, “and you can have a nice long nap.”
Just then, though—how could this happen?—a little mosquito of a chihuahua minced past on the sidewalk across the street. No owner anywhere to be seen, and no leash and not even a collar. Clarence sprang up instantaneously, as if his weariness had all been for show, and with a startlingly loud roar he leapt forward, yanking the leash from Abby’s hand. Somehow she had time to see his entire life streaming by: his soft, pudgy belly and giant paws when he was a pup, his old fondness for playing fetch with tennis balls gone soppy with spit, his pure, delirious joy when the children used to come home from school. “Clarence!” she shrieked, but he paid no attention, so she tore after him into the street, while something she couldn’t quite place—something huge and sleek and metallic that she hadn’t been expecting—came speeding toward her.
“Oh!” she thought. “Why, this must be—”
And then no more.
7
WHITSHANKS DIDN’T DIE, was the family’s general belief. Of course they never said this aloud. It would have seemed presumptuous. Not to mention that some non-Whitshank would have been sure to point out that after all, Junior and Linnie had died. But that had been so long ago; Red was the only one left alive with any firsthand memory of it. (Nobody counted Merrick.) And Red was not himself right now. He was just a shell of himself. He walked around in his slippers, unshaven, with a vacant look in his eyes. For one whole day it appeared that he had lost his powers of speech, till it was discovered that he’d once again neglected to put his hearing aids in.
Abby died on a Tuesday, and on Wednesday she was cremated as she had always said she wanted to be; but the funeral wouldn’t be held until the following Monday. This was so they could collect themselves and figure out what a funeral entailed, exactly. None of them had had any experience with such things except for Nora, and she came from such a different background that she really couldn’t be much help.
Putting the funeral off for so long might have been a mistake, though, because it meant they were all suspended in a kind of limbo. They hung around the house drinking coffee, answering the telephone, sighing, bickering, accepting covered dishes from the neighbors, trading comical Abby stories that somehow made them end up crying instead of laughing. Both of the Hughs were there, because their wives required support. Stem fielded the occasional work-related call on his cell phone, but Red didn’t even bother asking what the issue was. The grandchildren went to school as usual but gathered at the house in the afternoons, looking awed and stricken, while little Sammy, stuck at home all day with the grown-ups, seemed to be going slightly crazy. He gave up using his potty—an iffy business in the best of times—and started throwing spectacular tantrums. When Nora asked him, in a too-calm voice, what was troubling him, he said he wanted Clarence. This made everyone stir uneasily. “Brenda, you mean,” Nora told him. “Brenda has gone to be with Jesus.”
“I want him to come back from Jesus.”