“My only fear is, she’s requested ‘Amazing Grace.’ ”
“I like ‘Amazing Grace,’ ” Stem said mildly.
“So did I, till it got to be a cliché.”
“It’s not a cliché to me.”
Amanda raised her eyes to the ceiling.
At lunchtime they just foraged in the fridge instead of cooking. “I can’t find a thing in here but casseroles,” Denny complained, and Amanda said, “Isn’t it interesting: people never seem to bring liquor when somebody dies, have you noticed? Why not a case of beer? Or a bottle of really good wine? Just these everlasting casseroles, and who eats casseroles nowadays?”
“I eat casseroles,” Nora told her. “I serve them several times a week.”
Amanda sent Denny a guilty glance and said no more.
“I was thinking when I woke up this morning about the next-door people,” Jeannie said musingly. “The people at the beach. They’ll tell each other next summer, they’ll say, ‘Oh, look at that! They don’t have their mother anymore!’ ”
“Will we still go to the beach?” Stem wondered.
“Of course we’ll go,” Amanda told him. “Mom would expect us to. It would kill her if we didn’t go!”
There was a silence. Then Jeannie gave a wail and buried her face in her hands.
Nora stood up and walked around the table, Sammy straddling her hip, to stroke Jeannie’s shoulder. Sammy hung out at an angle and gazed down at her with interest. “There, there,” Nora told her. “This will get easier, I promise. God never gives us more than we can handle.”
Jeannie only cried harder.
“Actually, that’s not true,” Denny said in an informative tone of voice. He was leaning back against the fridge with his arms folded.
Nora glanced at him, still smoothing Jeannie’s shoulder.
“He gives people more than they can handle every day of the year,” Denny told her. “Half of the world is walking around just … destroyed, most of the time.”
The others turned to Nora for her reaction, but she didn’t seem to take offense. She just said, “Douglas, could you find Sammy’s juice cup, please?”
Stem rose and left the room. The others stayed as they were. There was something disjointed about all of them, something ragged and out of alignment.
Stem was the one who searched Red’s desk for the funeral instructions, while Red just watched from the couch with his hands resting slack on his knees. It turned out that Abby had taken over his bottom drawer. Her papers filled it to the brim—her poems and journals, letters from needy orphans and old friends, photos of long-ago classmates and her parents and various strangers.
All of these Stem leafed through in a desultory way and then handed over to Red, who took longer with them. The photos alone consumed several minutes. “Why, there’s Sue Ellen Moore!” he said. “I haven’t thought of her in years.” And he gazed lingeringly at a laughing young Abby hanging on to the arm of a sullen boy smoking a cigarette. “I fell for her the first time I saw her,” he told Stem. “Oh, she was always talking about the day she fell for me, I know. ‘It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon,’ she’d say, but that was when she was almost grown, she was grown, whereas I, now … I had been mooning over Abby all along. That’s my friend Dane you see her with there; Dane was the one she liked first.”
A desiccated violet flattened in waxed paper made him first frown in perplexity and then smile, but without saying why, and he spent some time studying a typewritten list of what must have been New Year’s resolutions. “ ‘I will make myself count to ten before I speak to the children in anger,’ ” he read out. “ ‘I will remind myself daily that my mother is getting old and will not be with us forever.’ ” The folder of Abby’s poems, though, he laid aside without a glance, as if fearing he would find them too painful, and he didn’t so much as crack open any of her little black-and-red bound journals.
Some of the items were mystifying. A wrinkled, flattened Hershey’s-bar wrapper; a piece of tree bark in a tiny brown paper bag; a yellowing two-page newsletter from a nursing home in Catonsville. “ ‘Five Tasks for Dying,’ ” Stem read aloud from the newsletter.
“For dieting?”
“Dying.”
“Oh, what’s it say?”
“Nothing to do with a funeral service,” Stem said, passing it over. “Telling people you love them, telling them goodbye …”
“Just—please, God—don’t let her ask for a ‘celebration,’ ” Red said. “I don’t much feel like celebrating just now.” He let the newsletter drop unread onto the couch beside him. Stem didn’t seem to have heard him, though. He was studying a sheet of onionskin covered with blurred typewriting—a carbon copy, obviously; the one and only item in an unmarked manila envelope.
“Found it?” Red asked.
“No, just …”