Frank said. The Arlens had come from Massachusetts, and I could still hear Malden in Frank’s voice — caught was coowat, car was cah, call was caul. ‘If the same guy is trying to sell a grieving husband a three-thousand-dollar casket for forty-five hundred dollars, they call it business and ask him to speak at the Rotary Club luncheon. Greedy asshole, I fed him his lunch, didn’t I?’
‘Yes. You did.’
‘You okay, Mikey?’
‘I’m okay.’
‘Sincerely okay?’
‘How the fuck should I know?’ I asked him, loud enough to turn some heads in a nearby booth.
And then: ‘She was pregnant.’
His face grew very still. ‘ What? ‘
I struggled to keep my voice down. ‘Pregnant. Six or seven weeks, according to the . . . you know, the autopsy. Did you know? Did she tell you?’
‘No! Christ, no!’ But there was a funny look on his face, as if she had told him something. ‘I knew you were trying, of course . . . she said you had a low sperm count and it might take a little while, but the doctor thought you guys’d probably . . . sooner or later you’d probably . . . ‘ He trailed off, looking down at his hands. ‘They can tell that, huh? They check for that?’
‘They can tell. As for checking, I don’t know if they do it automatically or not. I asked.’
‘Why?’
‘She didn’t just buy sinus medicine before she died. She also bought one of those home pregnancy-testing kits.’
‘You had no idea? No clue?’
I shook my head. He reached across the table and squeezed my shoulder. ‘She wanted to be sure, that’s all. You know that, don’t you?’
A refill on my sinus medicine and a piece of fish, she’d said. Looking like always. A woman off to run a couple of errands. We had been trying to have a kid for eight years, but she had looked just like always.
‘Sure,’ I said, patting Frank’s hand. ‘Sure, big guy. I know.’
It was the Arlens — led by Frank who handled Johanna’s send off. As the writer of the family, I was assigned the obituary. My brother came up from Virginia with my mom and my aunt and was allowed to tend the guest-book at the viewings. My mother — almost completely ga-ga at the age of sixty-six, although the doctors refused to call it Alzheimer’s — lived in Memphis with her sister, two years younger and only slightly less wonky. They were in charge of cutting the cake and the pies at the funeral reception.
Everything else was arranged by the Arlens, from the viewing hours to the components of the funeral ceremony. Frank and Victor, the second-youngest brother, spoke brief tributes. Jo’s dad offered a prayer for his daughter’s soul. And at the end, Pete Breedlove, the boy who cut our grass in the summer and raked our yard in the fall, brought everyone to tears by singing ‘Blessed Assurance,’ which Frank said had been Jo’s favorite hymn as a girl. How Frank found Pete and persuaded him to sing at the funeral is something I never found out.
We got through it — the afternoon and evening viewings on Tuesday, the funeral service on Wednesday morning, then the little pray-over at Fairlawn Cemetery. What I remember most was thinking how hot it was, how lost I felt without having Jo to talk to, and that I wished I had bought a new pair of shoes. Jo would have pestered me to death about the ones I was wearing, if she had been there.
Later on I talked to my brother, Sid, told him we had to do something about our mother and Aunt Francine before the two of them disappeared completely into the Twilight Zone. They were too young for a nursing home; what did Sid advise?
He advised something, but I’ll be damned if I know what it was. I agreed to it, I remember that, but not what it was. Later that day, Siddy, our mom, and our aunt climbed back into Siddy’s rental car for the drive to Boston, where they would spend the night and then grab the Southern Crescent
the following day. My brother is happy enough to chaperone the old folks, but he doesn’t fly, even if the tickets are on me. He claims there are no breakdown lanes in the sky if the engine quits.
Most of the Arlens left the next day. Once more it was dog-hot, the sun glaring out of a white-haze sky and lying on everything like melted brass. They stood in front of our house — which had become solely my house’ by then — with three taxis lined up at the curb behind them, big galoots hugging one another amid the litter of tote-bags and saying their goodbyes in those foggy Massachusetts accents.
Frank stayed another day. We picked a big bunch of flowers behind the house — not those ghastly-smelling hothouse things whose aroma I always associate with death and organ-music but real flowers, the kind Jo liked best — and stuck them in a couple of coffee cans I found in the back pantry. We went out to Fairlawn and put them on the new grave. Then we just sat there for awhile under the beating sun.
‘She was always just the sweetest thing in my life,’ Frank said at last in a strange, muffled voice.
‘We took care of Jo when we were kids. Us guys. No one messed with Jo, I’ll tell you. Anyone tried, we’d feed em their lunch.’
‘She told me a lot of stories.’
‘Good ones?’
‘Yeah, real good.’
‘I’m going to miss her so much.’
‘Me, too,’ I said. ‘Frank . . . listen . . . I know you were her favorite brother. She never called you, maybe just to say that she missed a period or was feeling whoopsy in the morning? You can tell me. I won’t be pissed.’
‘But she didn’t. Honest to God. Was she whoopsy in the morning?’
‘Not that I saw.’ And that was just it. I hadn’t seen anything. Of course I’d been writing, and when I write I pretty much trance out. But she knew where I went in those trances. She could have found me and shaken me fully awake. Why hadn’t she? Why would she hide good news? Not wanting to tell me until she was sure was plausible . . . but it somehow wasn’t Jo.
‘Was it a boy or a girl?’ he asked.
‘A girl.’
We’d had names picked out and waiting for most of our marriage. A boy would have been Andrew. Our daughter would have been Kia. Kia Jane Noonan.
Frank, divorced six years and on his own, had been staying with me. On our way back to the house he said, ‘I worry about you, Mikey. You haven’t got much family to fall back on at a time like this, and what you do have is far away.’
‘I’ll be all right,’ I said. He nodded.
‘That’s what we say, anyway, isn’t it?’
‘We?’
‘Guys. I’ll be all right.’
And if we’re not, we try to make sure no one knows it.’ He looked at me, eyes still leaking, handkerchief in one big sunburned hand. ‘If you’re not all right, Mikey, and you don’t want to call your brother — I saw the way you looked at him — let me be your brother. For Jo’s sake if not your own.’
‘Okay,’ I said, respecting and appreciating the offer, also knowing I would do no such thing. I don’t call people for help. It’s not because of the way I was raised, at least I don’t think so; it’s the way I was made. Johanna once said that if I was drowning at Dark Score Lake, where we have a
summer home, I would die silently fifty feet out from the public beach rather than yell for help. It’s not a question of love or affection. I can give those and I can take them. I feel pain like anyone else.
I need to touch and be touched. But if someone asks me, ‘Are you all right?’ I can’t answer no. I can’t say help me.
A couple of hours later Frank left for the southern end of the state. When he opened the car door, I was touched to see that the taped book he was listening to was one of mine. He hugged me, then surprised me with a kiss on the mouth, a good hard smack. ‘If you need to talk, call,’ he said. ‘And if you need to be with someone, just come.’
I nodded.
‘And be careful.’
That startled me. The combination of heat and grief had made me feel as if I had been living in a dream for the last few days, but that got through.
‘Careful of what?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know, Mikey.’ Then he got into his car — he was so big and it was so little that he looked as if he were wearing it — and drove away. The sun was going down by then. Do you know how the sun looks at the end of a hot day in August, all orange and somehow squashed, as if an invisible hand were pushing down on the top of it and at any moment it might just pop like an overfilled mosquito and splatter all over the horizon? It was like that. In the east, where it was already dark, thunder was rumbling. But there was no rain that night, only a dark that came down as thick and stifling as a blanket. All the same, I slipped in front of the word processor and wrote for an hour or so. It went pretty well, as I remember. And you know, even when it doesn’t, it passes the time.