“In my case, I didn’t know until I got to the airport to pick them up,” Joe said. “They’d been to Virginia to visit Michelle’s folks, and then three days in New York so the girls could meet their Aunt Delia for the first time. I arrived early, of course, and first thing when I went into the terminal, I checked the monitors to see if their flight was on time. It was still shown as on time, but when I went up to the gate where it was supposed to arrive, airline personnel were greeting people as they approached the area, talking to them in low voices, leading some of them away to a private lounge. This young man came up to me, and before he opened his mouth, I knew what he was going to say. I wouldn’t let him talk. I said, ‘No, don’t say it, don’t you dare say it.’ When he tried to speak anyway, I turned away from him, and when he put a hand on my arm, I knocked it off. I might have punched him to keep him from talking, except by then there were three of them, him and two women, around me, close around me. It was as if I didn’t want to be told because being told was what made it real, that it wouldn’t be real, you know, wouldn’t actually have happened, if they didn’t say it.”
They were all silent, listening to the remembered voices of last year, the voices of strangers with terrible news.
“Mom took it so hard for a long time,” Clarise said at last, speaking of her mother-in-law as fondly as if Nora had been her own mother. “She was only fifty-three, but she really didn’t want to go on without Tom. They were—”
“—so close,” Bob finished. “But then last week when we came to visit, she was way up, so much better. She’d been so bitter, depressed and bitter, but now she was full of life again. She’d always been cheerful before the crash, a real—”
“-—people person, so outgoing,” Clarise continued for him, as if their thoughts ran always on precisely the same track. “And suddenly here again last week was the woman we’d always known and missed for the past year.”
Dread washed through Joe when he realized they were speaking of Nora Vadance as one speaks of the dead. “What’s happened?”
From a pocket of her khaki shorts, Clarise had taken a Kleenex. She was blotting her eyes. “Last week she said she knew now that Tom wasn’t gone forever, that no one was ever gone forever. She seemed so happy. She was—”
“—radiant,” Bob said, taking his wife’s hand in his. “Joe, we don’t know why really, with the depression gone and her being so full of plans for the first time in a year… but four days ago, my mom she committed suicide.”
The funeral had been held the previous day. Bob and Clarise didn’t live here. They were staying only through Tuesday, packing Nora’s clothes and personal effects for distribution to relatives and the Salvation Army Thrift Shop.
“It’s so hard,” Clarise said, unrolling and then rerolling the right sleeve on her white shirt as she talked. “She was such a sweet person.”
“I shouldn’t be here right now,” Joe said, getting up from the armchair. “This isn’t a good time.”
Rising quickly, extending one hand almost pleadingly, Bob Vadance said, “No, please, sit down. Please. We need a break from the sorting… the packing. Talking to you… well…”
He shrugged. He was all long arms and legs, graceful before but not now. “We all know what it’s like. It’s easier because—”
“—because we all know what it’s like,” Clarise finished.
After a hesitation, Joe sat in the armchair again. “I only have a few questions… and maybe only your mother could’ve answered them.”
Having readjusted her right sleeve, Clarise unrolled and then rerolled the left. She needed to be doing something while she talked. Maybe she was afraid that her unoccupied hands would encourage her to express the grief that she was striving to control
—perhaps by covering her face, by twisting and pulling her hair, or by curling into fists and striking something. “Joe… this heat would you like something cold to drink?”