are large and awash with tears that overspill down her cheeks and run all the way to
her ears. “Beep-fucking-beepity-beep.”
She laughs for quite awhile, then dresses and goes downstairs to be with her relatives,
who have come to share their grief with hers. Only they feel apart from her, because
he didn’t call any of them. He called her. For better or worse, he called her.
During the autumn of that year, with the blackened remains of the apartment building
the jet crashed into still closed off from the rest of the world by yellow police tape
(although the taggers have been inside, one leaving a spray-painted message reading
CRISPY CRITTERS STOP HERE), Annie receives the sort of e-blast computer-
addicts like to send to a wide circle of acquaintances. This one comes from Gert
Fisher, the town librarian in Tilton, Vermont. When Annie and James summered there,
Annie used to volunteer at the library, and although the two women never got on
especially well, Gert has included Annie in her quarterly updates ever since. They are
usually not very interesting, but halfway through the weddings, funerals, and 4-H
winners in this one, Annie comes across a bit of news that makes her catch her breath.
Jason McCormack, the son of old Hughie McCormack, was killed in an accident on
Labor Day. He fell from the roof of a summer cottage while cleaning the gutters and
broke his neck.
“He was only doing a favor for his dad, who as you may remember had a stroke the
year before last,” Gert wrote before going on to how it rained on the library’s end-of-
summer lawn sale, and how disappointed they all were.
Gert doesn’t say in her three-page compendium of breaking news, but Annie is quite
sure Jason fell from the roof of what used to be their cottage. In fact, she is positive.
Five years after the death of her husband (and the death of Jason McCormack not long
after), Annie remarries. And although they relocate to Boca Raton, she gets back to
the old neighborhood often. Craig, the new husband, is only semi-retired, and his
business takes him to New York every three or four months. Annie almost always
goes with him, because she still has family in Brooklyn and on Long Island. More
than she knows what to do with, it sometimes seems. But she loves them with that
exasperated affection that seems to belong, she thinks, only to people in their fifties
and sixties. She never forgets how they drew together for her after James’s plane went
down, and made the best cushion for her that they could. So she wouldn’t crash, too.
When she and Craig go back to New York, they fly. About this she never has a qualm,
but she stops going to Zoltan’s Family Bakery on Sundays when she’s home, even
though their raisin bagels are, she is sure, served in heaven’s waiting room. She goes
to Froger’s instead. She is actually there, buying doughnuts (the doughnuts are at least
passable), when she hears the blast. She hears it clearly even though Zoltan’s is eleven
blocks away. LP gas explosion. Four killed, including the woman who always passed
Annie her bagels with the top of the bag rolled down, saying, “Keep it that way until
you get home or you lose the freshness.”
People stand on the sidewalks, looking east toward the sound of the explosion and the
rising smoke, shading their eyes with their hands. Annie hurries past them, not
looking. She doesn’t want to see a plume of rising smoke after a big bang; she thinks
of James enough as it is, especially on the nights when she can’t sleep. When she gets
home she can hear the phone ringing inside. Either everyone has gone down the block
to where the local school is having a sidewalk art sale, or no one can hear that ringing
phone. Except for her, that is. And by the time she gets her key turned in the lock, the
ringing has stopped.
Sarah, the only one of her sisters who never married, is there, it turns out, but there is
no need to ask her why she didn’t answer the phone; Sarah Bernicke, the one-time