The Summer We Fell Apart Page 9

  It was there the morning we were dressing for the funeral. I came out of the bathroom to find Kate in a proper black suit with sheer black hose and sling-back pumps. I had on a vintage beaded black sweater and a short houndstooth skirt with my white boots. Kate did one of those up-and-down looks.

  “Oh no. No way, Amy.”

  I knew exactly what she was in a tizzy over but it was more fun to act like I didn’t.

  “What?” I asked as I widened my eyes in pretend ignorance. But Kate didn’t even hear me. She was now too fixated on my head.

  “And your hair!” she cried. “What have you done to your hair?”

  Kate had been here for twenty-four hours. If she just now realized that my hair was not long and brown but short and blond I felt sorry for the clients she defended. Kate came to her true calling a little late in life—but when she did she pursued it with Herculean force. She graduated college when I was still muddling through seventh grade and moved to Italy with her boyfriend and later fiancé to teach English. She stayed until I was in the middle of my senior year of high school. For reasons I have yet to hear but have long since stopped speculating on, she moved back to the States, alone, applied to law school, graduated first in her class, and took a job in Washington, D.C., working for a lawyer who was frequently interviewed on television. That was the only way I’d known her job was a big deal. He’d had some very high-profile celebrity clients and I was fond of Entertainment Tonight.

  I smiled at Kate’s contorted face and touched a hand to my hair. I’d added a thick black velvet headband right before I walked out. It was cute. It was very sexy. I liked it and I wasn’t taking it off.

  “Your father is dead,” Kate said through a clenched jaw.

  “Really? No kidding. I thought that was someone else’s bedside I stood by for a month.” Despite my repeated phone calls that Dad was really sick, Kate had been unable to extricate herself from her legal briefs and power suits for even one bedside visit. Though she was his most devoted child, I wasn’t really surprised at her absence: I understood where she was coming from. She revered our father with a blind adoration that the rest of us did not possess. If she had witnessed the physical ravages his illness had inflicted on his wasted body, his diminishing mental capacities, she wouldn’t have been able to cope. In the end, some aspects of living were just so much easier when a real live person wasn’t involved. Better to come later to pick out the urns and the church.

  She turned away from me and snatched a shiny black clutch off the table, which was cluttered with the contents of the brown bag George had found under the couch cushions. He’d given it to Kate and flattered her by saying she would make the most sense out of what to do with our father’s “estate.” I’d almost snorted out loud when George used that word. I knew Kate had stayed up late the night before going through everything, but so far she hadn’t shared and I hadn’t asked. I watched now as she opened the clutch and checked inside. Her lips moved but no sound came out as she pulled out a tube of lipstick, tissues, a folded envelope, and some bills, and then silently named each item before she put it all back inside. When she was done, she asked if I had any mints.

  I shrugged.

  There was a large vertical crease between her eyebrows when she looked at me and said, “Amy, how do you live like this?”

  “Like what? Without mints?”

  She looked around at the space. Owen had painted the walls shades of cream in the living areas to a pale Creamsicle-orange in the kitchen. Once I’d moved in we divided the large, bowling alley–like space into separate areas: hangout, music, eating, and most lovely of all: my studio. True to his word, Owen had built a wall and a door, which he painted purple and red. Up above in what used to be the storage loft was our bedroom, where Owen and I slept in a nest of down and pillows. And since the ceilings were high, Owen and his buddies had built another lovely loft where guests, mostly George when he didn’t feel like going back to Manhattan (of course this was pre-Jules), occasionally crashed. It was now, much to her disdain, the domain of my sister.

  I was about to respond with a nasty comment about how she could have stayed at a hotel if it bothered her so much when the bell saved me. George was downstairs. He had insisted on coming to pick us up and then traveling back together to Grand Central Station. He probably thought I’d kill Kate and dump her body in the East River if he wasn’t along to chaperone. I buzzed him up as I gathered my bag. I wasn’t sure about what to wear for a jacket and I stood in front of the coatrack making a big deal of deciding between a plastic leopard-print raincoat (mostly because I just wanted to ride Kate a little more) and a black cashmere shawl that I’d picked up out of the latest batch of donations at the used-clothing store where I worked. Kate stood ready and waiting by the door, her black clutch held tight to her chest beneath crossed arms, as if they’d start the funeral without us.

  George came in and gave Kate a kiss on the cheek and told her she looked lovely. “You’re looking pretty spiffy too,” I teased as we walked to the subway station. Kate strode ahead of us even though I wasn’t at all sure she knew where she was going. When she heard me compliment George, she glanced over her shoulder.

  “He looks like someone going to a funeral should look, Amy.”

  George’s trench coat and shiny shoes screamed kept man to me, but somehow I knew the George who perennially smelled like chlorinated pool water was still there beneath the Italian worsted wool. The original kept man more accurately described how our father looked laid out in his coffin, and in his case the phrase had actually applied during a great portion of his sixty-two years.

  Because we had chosen not to have a viewing and the funeral would be closed-casket, we had all trooped to the funeral home the night before for one last look at Dad dressed nattily for the great send-off. When we got there, everyone filed into the small room but me. I stayed out in the lobby where the air wasn’t as suffocating. Instead I sat in a fake gilded chair next to a marble-topped table that held a lone box of tissues. Every time the front door opened bringing people for the wake that was being held in the room next to our father’s, I averted my eyes and acted like I needed another tissue. The expectations for grief were too high in a situation like this and I didn’t know what else to do.

  I had the same suffocating feeling today when we got to the church, except it had nothing to do with a small room and a lot of people. Considering we were on the late side and Finn was already there, the church was embarrassingly empty. I couldn’t even look from side to side as we filed up the main aisle toward the casket. I knew the first several benches held a handful of people but I didn’t maintain direct eye contact. Instead I concentrated on the way Finn was standing with his hands clasped awkwardly in front of his body, sort of below his waist. He looked like he was wearing the suit from his high school graduation. He smiled when he saw me and made room so I could sit. As I slid in next to him I could smell something akin to Listerine on his breath and I prayed silently that Kate didn’t get a whiff. I peeked over at her but she was staring straight ahead, unwilling to make eye contact with any of us. She had not offered a word since we arrived. I made a point of looking around Finn to his other side to see if Miriam had come. Truthfully, I wasn’t surprised that the seat was empty.

  While a lover purchased George’s finery, Kate was entirely a self-made woman down to her fine wool suit and highly polished leather shoes. Kate had ambition that must have come from another branch of the family tree altogether. One of our father’s last plays had been about the lazy immigrants in our family. The story had been told from the perspective of his uncle, who had been trying to save enough money to leave his country and come to America since he was sixteen. When he finally booked passage he was in his eighties and managed to live here only one year before he died.

  George looked anxious. While I was watching him, I saw him slide back the cuff on his left wrist and check his watch—twice—before stifling a sigh and affixing his gaze back toward the altar.
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br />   I linked my arm through Finn’s and he seemed surprised, but then he patted my hand and I knew I’d at least make it through the funeral standing; Finn would not let me fall. Of course if he was too drunk to stand, then I was going down as well. I realized as I glanced at my brothers and sister that this was it. This was our family now. And while I knew that for some family was everything, protection against the cold, cruel world, I only really experienced that with George. With the others, we viewed each other more as obstacles to be negotiated, not shelter. It scared me to think that Finn had yet to hit bottom even though he was trying his hardest and that Kate just didn’t give a damn about any of us. I could tell Kate wished that George, Finn, and I (but mostly me) would grow up and get a life. If she would listen to me I would tell her how happy I was, but I doubted she would believe me or, even worse, understand. And while we each had our own issues, Kate made me the saddest of all—she just seemed to view life as one long tangle of disappointments.

  As the service began, I was acutely aware that our father currently resided in the pine economy box in his discounted Brooks Brothers suit not six feet away from where we sat and a minister of indeterminate religious affiliation—something called the Congregational Church—was talking about the afterlife. I had no idea what awaited my father on the other side—if indeed there even was one. Every time the minister referred to the other side I thought about England. There was that old saying: “Close your eyes and think of England.” It supposedly was the advice Queen Victoria gave her daughter on her wedding night. I hoped if Dad was anywhere he could be in England. He’d always preferred Europe to the States.

  Finn stood, and because I was attached at his hip I stood along with him. He shook his head at me and pried my fingers off his arm. When I didn’t fully comprehend what he wanted me to do, he pushed me back down onto the bench. I watched my brothers file out of the pew and arrange themselves around the casket. Then, with the help of four other men that I recognized from the funeral home, they carried the casket down the aisle and out the double doors at the front of the church. Kate took hold of my hand and slid me along with her out of the pew. When I realized that she wanted me to follow the casket down the aisle I took a step backward. She refused to let me linger and pulled me out into the aisle, so I stumbled. I kept my head down and walked quickly. I got outside in time to see the hearse drive away. Kate had somehow prevailed upon them to burn our father as quickly as possible. They’d promised an urn pickup by six that evening.

  The light outside hurt my eyes and I blinked and squinted until I found my sunglasses and put them on. They were very large and white-rimmed and cost me a dollar on Canal Street. Once I could see I walked over to my brothers. Finn and George were talking to a couple I vaguely recognized. I turned around to ask Kate if she knew whom the boys were talking to, but she was nowhere to be seen. I hovered awkwardly by George’s left side, not really wanting to engage in conversation but not knowing what to do with myself. What are you supposed to do after they cart away the body? I wasn’t going to stand there and cry—I didn’t even have a tissue to dab at my eyes and besides no one else seemed that broken up. Why did everyone else seem to know what to do? I felt a sense of panic rising in my chest and ran back into the church under the guise of looking for Kate.

  Inside the vestibule there was a cluster of people who looked up when I entered but then looked quickly away. The double doors to the main church area were still open so I stepped back inside. The altar was empty, as were the pews. I tried hard to remember if we’d ever gone to church as kids. Maybe with my mother’s parents once or twice, but I really couldn’t come up with anything concrete, just a lot of images of candles and choirs at Christmas, which may actually have been memories I appropriated from watching too many schmaltzy Christmas movies on television.

  On either side of the church there were tall, narrow stained-glass windows with a modern flair, no saints or Jesus or Scripture as far as I could tell. The windows appeared as slabs of colored glass pieced together like a quilt. They were actually pretty. I was just standing there getting lost looking at the windows when I heard a noise from behind the altar area, and then my sister exited stage left. Her head was down and she was fussing with her jacket, tugging on it as if it was twisted.

  She rushed down the stairs from the altar and headed down the aisle. She hadn’t even seen me standing there so I called out her name. She hesitated and looked quickly over her shoulder to see if anyone had followed her before she continued walking out the front of the church. I had to run to catch up to her and when I came up behind her and touched her shoulder on the front steps she screamed. She would hate it if I told her she sounded just like our mother in her latest film.

  The boys turned to look at us and Kate shot me a dirty look.

  “Why the hell were you sneaking up on me like that?”

  I slid my sunglasses down my nose a little and peered at her over the rims. “I called your name but you didn’t hear me.”

  She swallowed hard and her cheeks flushed a shade of burgundy.

  “In the church?”

  I nodded. “What? Did you have a quickie behind the altar?”

  Kate’s head snapped back on her shoulders like she’d been slapped. “God, you are so disgusting.”

  I smiled sweetly at her as George came over and slipped my sunglasses off my face and onto his. He preened a little until I grabbed them and put them firmly back on my face.

  Kate groaned, forgetting for a moment that she was superior to all of us. “Come on already. I’m starving.”

  For once we were all in agreement. Luckily the church was in walking distance to the commercial strip and a Denny’s. Kate must really be hungry because she didn’t even justify her choice of restaurant. As we walked I noticed Kate glance back over her shoulder a few times so I started to as well. But there was no one behind us.

  We were ushered into one of those round booths where everyone had to slide in. I was stuck in the middle of the semicircle between Finn and George. They ordered enough food for a football team. All I thought I wanted was coffee and onion rings but I ended up eating way too much off Finn’s plate. Kate kept stabbing at her omelet and sighing until Finn moved it aside so the mutilation could end.

  Eating all together like this felt like those rare occasions, when we were kids, when our mother or father (never both of them) would take us to the Howard Johnson’s over on Route 9 and we’d all order the Turkey Delight off the children’s menu. The meal, which was a quasi-replication of a Thanksgiving dinner complete with an ice-cream-scoop lump of stuffing, came with a free hot-fudge sundae, and Finn would always trade me his if I gave him the thickest slice of my turkey. I glanced around the table at my siblings and wondered if any of them remembered the Turkey Delight. Probably not, they all looked like they just wanted to be far away from here. I ran my tongue over my lips. This was what it would be like if we ever all got together for Thanksgiving or Christmas, everyone disappointed that this was all there was and biding time until they could leave. I sighed and reached for an onion ring. No sense pretending.

  As I chewed I realized why the church had looked so stark. There weren’t any flowers. Weren’t we supposed to have one of those hideous carnation wreaths with a ribbon that said DAD on it? But when I said this aloud Kate started to cry. Not big tears, just the slip-sliding-down-her-cheeks kind that she didn’t even make an attempt to wipe away.

  I threw a wadded-up napkin in her direction. “It wasn’t meant as a criticism; I was just thinking out loud.”

  “It was just awful,” Kate said quietly.

  George rushed to say the service was nice so Kate would stop throwing a pity party, while I stayed silent, and I noticed Finn did too.

  “No one came,” Kate whispered.

  I shook my head and stared down at the table. I don’t know what Kate had expected.

  “Not true,” Finn said. “I talked to the bartender from Backstreet Billiards—he came.”

  �
��What?” I snorted. And then thought, of course you found the bartender.

  Finn nodded. “Seems like Dad spent a lot of time at the bar.”

  “We should go there,” George said.

  “Where?” Finn asked. As always, the constant infusion of alcohol had dulled his cognitive abilities.

  “Backstreet—shoot some pool and have a drink for Dad.” He looked around the table to see who was agreeable to his idea. “Don’t we have to hang out and wait for the ashes anyway?”

  “About that,” Finn said, “why are we waiting—can’t they mail them to us?”

  Kate’s lip did that thing. “Go ahead. Leave. I thought you’d want the ashes right away. I was doing everyone a favor. But obviously if you want to go to your post office to collect your father’s remains just let me know and I’ll mail them.” She looked for the waitress and signaled with her arm for the check. “I’m sure they have special boxes for that sort of thing.”

  “He was just asking a question, Kate,” George said as he reached into his breast pocket for his wallet but Kate was faster. As the waitress approached with the check Kate didn’t even look at it—she just handed over her credit card and shooed the girl away.

  “I can pay for my own food,” I said, quietly hoping I had at least a five somewhere in the bottom of my bag.

  Kate turned to me and said, “It’s on Dad.”

  “Dad had money?” I said, surprised.

  Kate shrugged like she was the bearer of a big secret she wasn’t ready to share. After she signed her credit card she stood. The rest of us, obviously still contemplating the money Dad may have left behind, didn’t move. I could almost see the dream on Finn’s face. Reality would set in soon. Especially when he remembered how Dad had been living. This was typical of my sister, acting like she had one up on the rest of us even when she didn’t. Perhaps that was what compelled her to practice law. Finally Kate stomped her foot and said in an exasperated tone, “Well, aren’t any of you coming?”