Then Came You

very little to prepare for it. “I don’t know what to do. I’ve never done this before.”

“Drink,” said Kimmie. I took a sip from the cup. The tea was hot and strong, laced with sugar. “Where’s Dad now?” she asked.

“Huh?” For a second, I’d thought she was talking about her father, not mine. I tried to remember whether I knew, finally shaking my head. “I’m not sure.”

“You got that police officer’s number?”

I hadn’t written down the number, but it showed up on my BlackBerry. Kimmie hit “redial” and lifted the phone to her ear. “Yes,” she said, in a crisp voice, one I recognized from the admissions office, when she’d take parents’ phone calls. “May I speak to Sergeant Potts, please?” She waited, then said, “Hello, I’m a friend of Julia Strauss. We’re on our way back to Pittsburgh, and I need to know. .” She paused, then nodded. Scritch-scratch went her pen. “Mmm-hmm. Yes. I see. And how long will that take?” More writing. I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to live in my head right now, which insisted on serving up a slide show of my father, cold and stiff and dead on the shag carpet of that crappy apartment. . and of a child with my face, a child that would be half mine, a little boy or little girl I would never know. The price I’d paid. The sacrifice I’d made for nothing.

“Can you give me that number?” Kimmie was asking. “Should I have the funeral director get in touch?” I watched her, wondering, dimly, how she knew how to do all of this. Who had she buried? I’d have to ask.

She hung up the phone and set it, facedown, in the middle of the table. “They took his body to the medical examiner’s office. There’s going to be an autopsy, because it was. .” She paused, looking flustered for the first time, glancing at her notes. “Because he didn’t die in a hospital, I guess, so there wasn’t a doctor there. That’s what they have to do.”

“He overdosed.” My voice was flat. Kimmie got up from the table and stood behind me, one hand resting lightly on my shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” she said softly.

“Can you. .” My voice was almost inaudible. I could barely get the words out. “Will you come with me?”

She answered instantly, as if nothing else were even possible. “Of course I will,” she said.

• • •

Kimmie gave me the window seat on the plane. I leaned the top of my head against the glass and stared out at the sky. All through the ride, she kept giving me things — a novel, a honey-nut granola bar, a bottle of water, tissues. I read, or tried to; I ate and drank what she gave me; I cried, wiping my eyes with my sleeve; and every once in a while I’d manage to tell her something about my dad: how he’d taken me horseback riding once after I’d seen International Velvet on TV, how proud he’d been when I’d gotten into Princeton. Kimmie listened quietly, nodding. “You must have loved him very much,” she said. For a while, when no one was looking, she held my hand.

It was getting dark when we landed in Pittsburgh. My mother picked us up, her eyes red, her hair still frizzy, tucked into its morning ponytail. “There’s soup and frozen pizza if you’re hungry, and, Jules, I put the air mattress in your room, and there’s fresh sheets…”

“We’ll be fine.”

“Did Greg get in touch?” my mother asked.

“He texted.” My brother had, indeed, sent a message consisting of two words: NOT SURPRISED. For Greg, our father had died a long time ago… probably the night he’d stolen Greg’s prized possession, a baseball signed by Reggie Jackson, and sold it. Since then Greg seemed to have decided, maybe unconsciously, that the easiest thing for him to do was to simply hate our father, to forget that, once, he’d been a good dad.

“I’m glad you’ve got such a good friend,” my mother whispered after Kimmie carried our bags up the stairs, slipping quietly out of the room to give the two of us time together. I didn’t answer, didn’t even think to wonder if she suspected Kimmie was more than that.

Upstairs, Kimmie and I took turns in the shower, then had a funny little fight about which one of us should take the air mattress. Finally, I lay down on my bed and Kimmie lay down beside me, fitting her body against mine. I buried my face in the silken net of her hair, and that was how I slept.

The next morning, my mother drove us to the Hoffman Funeral Home, then sat outside waiting in her car. “I could come in,” she’d offered, her voice tentative, and I told her what she expected to hear: “Don’t worry. I’ve got it.”

The office floor was thickly carpeted; the chairs were plush and padded. There was a pitcher of ice water on the sideboard, a metal urn of coffee, and a pair of cut-glass decanters, one with amber liquid, the other with something clear.

Monday morning, I told the Hoffman who was helping us, a middle-aged, round- faced man who wore a sober gray suit and a small, sympathetic smile. I told him I would bring clothes for my dad to wear, that the coffin would be closed, that my mother should get the flag that would drape the coffin, and I’d get the bullet casings from the gun salute. (“As a remembrance,” Mr. Hoffman said, and I’d nodded, wondering briefly what I was supposed to do with spent shell casings. Put them in a candy dish? String them on a length of silk thread and wear them as a necklace? Offer them to Rita, who I’d have to deal with soon?)

There was a display room, where I picked out a simple coffin — it was one of the least expensive, and still more than two thousand dollars. “Now, what were you thinking in terms of a service?”

“Small,” I said. “Just the family.”

“And will you be writing an obituary? We can help with that if you…”

“No obituary.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Are you sure?”

I nodded. The air in the room felt thick and unwholesome. The newspapers had already had enough to say about my dad, after the car accident, after his trial. Maybe they’d use the official notice of his death to dredge up the old stories, and write a piece about the disgraced schoolteacher’s unsavory demise. For all I knew, the shame could have been part of what killed him. My dad could have literally died of embarrassment.

Mr. Hoffman touched my arm. “Are you all right? Why don’t we sit down?” Kimmie poured me a glass of water, and I gulped it gratefully.

“Now. How many copies of the death certificate will you require?”

I looked at Kimmie, who shrugged. “I don’t know. What do I need them for?”

“Your father was a teacher, right?”

I nodded, not bothering to correct him, to explain that my father hadn’t been a teacher for years, that for years he hadn’t been anything but a junkie and a drunk.

“So he’ll have a checking account, a savings account. Investments. Cars and a house in his name. .” I let him talk, not bothering to correct him as he listed the things that a man of my father’s age and station should have had. We agreed on twenty copies, I wrote him a check, shook his hand, and told him I’d see him at the cemetery.

My mother was waiting in the parking lot, with her cup of black coffee and a book on tape. “Greg called,” she said. The Camry started with an unpleasant grinding sound. I wondered how long it would run and if she’d have enough money to replace it, and whether I’d be able to help. “He’s not going to be able to make it.”

I nodded, unsurprised. Kimmie, meanwhile, was unzipping her backpack. “You hungry?”

I shook my head. Food sounded like a rumor from a distant planet. I couldn’t imagine ever being hungry again.

“Here,” she said, pulling out a granola bar and passing it to me. “Eat.”

I took a bite and chewed lethargically. Behind the wheel, my mother’s face was pale, her eyes circled with purplish half moons. “Can we stop here, please?” Kimmie asked from the backseat when we drove past a supermarket. She trotted inside and came out with a bouquet of flowers, white daisies and pink carnations wrapped in plastic.

We dropped my mother off at her beauty parlor and drove to the apartment building where my father had lived and died. I pressed the doorbell and we stood there, waiting. A pair of women talking in Spanish came out, followed by a grim-faced teenage boy in drooping jeans and a hoodie. MOVE-IN SPECIAL, announced a sagging banner hanging from the fence along the street.

Rita Devine hurried down the hallway. “Come in, come in. My God, I can’t believe it!” she said, in her thick Pittsburgh accent, the kind that would turn the home team from the Steelers into the Stillers and employed yinz as the plural of you. Her eyes darted from me to Kimmie and back again. “Yesterday there was a dead body on my bathroom floor!”