“No!”
Marina nodded, and when Dave stepped back to let his companion enter the pew ahead of him, I saw that she was right. “How long has her divorce been final?” I asked.
“A week.”
Viv and her husband had married and started a family while still very young. Two and a half decades and three beautiful adult daughters later, Viv was one of those women who delighted in strangers assuming she was a fourth sister.
Her husband had found this amusing for a few years, but when she’d wanted him to pretend that he was her father, he’d declined to participate. From that simple beginning, exceedingly ugly divorce proceedings had commenced. Coward that I was, I’d avoided Viv for months so I didn’t have to hear about it.
“I don’t care how good she looks,” Marina said, “she’s got to be ten years older than he is.”
The look she slid me was so open and innocent it could only mean one thing: She was trying to start an argument. Whether she wanted to fight about Viv’s age or was trying to get me going on the double standards so common in female-male relationships, I didn’t know. More likely she was trying to distract me from her note taking. No matter what her intent was, I wasn’t going to be drawn into a verbal battle at a funeral service. I started to say so when the black-robed minister stood and put his hands on the pulpit.
I jabbed Marina in the ribs and pointed at the memo pad. She heaved a very small sigh and tucked it into her purse.
“We are here,” the minister said, “not to mourn the death of Sam Helmstetter, but to celebrate his life.”
I dug into my own purse and found the one thing I always brought to funerals.
A handkerchief.
On the way home, Marina handed me her memo pad. “Read, O comrade, and see if anyone twangs your instincts.”
“But I was right there,” I said. “I saw everyone you saw, and I didn’t see anyone.” Which didn’t make any sense whatsoever, but since the sentence was inspired by Marina, she understood.
I was still a little startled by my post-funeral behavior. I’d stopped to talk to Sam’s widow, Rachel, and had nearly cried at the emptiness in her face. On impulse I’d asked if she wanted me to stop by the next day. Rachel had nodded slowly and said that would be nice. Good move, Beth, making a condolence call the day after Sam’s funeral. What were you thinking?
“Sometimes it takes more than one look,” Marina said, as if she had decades of experience in homicide detection instead of what she did have under her belt, which was years of movie watching. “Sometimes something just clicks and—”
My phone beeped.
“That’s got to be the most boring ring tone in the history of cell phones,” Marina said.
This was an old discussion and always ended with me telling her that if she wanted me to have a more interesting ring tone, she was welcome to read the instruction manual and reprogram the phone to her heart’s content.
I dug into my purse for the phone. “Hello?” To my left, I could feel Marina rolling her eyes. “Hello?” I said again. “This is Beth.”
“There’s a problem with Thanksgiving,” said a male voice.
“Hey, Tim,” I said to my brother. “How are you?”
“How am I?” The puzzlement in his voice was thick. “Reasonably well. Why do you ask?”
Tim’s social skills hadn’t improved since he was fifteen. When asked by a girl to a Sadie Hawkins dance, he’d replied, “Why would I want to do that?” How he’d managed to date a woman long enough to get married—and stay married long enough to beget offspring—was one of life’s great mysteries. Their son, Max, was, to the disappointment of his multidegreed parents, a completely average teenager. I loved him dearly. Not that I didn’t love my brother; blood is thicker than water, or so they say. But with my lifetime knowledge of sibling behavior, Tim’s question was a good one: Why had I bothered asking him how he was? “What’s the problem with Thanksgiving?”
“My project team,” he said, “had a procedure scheduled on Gammasphere for January. There was a cancellation and I can get in on Thanksgiving.”
I waited. But that, apparently, was all he intended to say. No apologies, no remorse, no nothing beyond the bare-bones explanation. Typical Tim. “What about Max?”
“Max?” He sounded surprised that the name would come up. “What about him?”
I wanted to reach through the phone and twist my brother’s nose. “What’s he going to do for Thanksgiving?” As in, while you’re closeted away with like-minded physicists, what is your sole offspring going to do with himself?
“That,” Tim said, “is a reasonable question.” There was a rustling sound as he covered the phone with his hand. “Max!” he called. “I’m going to be working on Thanksgiving. What do you want to do?”
I closed my eyes and prayed for strength.
There was muffled conversation, but I couldn’t make it out. Eventually Tim uncovered the receiver. “Max will be fine,” he said.
“Let me talk to him.”
“Beth—”
I firmed up my voice. Too bad I couldn’t do that to my hips as easily. “Put him on the phone.”
Tim sighed and called for his son.
“Hi, Aunt Beth.”
“Where’s your father?” I asked. No way could we have this conversation with Tim in the same room.
“Um . . . he just made the signal. He’s going over to Mom’s.”
The signal was a complicated series of taps on the joint wall between the two sets of living quarters. Morse code, I assumed, but had never asked. Even mild technical questions asked of Tim tended to be answered in fifty- minute lectures. He’d served as a teaching assistant while in graduate school and had never recovered.
“Let me know when he’s gone.”
There was a pause punctuated by the shutting of a door. “Okay, we can talk now. What’s up?”
“Still working on that B average?” I asked.
“Every day.”
“That’s my boy.”
“There’s just one thing.” Even though he was alone, his voice went quiet. “I really like my English lit class.”
I pumped my fist in the air. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. There’s this long poem about a monster. This guy decides he’s going to kill it. He does, but the monster had a mother who’s even meaner. The guy kills the mother, too, and he ends up being the king. When he’s really old, a dragon wakes up. The guy kills the dragon, but he ends up getting killed, too. His people give him a huge funeral, though.”
“How nice for him.”
“Do you know it?” Max asked. “Dad didn’t, but I think it’s kind of famous.”
“It sounds familiar. Listen, Max. About Thanksgiving.”
“Oh. Yeah.” His voice, which had been full of inflection and life when telling me about Grendel, went flat and lifeless. “He’s going to be working, so I guess we’re not coming up.”
“What do you feel about coming up by yourself?” A good sister would have talked to her brother about the possibility before discussing it with the fifteen-year-old, but today I was being a better aunt than sibling.
“By . . . myself?”
“We’d have to clear it with your parents, but there is such a thing as Greyhound.”
“Greyhound?”
“The bus. I’m sure you’ve heard of it. Service nationwide with reclining seats, tinted windows, and an onboard restroom.” Not that I’d use one, but it was different for boys.
“Bus?”
