country?'
Her voice is dry and crackled, parched by cigarettes like the desert from the sun, but nice, with family warmth rushing into its old veins at what she takes to be an emergency. Otherwise, why would he be calling? She is six years younger than Dad so she would be sixty now, not old for some professions but in hers ancient, long out of it, even with face-lifts and ass-tucks and the marvels of modern dentistry. Nelson wonders when she turned her last trick. You get the occasional sex-worker at the Center and some of them keep on with a few old customers almost like a marriage. Now, without her brother or her parents to link her to the region, Aunt Mim never comes back. The last time was Dad's funeral. There wasn't a body, just a square, lidded urn made of a composition substance like pressed bran flakes. Mom had him cremated down in Florida because it was easiest transportationwise. She and Nelson, taking turns at the wheel, brought him back north in the slate-gray Celica in which he had made his last run. Pru had flown down with the kids the day after he and Mom had caught a night flight from Philly but by the time she landed Dad was already gone. Gone and his body, six foot three and two hundred fifty-five pounds, whipped from the hospital to the crematorium. Pru was in disgrace because of having confessed, having been raised as a Catholic to confess everything, that she and Dad had committed- what would you call it?-double-barrelled adultery. Incest of a sort, one night only. She and the kids were scrunched into the two-door sports car's inadequate back seat, and the thick composition box, like a Styrofoam cooler but smaller and dense with its distilled contents, rode in the trunk among all their suitcases. It had been a tough tight packing job to get everything in and Nelson had not been especially gracious when little Judy, who was nine then, burst into tears, their first night's stop at a motel outside Savannah, because she couldn't bear to think of Grandpa all alone out there in the cold dark trunk. The two motel rooms didn't have too many high safe surfaces for such a sacred and ominous thing- surprisingly light, baked bone flakes, Harold C. Angstrom concentrate-so they settled on the top of the mock-wood cabinet holding the television set that slid in and out. Mom and the kids slept in that room, and she had to keep talking them out of climbing up and opening the box and looking inside. He and Pru were so upset with each other they couldn't sleep and finally fucked in an effort to get relaxed, which made them both madder and sadder than ever. The next night, in a Comfort Inn beyond Raleigh, Mom and Pru took one room and he and the kids the other. They fell asleep before he did, they were watching
It was Judy who remembered, about two exits up the road. Though Nelson floored the accelerator, it seemed to take forever getting to the next exit and reversing their direction on 95. His whole body went watery with guilt and hurry. The black desk clerk, who had just come on duty, looked dubious at Nelson's panting explanation, but let them have the key again. It was strange to be let back in, as if into an empty tomb-as if they all had died or been abducted. The beds were still unmade, the towels wet outside the shower stall. They found a child's toothbrush in the bathroom as well as Grandpa's remains sitting docilely on the cabinet shelf, the square urn blending in like one of those combination safes motels sometimes give you. Nelson felt this tremendous rush of reunion at the time, taking the canister into his arms, a bliss of wiped-out sins. Afterwards, with schooled hindsight, he saw that there had been a certain unconscious vengeance in their leaving Dad behind, as he had more than once left them behind.
Nelson doesn't remember if they all laughed about it, forgetting the head of their family like that, but he does remember that Aunt Mim wore too much black at the funeral,
REBECCA JUNE ANGSTROM
1959
His sister. He has always blamed himself somehow. If he had been more pleasing to Dad he wouldn't have left and Mom wouldn't have gotten drunk and it wouldn't have happened. At Dad's funeral Aunt Mim seemed an animated, irreverent slash of black among the dowdy mourners (there were some aging male strangers, even, who showed up, having worked with the deceased at Verity Press or the Toyota agency or played with or against the dead man in his teen-age prime and who felt enough connection to take a morning out of their own remaining lives) but Dad had loved her, and she him, with the heavy helplessness of blood, that casts us into a family as if into a doom.
'The funniest thing, Aunt Mim,' Nelson says over the phone. 'It turns out Dad had a baby by the woman he lived with that time and she's showed up. It was a girl baby, and she's thirty-nine, and a nurse living right here in Brewer. She grew up on a farm. I had lunch with her. She looks a little like Dad before he got really fat but when his face was turning round-kind of, you know, sleepy-eyed, with very white skin. So as well as a nephew you have a niece.'
'Damn,' the phone crackled after a pause. 'I'll have to rewrite my will. How come she showed up now? Did Harry know she existed?'
'He guessed, I guess, but didn't know for sure. Her mother wouldn't tell him. She died this summer and told Annabelle before she did. She came to us.'
'Who's us?'
'The family. Me and Mom and Ronnie.'
'I bet Ronnie's just thrilled. And Janice even more so. I think it was you she came to, Nelson. So what's your thought?'
'Well, it's not as if she's not managing, she makes better money than I do, but she seems awfully alone. I think she should get to meet some people. But I don't know so many people since I kicked coke, except for the clients at work.'
At her end of the line, Aunt Mim considers. 'How long since you've known about this girl?'
'Since September.'
'And you're just calling to tell me now?'
'I've been sitting on it, I guess.'
'You're embarrassed,' the woman concludes. 'Don't be embarrassed, kid. Your father didn't understand birth control. You were born some months early, as I remember. It's not your funeral. Want some advice from your old aunt, whose life is no model for anybody?'
'Sure.'
'This little nursie's not your problem. At thirty-nine, everybody's their own problem. You have a family-how are they?'
This is getting to be a disappointing conversation. If there was anybody he thought would see with him the wonder of his having a sister it was Aunt Mim, his father's sister. 'They're good, I guess. Pru finally had enough of me and a year and a half ago took the kids back to Akron. She works for a Greek lawyer downtown, near the old Goodrich factory.'
'Oh, those Greeks,' says Aunt Mim. 'They invented democracy,they'll tell you.'
'And Judy's out of school and thinking of becoming an airline stewardess.'
'flight attendant, they like to be called. Some of them, the way they carry on is legal only in Nevada.'
'I know. She worries me. She's kind of wild.'
'You worry too much. Life is wild. When it isn't a total bore.'
'And my little boy, Roy, is almost fifteen. We communicate by e-mail. He's bright, it turns out.'
'You sound surprised. Your father wasn't stupid, he just acted stupid. So. And now a sister to fill in the gaps. You're quite a family man, Nelson, I don't know where you get it from. The
Springer side, I guess. They were good Germans. The Angstroms never quite fit in.'
'I thought you might have some ideas.'
'Ideas about what?'
'What I should do, about having a sister.'
'Well, your father used to hold my hand crossing the street, and he liked to watch me pee, but maybe she's beyond that. What's her name, did you say?'
'Annabelle. Annabelle Byer.'
