The Dearly Departed (26 page)

“Entrez,”
Fletcher called, then exclaimed to Sunny, “As I was saying, I wanted to throw myself on top of it.”

“On top of what?” asked Emily Ann, clicking her seat belt into place.

“My father's coffin. As it was being lowered into the Astroturf liner.”

“I didn't mean to interrupt.”

“Not at all,” said Sunny. “Sometimes it's better to keep one's grief private.”

“I was confessing a discovery, that I thought I disliked my father—
our
father, we now know—but death turns out to be a great psychoanalyst: i.e., feelings surfaced that I didn't know I'd ever entertained.”

“Was it that way for you, too?” Emily Ann asked Sunny.

From the backseat, Sunny said, “Actually, I'd entertained these feelings when my mother was alive, so—”

“She was devastated from the first moment she heard,” interrupted Fletcher, “whereas I was sucker-punched.”

“Men are different from women,” said Emily Ann. “It isn't just the way we're socialized, either. Our brains are different, which isn't something everyone likes to admit.”

“I'm happy to admit it,” said Fletcher. “It's why we're so much better at geography and math: spatial relations and mental rotation.”

“You don't sound devastated to me,” said Emily Ann.

“Because the Lord tooketh away, but in this case He also gaveth. I lost my father but I gained a half-sister, and don't we look like clones?”

“Is that what you're going on? Physical appearances?” asked Emily Ann.

“Turn on the dome light,” he ordered.

“I have three brothers,” Emily Ann said unenthusiastically.

“Older or younger?” asked Sunny.

“All older. I was a birth-control accident.”

“I doubt that,” said Sunny. “I bet your parents kept trying for a girl.”

“Hah,” said Emily Ann.

“Your old man worships you,” said Fletcher. He turned the key in the ignition, put the car in reverse, and confided his disappointment over his father's choice of transmission.

“What makes you think my father worships me?” Emily Ann asked.

“Buying you a congressional seat? How many fathers do that? Finance their daughter's campaign and put their family name out there? And I noticed he didn't do it for any of his sons.”

“It's free advertising. Besides, they're all happy where they are.”

“Free advertising can backfire,” said Fletcher.

“He means,” said Emily Ann, her voice rising, “that my candidacy was such an embarrassment that any ballyhoo surrounding the Grandjean name would not sell one single stationary bicycle.”

“Is that what your father does? Makes stationary bikes?” Sunny asked, trying to sound as if Fletcher had not enlightened her on the subjects of Emily Ann's trust fund, eating habits, and menstrual irregularities.

“My father owns Big John, Incorporated,” she said flatly. “And every piece of Emily Ann Grandjean's campaign literature stated that fact.
Why?
Because my father thinks that when one goes into a voting booth, one votes with one's handlebars.”

“I can't help noticing your referring to your candidacy in the past tense,” said Sunny.

“It's over,” Emily Ann snapped. She pulled down the visor, lifted the flap over the illuminated mirror. “How much do you know?” she asked, plucking angrily at her eyebrows.

“About what?”

“Did your brother tell you what happened on the way to your respective parents' funerals?”

Fletcher jumped in. “Sunny and I haven't even gone beyond dates of birth and names of family pets.”

Sunny put her hand on Emily Ann's shoulder. “If you mean that unpleasantness on the airplane, I think he'd say he wishes he could take it back.”

“He'd
say
? As if he isn't sitting a foot away from me? As if he's under a gag order?”

“Fletcher's not good at apologies,” said Sunny.

Fletcher said, “Look, the God's honest truth about the incident on the plane is that I was just looking to do enough damage to get myself terminated. And now my fervent hope is that you don't go public. Or sue me.”

Emily Ann swiveled as far as her seat belt allowed, in order to address Sunny directly. “See: Not ‘I'm sorry.' Not ‘I apologize.' Not ‘I hope I didn't effectively destroy your future by disabling your campaign.' ”

“What exactly have you told your father?” asked Fletcher.

“I lied! I didn't say I was touched inappropriately. I said, ‘Fletcher quit,' and he said, ‘He can't quit. It's a breach of contract.' And I said—you won't believe what I said. I actually said you were taking a moral stand. That it was just a trick to get me to resign and save me from further humiliation.
Me.
Like I needed intervention. Do you believe I'd protect him? Am I the most pathetic woman ever born?”

“I think you're being extremely honest,” said Sunny. “And I think Fletcher is, too, in his own graceless fashion.”

“Well, I'm furious,” said Emily Ann.

“At yourself, or at me?” asked Fletcher.

“Both!”

“Do you want me to turn around and take you back to the motel?” he asked mildly.

“Fletcher!” said Sunny. “Emily Ann didn't come all the way back to King George to rant at the four walls of her motel room.”

“He's not interested,” said Emily Ann. “Why bother?”

“I
am
interested,” he said unconvincingly.

“Have you officially withdrawn from the race?” asked Sunny.

“No! How could I?”

After a tactful pause, Sunny said, “You could have called a newspaper.”

“Without a press officer?”

“One of my many hats,” Fletcher murmured.

“
You
write the headline—
EMILY ANN GRANDJEAN, VICTIM AND SEX OBJECT
. And how do you like this irony: Now
I'm
the one my father's calling a quitter and a crybaby.”

Fletcher was shaking his head emphatically. “Can I tell you why you characterized it as a simple, even noble resignation? Because you knew in your heart that it wasn't sexual harassment. You knew it was just me problem-solving.”

Sunny said, “Up ahead, at the fork, you'll want to bear right.”

“I swear, I never saw you as a sex object,” said Fletcher.

Emily Ann turned around to face Sunny. “Tell your brother that he's only insulting me further and digging himself in deeper.”

“I didn't mean you weren't attractive,” said Fletcher. “And I now see clearly that in one moment of . . . temptation, I may have ruined my chances of ever being hired by a woman again.”

“Temptation had nothing to do with it,” Emily Ann barked. “I know where you stand, so let's not rewrite our emotional histories.”

She turned to Sunny. “We spent hours and hours together—driving around, canvassing, leafleting, working late, drinking coffee from the same vessel—and there was nothing. Ever. Temptation was never on the table. In fact, I concluded what most women would have in this situation, which is to say zero interest. Way,
way
beyond no chemistry: dead nerve endings.”

“Meaning?” asked Fletcher.

“That you're not attracted to women. Which I'm fine with. Completely. In fact, relieved by.”

Fletcher said, less emphatically than Sunny expected and with a tinge of kindness, “Sorry, Em. I'm not gay.”

“Not everyone knows when they are,” said Emily Ann.

“As far as I know, I'm a heterosexual. But I can say with equal conviction that I don't let myself get involved with many women, because I do have principles. And the first of my ironclad rules is, Never ever sleep with a woman you work with or for.”

“You just made that up,” said Emily Ann.

Fletcher took his hands off the steering wheel to flail them in a surrender. “Hey! It's not my rule. It's the way all men should conduct themselves in the workplace.”

“Are you following this?” Emily Ann asked Sunny. “He pinches my breast, then tells me what a right-thinking and noble professional he is.”

“It's coming up on the left,” said Sunny. “About three hundred, three-fifty yards ahead.”

“How far to the green?” Fletcher asked, and laughed.

“What's so funny?” asked Emily Ann.

“It was a golf joke,” said Fletcher.

“I don't get it,” said Emily Ann.

“Her directions sounded like she was describing a fairway.”

“You golf, too?” Emily Ann asked Sunny.

“When I can.”

“She used to beat the boys,” said Fletcher.

“They make the ice cream here,” said Sunny. “There's an actual dairy farm behind the stand. When I was a little girl, my mother and I used to come out and stand by the fence and watch the cows.”

“How little?” asked Fletcher.

“Three? Four? That age when you still find farm animals thrilling.”

“I wouldn't know,” said Fletcher.

“You grew up here?” Emily Ann asked Sunny.

“We moved here when I was two.”

“My father impregnated her mother back in Philadelphia,” Fletcher offered.

“How old are you?” Emily Ann asked.

“Same as me,” said Fletcher. “Isn't that creepy? My old man impregnating two women at the same time?”

“They claim to have invented maple walnut here,” said Sunny.

“Yet they found each other again? In their old age?” asked Emily Ann.

“We think they were an item the whole time,” said Fletcher.

He parked directly in front of the slatted menu board. Behind the screened-in counter, two teenage girls in raspberry T-shirts stopped talking to stare at the Beetle. “I'm buying,” Fletcher told his passengers. “Have whatever you want.”

“I swear, nothing's changed since the last time I was here,” said Sunny. “When was the last time you saw frozen pudding?”

“I don't see frozen yogurt,” said Emily Ann.

“I'm going to have a banana split,” announced Fletcher.

“If that's true, after a Deluxe Carnivore, I'm amazed,” said Sunny.

Emily Ann said, “Appearances aside, you two seem like complete opposites.”

“Too early to tell,” said Fletcher.

“You should have a DNA test,” said Emily Ann. “
I
would if I were in your situation. I mean, do you really want to declare yourself siblings without proof?”

Fletcher looked up into the rearview mirror and cocked his head. “
Do
we want that?” he asked Sunny.

“Neither one of us ever had a sister or a brother,” she answered.

“Greatly overrated, believe me,” said Emily Ann.

“Can I help you guys?” yelled one of the teenagers.

“We wouldn't even know where to go for a DNA test around here,” said Sunny.

“I think, if this is the home of maple walnut, I'll scale back and have a cone,” said Fletcher.

“Me too—a small,” said Sunny.

“Tell her I want the lemon sorbet,” said Emily Ann. “See if they let adults get the children's size.”

“I'll ask no such thing,” said Fletcher. “And if this is a working dairy, you might want to get a cream-based product. It's always best to go with the house specialty.”

“Get a scoop of each,” said Sunny. “He'll finish what you don't eat.”

Fletcher restarted the car so he could lower the electric window. “Two maple walnut cones,” he called out. “One
grande
and one
poquito.
And your smallest dish of lemon sorbet.”

The older of the two girls, with a gold braid arranged over one shoulder, slid open her screen. “There's no curb service,” she smirked. “And we call it
sherbet.
”

Fletcher smiled and waved in friendly, obedient fashion as he said under his breath, “No tip tonight, little lady.”

The girl held up a waffle cone and a sugar cone smartly for his vote.

“I guess I'll have to make an appearance at the window,” said Fletcher.

“Be nice,” said Sunny. “You live here now.”

“Can't promise anything,” said Fletcher.

“See if they sell water,” said Emily Ann.

 

W
hen Emil didn't return from his evening constitutional exactly forty minutes after starting out, when she didn't see him stretching and cooling down in his usual unappetizing fashion between house and garage, Christine Ouimet locked every door. She was not going to forgive this outburst easily—not just the language and the loathing in his voice, but the public nervous breakdown over Margaret Batten's passing. Good riddance to secretaries worshiping their bosses, and vice versa. It was humiliating at best—this infidelity cloaked as employer lamentation.

She hoped he would appreciate the symbolism of being locked out, excluded, hungry, thirsty; without transportation or toilet and unwilling to relieve himself in the yard. What did that say about him? So fastidious that even on their one camping trip, when the boys were small, even in the middle of the night, he'd led them on a hike to the sanitation facility instead of twenty-five yards into the woods.

Maybe he wasn't coming back. More likely, he'd passed some patient along the way who had to describe her latest lump. He listened too readily; didn't like it when she reminded these encroachers that her husband practiced medicine Monday through Friday, at his office. Margaret, she surmised, was even better at the kind of armchair compassion patients equated with good medicine. Her own friends implied as much—never directly, but couched as praise for Emil's staffing talents. Some said “good listener”; some even used the word
nurse,
which Christine would correct. (Margaret had a certificate from a secretarial college she'd never heard of.) And while she may have been professionally gracious to Doctor's patients, she'd never been particularly warm to the doctor's wife. She'd heard it all—Margaret this and Margaret that, in life and in death: acts of mercy and clever bits of psychology she'd performed at the office; how a phlegmy, obviously contagious patient was led out of the waiting room, diplomatically shown to an examining cubicle, and compensated in the form of the latest issue of
People.

Not that she had ever wished Margaret ill or dead. Certainly not dead. In fact Christine had been gripped in an unexpected way at the service, watching the daughter's face contorted with grief and seeing the tears of the better friends. The eulogies would have made her worst enemies cry—Doctor's performance at the top of everyone's list. She knew what people were reading into his waterworks: that he'd been transparently in love with the sweet, marvelous, albeit plain Margaret for years. And how shrewd of her to be buried next to that man, the intended—the out-of-towner Miles Finn—a beard if ever there was one.

It was ten minutes to eight, and she was
not
keeping his half of the Rock Cornish game hen warm. She'd followed her own example from when the boys were late, after promising to return from practice or a matinee by 6
P.M.
sharp: She'd sit down and eat by herself. When they returned, she didn't jump up from the table the way some slavish mothers would. Her boys sliced their own meat, buttered their own rolls, poured their own milk. A small enough punishment to fit the crime of unreliability.

Dr. Ouimet walked home at less than his usual brisk pace, mindful that blood would be rushing to his stomach to aid digestion of his hamburger. Marvelous thing, the human body. He hadn't had red meat since last summer—another case of being a polite guest at a barbecue—but he always advised his dieting patients to be kind to themselves, to indulge their needs occasionally lest the deprivation result in something worse.

He'd gleaned from his new lawyer's instructions that he was not to abandon the house, the property, his belongings. Parallel lives, he chanted silently.
Parallel lives.
He already knew how to survive conjugal hypothermia, and certainly tonight's outburst was the declaration of independence he'd been unable to voice heretofore. This was a watershed night: One doesn't confess one's hatred, turn on one's heel, then reintegrate oneself into one's domestic routine after the customary four circuits around the neighborhood. He slowed down when he turned onto Puffton, and stopped altogether at his lamppost to pinch several dead petunias from their stems. His watch said 7:55. He noted with pleasure how light it still was on this twenty-third day of June.

No question, this would be unpleasant. He'd slip in the back door, ascend the back stairway, check with his service, change into proper clothes for his house calls even if none had been requested, and go out for a drive. There were always visits he could make voluntarily that would be no less appreciated than the solicited ones. The chronics, Christine called them in a less-than-charitable tone of voice. In fact, he was thinking fondly of the brave Albert Fournier, who had contracted polio a month before the Salk vaccine was distributed and now wrote poems on a computer with the aid of a mouth stick, when Emil Ouimet found the entry to his own home thwarted by a locked door. He tried the front door, then the cellar door, then the rusty nail underneath the back porch steps. It yielded nothing. He felt in the dirt where the spare key sometimes landed, then rinsed his hands in the sprinkler.

Annoyed, he pressed the back doorbell for longer than was necessary.

“Who is it?” Christine asked, visible at the table through the shirred curtain.

“Emil,” he said, trying not to sound apologetic or at a disadvantage. He waited the few seconds it should have taken her to put down her teacup and her newspaper, and then waited longer before rattling the doorknob. “Open the door, Christine,” he called.

She didn't. He moved along the porch to the picture window. She was reading. Above the headlines, he could see her eyebrows arched like those of an actress reading a newspaper too well, pointedly ignoring the man across the table.

MASS. MAN ARRESTED FOR COP SHOOTING
, said the
Bulletin.
“
TIP
”
HAS NEW MEANING AT DOT DINER
, exclaimed its sidebar, under a photo of Winnie the waitress, mid-pontification. He rapped on the window.

Suddenly, Christine lowered the paper, folded it neatly, met his stare. Her lips formed, “How dare you?”

Which offense? he wondered. His declaration of hatred? The skipping of dinner? Or how dare he characterize her ass as fat, knowing about her concerns in that department and her thrice-weekly step classes.

“Let me in, Christine,” he said sternly.

“Or what? You'll crawl in a window? I don't think so. Everything is locked. And I'd be very surprised if you had any kind of key.” She moved the newspaper to display a collection: his key ring,
her
key ring, the discolored spare missing from its hiding place.

He returned to the door and pulled, causing no more than an unyielding click with each yank of the knob.

“Let. Me. In!” the doctor yelled, his syllables a crescendo.

“Go away,” said his wife.

“Christine,” he warned.

“I'm sitting here quite happily on my fat ass. And I'm not moving until hell freezes over,” she answered.

He remembered his new counselor's advice. “I own this house and its contents!” he shouted. “And now I've returned. I want you to unlock this door immediately.”

Christine jumped up from the chair and yanked the filmy curtain aside. “Well then,” she said smartly, her nostrils flared, “you'll have to apologize, won't you?”

She had changed into a skirt and blouse and had swept her hair off her face with a zigzag tortoiseshell instrument he'd never seen before.

He forced what he hoped was an expression of reasonableness and possible rapprochement. “Open the door, Christine. We don't need to air our dirty laundry to all of Puffton Lane.”

“I will if I have to,” she yelled.

“I'm not apologizing through Thermopane,” he answered. “And furthermore, it's not abundantly clear what I'm apologizing for, since you're the one who impugned the memory of Margaret and rubbed salt into my wound.”

“Your wound!” she spat back. “Are you a man or a mouse? Not even a widower carries on the way you have in public. You're a married man, a professional, who buried his own mother without a whimper as I recall. And the first little word of criticism out of my mouth—”

“Shut up!” he yelled. “Shut up! Shut the
fuck
up!”

Never before had Emil failed to apologize on demand. And never had he used the “f” word. Christine's lips parted, then trembled. He might as well have slapped her, the way her hand flew to her face and the way she backed out of the room, unsteady and incredulous.

Even from the porch he could hear her sobbing, then the slam of the bedroom door.

Conciliatory words could have reached her ears if he'd wanted them to. Instead, he moved off the porch to the side yard and looked for something, anything, to get his wife's attention. A pebble thrown at the window, he decided, would be too soft, too apologetic. She'd think it was an invitation, Romeo paging Juliet. A pinecone hurled with all his might barely tickled the sill. He dislodged an ornamental rock from the perennial bed and launched it. It hit its mark, the screen, with a satisfying thump, and returned to earth.

“Open the door this minute,” he tried one more time.

He waited on the front porch—a man without a key, without a change of clothes; without a secretary famous for her sympathies.

He looked around, wondered how loud their fight was and how much their neighbors had heard.

Too much, evidently. In an impressively short time, a siren wailed and grew closer.

Ambulance? Dr. Ouimet wondered.
Hope it's not for one of mine.

Within seconds, King George's only emergency vehicle flew up Puffton Lane, lights flashing, radio squawking, and came to an abrupt stop in front of Dr. Ouimet's annuals.

Chief Loach stepped out of the cruiser, bullet-proof vest over an off-duty polo shirt, to mediate the least likely domestic dispute of his increasingly perilous career.

 

A
ll he's asking,” Joey argued, stooping to enunciate into the mail slot, “is to change into clean clothes and pack an overnight bag.”

“Where is he now?” Mrs. Ouimet demanded.

“He's sitting in my cruiser, ma'am.”

“Is he under arrest?”

“He's cooperating fully.”

“He's not who you think he is,” said Christine. “But now the truth will come out.” The door opened exactly the width of her red face. “And I suppose you think that a police officer's presence means I'm safe? Because I disagree. One can be surrounded by security and still be injured. Look at Ronald Reagan.”

Joey read from his notes in order to stanch the flow of her lecture. “Dr. O alleged that the complainant—you—locked him out, at which time he tossed a rock at an upstairs screen to get complainant's attention.”

“Our windows
happen
to have combination–storms and screens. The fact that glass didn't break is academic.”

Joey said, “I understand. Right now, I'd like to sit down, take your statement. Maybe talk things over.”

“I should have been the first one interviewed.
I
called you.”

“It's all part of the record, ma'am. It doesn't matter who goes first. You were locked inside and he was outside—”

“What's preventing him from escaping and lurking in the bushes until you leave, then coming back here to storm the house, or worse?”

“Me.” He motioned inside, as if the hospitality were his to dispense:
The couch would be fine. After you.

Christine hesitated, then led Joey past the mauve sateen perfection of her living room toward the kitchen. She stopped abruptly at the threshold. “Is he handcuffed?”

“Yes,” Joey lied. “I don't take any chances these days.” He patted his vest.

Mrs. Ouimet asked, “Is it true you got knocked to the ground by the force of the bullets?”

“So I've been told. It's kind of a blur.”

She frowned. “Are you on any pain medication right now?”

“Haven't needed it,” he said, then added, “Your husband did such a good job on my injuries that I haven't taken anything since the hospital. And I certainly wouldn't be driving if—”

“Good job?” she repeated scornfully. “My understanding is that you were examined and kept overnight for observation.”

“Still,” said Joey. “Dr. Ouimet came right over, and he stayed for at least an hour, and he was very upset when he saw what a close call it was.”

“Mr. Compassion,” she huffed. “Except that charity is supposed to begin at home.” She plucked the piece of paper he was carrying and studied it, front and back.

“Why don't we sit down,” said Joey.

“ ‘Incident-slash-offense report'! That could be anything. Don't you have one specifically for spousal abuse?”