The Last Bridge Page 3

  “Hands that touch dead bodies do not come near my beer,” I said.

  He smiled a car salesman kind of smile and laughed awkwardly. “You’re joking, right?” he said as he sat down on the bench across from me.

  “No,” I responded, looking back at the dancers. The guy’s fly was unzipped and her hand was lost in his pants. He was looking younger every second. The coroner ordered a beer from the waitress.

  “So, uh … Hal tells me you guys went to school together.”

  “Yup,” I said, not diverting my attention from the impromptu peep show on the dance floor. He looked over at the dancers and then back at me watching them and smiled.

  “That’s some dance move,” he said.

  I stared at him and tried to figure out if he was trying to be funny. I decided I needed more beer.

  We sat in silence as I watched chunks of frost slide slowly off the handle of his beer mug. I felt his eyes on me. I didn’t remember anything about him except his voice and that pen. I tried to remember what he looked like, not for any other reason than to be able to describe him in detail in case something happened to me. It was a little trick I picked up along the way.

  “I don’t think I know your real name,” he said, finally breaking a silence I was prepared to endure for much longer.

  Was he joking? He didn’t look like he was. “You didn’t notice my name on any of the paperwork? What about next of kin, what—”

  “Is your point?” he interrupted.

  “The point is you know my name is Alex … Alex Rucker. So why are you playing this stupid game with me?”

  He sat there stunned, shaking his head. “I wasn’t sure if you were Wendy or Alex. It was busy today; I didn’t check the paperwork that closely. I had to process the body.”

  I lifted my mug. “Well, here’s to processing.”

  He took a reluctant sip while I finished what was left of my beer and poured the last of the pitcher. “People call me Cat.”

  “Well, Alex,” he said as he finished his beer, “I’m sorry about your mother. She was a wonderful woman.” He stood up and put on his coat.

  “You knew her?” I said.

  “Yeah … we used to run into each other at the park after church. She would go there on Sundays to watch her grandson. I would go to read and to get some sun on my face. You know, being in my business …”

  “I’m sorry, but did you say her grandson?”

  “Yeah …”

  “My mother has no grandchildren. You must be thinking of someone else.”

  “Oh …” He hesitated and thought for a moment.

  I felt dizzy but tried to concentrate.

  “On Sundays she watched the kids climb that twisted apple tree with such interest that I assumed—”

  “Nope. No grandchildren.” That wasn’t completely true. I didn’t know for sure that Jared or Wendy had no kids. I reached into my pocket and threw a couple of singles on the table and struggled out of the booth. I felt a wave of nausea pass through me and lost my balance. The coroner put his arm out to steady me and out of instinct I flinched.

  “Thanks,” I said, more embarrassed at flinching than at almost passing out. He locked his arm under mine and helped me to the door.

  “Are you okay getting home?”

  I pulled away and grabbed the keys out of my pocket. “I’m fine,” I said, walking toward my car.

  “I’ll follow. Just to make sure.”

  “That’s not necessary.” I was perfectly prepared to lecture him on my infamous capacity for drinking and driving.

  “I’m afraid it is …. I don’t need the business.”

  He pulled behind me and waved when I looked in the rearview mirror.

  I pushed in the car lighter and for a moment considered smoking two cigarettes at the same time.

  THREE

  THE ALARM WENT off at seven in my old bedroom. Wendy shouted at Willard to turn it off. I was asleep in my father’s La-Z-Boy by the window in my parents’ bedroom. I wasn’t picky about where I slept as long as I’d had enough to drink to pass out.

  Jared was rustling in the kitchen. I could hear his sure-to-be-polished dress shoes traversing the floorboards as he put coffee on and prepared for the service. The white winter sun was warm on my face. Dust fairies danced around the orange-and-green afghan at the foot of the bed.

  Did she know she was making her bed for the last time?

  I pushed the footrest down on the chair and rolled to a stand. My legs, as usual, felt hollow and unsure of whether or not they wanted to carry me for the day. My head soon followed; why stay upright when you could be resting on a pillow? I battled my body on a daily basis. Most days it won, and I crawled back to wherever I came from—the bed, the floor. Today I rallied the troops: I asked the legs to stand, the head to focus, and the heart to stay hidden.

  I dressed slowly, putting on an old black cocktail dress I bought a couple of years ago to impress a club owner who could not be impressed. I forgot I had it until Ruth called. The dress was plain and fell above my knee, with a scoop neck and short sleeves. When I last wore it, the fit was snug against my body, showing off my “assets,” as my stripper friends call them. Now the dress was loose in all the places it should be tight, and communicated “wasting away” more than “come fuck me.”

  I hatched my panty hose from their egg-shaped home. Off-black—do the makers of cheap stockings have something against solid black? Even people who buy panty hose at Wal-Mart like real black. A line called “Funeral Black” resting in a plastic coffin would do just fine.

  I bent over, hooking my foot into the toe of the panty hose. My fingers couldn’t pull with authority. I was overwhelmed with the image of my own death. The thought sent me toppling onto the bed. Who would come to bury me? What would my note say? “He was everything I thought he was.”

  “Coming?” Jared yelled from the bottom of the stairs.

  “In a minute,” I answered, giving my panty hose a final tug.

  I slipped on the matching black pumps and went to my mother’s jewelry drawer in her dresser for earrings and a purse. I found the beaded bag she bought on her honeymoon in Atlantic City and stuffed my cigarettes, a lighter, and an airplane-size bottle of bourbon into its tiny opening. I would need a liquor store at some point, but that would get me through the service at least.

  I sat on Mom’s pink satin bench rifling through the stacks of brittle cardboard boxes filled with costume jewelry and found the rhinestone earrings I had given her before I left. She had admired them every time we passed Jacob’s Jewelry in town, so I bought them with my babysitting money and left them on her pillow with a note that said, “From your secret admirer.” She never said anything. I wondered if she knew who gave them to her. Now they sat in a Jacob’s box that said “Jacob’s Jewelry, Jewels Fit for a Queen!” and were wrapped in the original tissue paper and never worn.

  At the bottom of the box there was an old receipt from Abe’s Dairy folded in half. It was yellowed and crisp. On the front was an order for two gallons of whole milk, a large cottage cheese, and a quart of buttermilk with a notation that said “Weekly—Saturdays are preferable.” I almost threw it out until I saw a neatly written scribble on the back:

  7lbs 8ozs—20 inches.

  name ???????

  The word name was underlined five or six times. The blue script was hers, delicate and lovely. I looked up to see if anyone was watching me and caught my reflection the way you do when you walk down a crowded street and think you recognize the stranger in the store window. You look closer and realize it’s you.

  I folded the paper and returned it. I put on the earrings and stood up. With my black and rhinestones, I looked like I was attending a memorial service for a cabaret diva instead of a funeral in Bumfuck, Nowhere.

  “Cat, can I pull this off?” Wendy was standing in the doorway wearing a sleeveless black knit dress that was a size too small. Her stockings were true black, as were her gloves, which coiled up her arms like
fashionable garden snakes. She wore a pillbox hat that cast dark netting over her face. She looked like the widow of a mafioso.

  “You look fine,” I lied. I headed for the kitchen.

  She shuffled behind me, hovering as I stumbled on the stairs, not used to walking in heels.

  “Are you sure I look okay? As the youngest, I thought I should look, well, you know …” She struggled for the right adjective.

  “Sadder?” I said sarcastically.

  “Yes!” she answered. She held my shoulder as we came down the stairs.

  I turned around and looked at her. “You look blacker.”

  “I guess that will have to do.”

  Jared and Willard sat together drinking big mugs of coffee in their black suits. Willard looked old enough to be a father taking his grown-up children to mass. God, I wanted a drink. I felt my purse for the shape of the bottle and felt calmer.

  Jared and I had stayed up the night before setting up the living room and bringing down the folding chairs from the attic. The deli platters were in the fridge, the beer was on ice, and we had cleared an entire table just for the Bundt cakes. As long as we were talking about the service, we were okay.

  After deciding whose car we would take, we left for the church. Our Lady of Grace was anything but graceful. Looking at the façade, you had to wonder where all those dollars in the collection basket went—certainly not to capital improvements. The parking lot was almost as large as a football field—a callback to the days when going to mass was more than a birth/death thing, and as much a part of life as marriage and Saturday night sex. My mother’s faith was old-fashioned. She believed the church took care of you, and in return, she took care of it. She had tea and potlucks with her fellow parishioners and never told anyone about the monster living in her house.

  The parking lot was filling quickly with mourners. I was not surprised. My mother was well loved, and even though my father tried to keep her to himself, she had managed at one time or another to bestow her kindness on almost everyone.

  It was a brittle day. The branches on the trees creaked like the bones on a skeleton waving in the wind. Nothing green would come this way until April. I would be long gone by then.

  Jared and Wendy blessed themselves with holy water as we entered the chapel. I passed them and ended up walking down the aisle alone, like a bride who has been jilted and doesn’t know it yet.

  The church was warm and had the faint smell of fireplace ash mixed with lemon furniture polish. High behind me “Amazing Grace” boomed from a bulbous organ that was made for a better place.

  The front pews were full of families and couples while stragglers and loners punctuated the back rows. As I made my way to the altar, I felt the eyes of the town watching me, hoping to see if they could find something in my manner that might reveal what had happened to me.

  “She took off. No one ever heard from her again.”

  “Poor Maureen, all alone with that man.”

  As we passed Ruth Igby, I looked at her and she turned quickly away, as did most of the women when I attempted to make eye contact. I reached back and took Jared’s arm, needing something to steady myself even if it was him. “You okay?” he whispered in my ear, brushing my hair off my forehead.

  I nodded, feeling worse for needing him.

  No one from the family spoke. We agreed my mother would have wanted the priest to handle everything. The service was long and filled with lots of standing, sitting, kneeling, hymns, bowed heads, and moments for reflection. As a little girl I would sing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” quietly to myself whenever we had to recite a prayer or sing. My mother would squeeze my shoulder and shake her head in disapproval. I didn’t care; I thought God would appreciate hearing something a little different.

  We piled out of the church and stood at the entrance and thanked everyone for coming and invited them back to the house. I slipped away and found the ladies’ room and my airplane-size bottle of courage in the basement. I needed more to drink but was too far from a liquor store. I thought about stealing wine from the rectory but thought better of it.

  The wait at the grave site was unendurable. My mother had planned every detail, down to the coffin, the hymns at the service, and where she would be buried. She had left that information with our parish priest, who had made most of the arrangements as a personal favor to her. Rather than helping her with her funeral, I wondered why he didn’t consider keeping her from killing herself.

  Mom was buried in Calvary Cemetery next to her parents on the top of the windiest hill in the windiest section of town. There was an empty space next to her reserved for my father. No plots had been purchased for the kiddies—we’d be as alone in death as we were in life.

  “The views are great here, aren’t they?” Father O’Malley said to Jared and me when he took us to meet with the cemetery administrator yesterday. “Your mother will be happy here.”

  “I’m so glad,” I lied. I was dying to ask him if Mom was really going to go to heaven: I thought suicide was a sin. I’m guessing my mother took care of that already. She probably dropped a few extra singles in the basket, made two stews for potluck night, and, of course, had a last confession.

  Most of the mourners followed us to the grave site. The air was so cold and dry, it felt as if it were slashing my face as it tore up and over the mound that was to be my mother’s final resting place. The priest recited a few prayers and some crap in Latin and asked us if we wanted to say anything. None of us did. Wendy cried as Willard held her and chewed on a toothpick. Jared stood as still as a soldier on guard duty. I felt an intense pressure on the balls of my feet from wearing high heels in the mud. My legs felt chapped and exposed. My body had cooperated: legs were standing, head was focused, and my heart remained hidden. My buzz was wearing off.

  I counted twelve Bundt cakes. This was part of Wilton tradition: a Bundt cake for a death, a blanket for a birth, a casserole for a heart attack. The cakes were stacking up on the card table; there were three lemon with yellow drip icing, four chocolate with coconut centers, two cinnamon swirl with coffee-cake-crunch topping, and three chocolate mousse, which were made from my mother’s favorite recipe. She invented the chocolate mousse Bundt cake after her thirtieth or fortieth funeral. She decided there had to be a different kind a woman could bring to a wake, so she came up with her own. It never occurred to her that she could have brought something else, like a ham or a salad; she knew that Bundt was the tradition and she worked within her limits. Her chocolate mousse cake became so popular that we suspected some people looked forward to the next death just so they could have a piece. Today no one touched any of them, not even the mousse ones.

  I tried to be polite to our guests. Many offered their condolences and all of them knew better than to wish my father a speedy recovery. Although the circumstances surrounding my departure remained a mystery, it was no secret that it might have had something to do with my father, and out of respect, no one mentioned his name all evening. It was clear from the way people checked out the place that it had been a while since my parents had company. Although the house looked the same to me, I was aware that everything had aged, but it still gave me the feeling of stepping back in time.

  Andrew Reilly, County Coroner, stopped by and paid his respects. He had been at the service as well. He introduced himself to Jared and Wendy and made a point of telling them how brave I had been at the morgue.

  “Cat?” Wendy snorted. “She runs from everything.”

  Andrew smiled politely and looked at me. “I don’t see her running now,” he said and then excused himself. As he left the room he put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed it.

  I managed to get away from the crowd and found a spot in the kitchen. I opened the back door and faced the driveway as I smoked a butt and gulped Iron City beer and stared at the fat moon hanging in the winter sky.

  He isn’t who you think he is ….

  Jared stood next to me and took in a few breaths of the crisp air. It w
as more refreshing than the moist, yeasty, moth-ball-scented atmosphere in the house.

  In the living room I could hear Wendy ogling over the Smythsons’ granddaughter. “She’s so beautiful! Willard?” She wandered through the crowd looking for Willard, who was in the dining room skimming my mother’s collection of the Reader’s Digest Condensed versions of the classics.

  The doorbell rang.

  “Your turn,” Jared said.

  “I got the last one,” I lied. He went to the door as I walked to the refrigerator and pulled out another bottle of the good beer I had stashed and drank it like it was bottled water. I left the back door open, but latched the screen door to keep it from banging.

  Since returning from the service there had been a steady flow of mourners coming through the front door. Although I was forced to do a few meet-and-greets, I managed to stay in the kitchen for most of the evening. It was the safest place, as everyone who wasn’t family (or Ruth Igby) came to the front door when they visited. The rest of us used the back door.

  I sat at the kitchen table and stared at the containers of food stacked in towers on the counters. Death sure makes people hungry. It makes me thirsty. I went for another beer. I was feeling lightheaded.

  There was a shuffling at the back stoop like someone was shaking snow off their shoes.

  “Hello?” a man’s voice sounded through the screen door. The tone made the hair on the back of my neck bristle.

  “Alex, can you get me two Cokes?” Jared yelled from the living room.

  “Hello?” I shivered as I moved unsteadily toward the sound.

  “Alex?” Jared’s voice was getting closer.

  The screen door shook; he was trying to get in. I stepped into view. “Hello?” he said as he placed his hand to his forehead and pressed his face against the screen to get a look at who was standing before him.

  The voice matched the body: smooth, tall, and copper-colored at the top. Snow swirled in a halo around the outside light as he stepped back.

  “Holy shit!” Jared’s voice cracked in surprise. He had come into the kitchen in search of the Cokes and found me standing glacier-still in front of the door. There was no slow-motion revelation. There was nothing except the cold, hard drop of fear—the feeling you get when you look down from the top of the Empire State Building and suddenly know exactly what it feels like to fall a great distance.