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By Root 640 0

and won’t wake up.’ Well, you know that could have meant anything. Of course I made plans to get right over there but I did say, ‘Oh, sweetie, I bet she’s just tuckered out,’ and that’s when Agatha said, ‘She wouldn’t even wake for breakfast.’ I said, ‘Breakfast?’ I said, ‘This morning?’ Ian, would you believe it, those children had been on their own since the night before when she put them to bed. Then she went to bed herself and just, I don’t know, I mean there’s no sign she did it on purpose but when we walked in she was flat on her back and breathing so slowly, just a breath here and another breath there, and this pill bottle sat on her nightstand totally empty. There wasn’t any letter though or anything like that. So it couldn’t have been on purpose, right? But why would she take even one of those pills? Our family’s never held with sleeping pills. I always say, get up and scrub the floors if you can’t sleep! Do some reading! Improve your mind! Anyhow, we called the ambulance and they took her to Union Memorial. She had gone on too long, though. If they’d got to her right away, well, maybe; but she’d been lying there a whole night and a day and there wasn’t much they could do. She died this noon without ever regaining consciousness.”

Can’t we just back up and start over? Couldn’t I have one more chance?

“Ian?” his mother was saying. “Listen, don’t breathe a word to the children.”

He found his voice from somewhere. He said, “They don’t know yet?”

“No, and we’re not ever going to tell them.”

Maybe the shock had sent her around the bend. He said, “They’re going to have to find out sometime. How will you explain it when she doesn’t come home from the hospital?”

Or when she fails to show up for Thomas’s high-school graduation or Agatha’s wedding, he thought wildly, and he almost laughed.

“I mean we’re not going to tell them they might have saved her,” his mother said. “If they’d phoned earlier, I mean. They’d feel so guilty.”

He leaned against the wall and briefly closed his eyes.

“So we’ve set the funeral for Friday,” his mother said, “assuming her people agree to it. Did she ever happen to tell you who her people were?”

“She didn’t have any. You know that.”

“Well, distant relatives, though. Isn’t it odd? I don’t believe she once mentioned her maiden name.”

“Lucy … Dean,” Ian said. “Dean was her name.”

“No, Dean would have been her first husband’s name.”

“Oh.”

“There must be cousins or something, but the children couldn’t think who. We said where could we reach their daddy, then? They didn’t have the slightest idea.”

“He lives in Cheyenne, Wyoming,” Ian said. As clearly as if he’d been present, he saw Lucy heaving her package onto the post office counter. She looked up into Danny’s face and asked in her little cracked voice how much it would cost to airmail a bowling ball to Wyoming.

“Your father has already called every Dean in the Cheyenne directory,” his mother said, “but he came up empty. Now all we have to rely on is someone maybe seeing the obituary.”

Two boys were walking down the corridor. Ian turned so he was facing the other way.

“Ian? Are you there?”

“I’m here.”

“I told your father I wasn’t going to phone you. I said, why interrupt your studies? But he thought maybe you could come on account of the children. Well, goodness, I can handle the children but they’re so … the baby hasn’t slept since she got here. And Thomas just sits around hugging that doll of his, and Agatha’s being, oh, Agatha; you know how she is. Somehow I just never have felt like those two’s grandma. Isn’t that awful? They can’t help it! But somehow … and your sister’s all tied up with Davey’s measles …”

Ian could guess what this was leading to. He felt suddenly burdened.

“So your father said maybe you could come help out a few days.”

“I’ll catch the next Greyhound,” he said.

He rode to Baltimore that evening on a nearly empty bus, staring at his own reflection in the window. His eyes were deep black hollows and he appeared to have sharper cheekbones than he really did. He looked stark and angular, bitterly experienced.