Standing in the Rainbow - Fannie Flagg [191]
Monroe
BOBBY HAD FLOWN to New York for a round of business meetings. Fowler Poultry was in the process of merging with another, bigger company. On the third night, when he came back to his hotel he picked up at the desk the message Lois had left for him.
YOUR FRIEND MONROE NEWBERRY PASSED AWAY. FUNERAL IS WEDNESDAY AT 2. CALL ME AS SOON AS YOU GET THIS.
He went up to his room, sat down, and called her. Thank God for Lois. She had arranged everything with their travel agent and booked him on a flight from New York directly to Kansas City, where a rental car was reserved; he could drive to Elmwood Springs. After Bobby’s mother had died, Doc had gone to Seattle to live with Anna Lee, and Bobby had not been back to Elmwood Springs since the day of his mother’s funeral or seen Monroe for years. He had been so busy. But he and Monroe always called each other on their birthdays and at Christmas just to check in. They always planned to get together and do something but they had not. Both had always figured they had plenty of time. Now it was too late.
In Kansas City, his rental car was waiting and as he drove out onto the new superhighway he began to think about so many things he and Monroe had done together. Climbing the water tower, swimming at the Blue Devil, the train trip to the Boy Scout Jamboree, all the hundreds of times Monroe had spent the night at his house. The promise they’d made to one another that night, looking up at the stars with his grandmother, to call each other in the year 2000. Each had been best man at the other’s wedding.
But time and distance had taken its toll. Bobby had moved up in the world. He had new friends. He and Lois had bought a home in Shaker Heights in Cleveland, where the corporate offices were now located, and had joined the country club. Monroe had stayed at home to manage his wife’s father’s tire store.
Bobby arrived at the church around 1:40 and said the appropriate words to Monroe’s wife, Peggy, and a few other classmates. Then he walked over to the casket. He reached out and patted the body lying there, a body that was supposed to be Monroe but was only some cold, hard thing just taken out of a freezer. It startled him. Why was he so cold, had they put him in an icebox? What was lying there in a brown polyester suit and tie looked like a bad mannequin someone had made of Monroe as a joke. What was death anyway, some cruel magic trick pulled by the universe? One moment people are here and then somebody waves a cloth over them and in an instant they are gone.
What was once Monroe had disappeared. Where had he gone? Bobby wondered, just as he had as a child, what happened to the rabbit that the magician pulled out of the hat and made disappear—was Monroe hidden in a secret compartment somewhere waiting to come back?
He knew he should be feeling something more but he just felt numb, almost detached. And as he sat in the pew listening to the minister drone on and on, he realized that he had started to hum a little tune that for some unknown reason kept playing over and over in his head. A tune he had not sung in years. Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think./Enjoy yourself while you’re still in the pink. He knew he should be paying attention to the service but he could not concentrate. When it was over, the women, as usual, handled everything well; they even seemed to know when to cry. And how to cry, what casserole to make, and where to bring it. All the men did was show up and line up as pallbearers and even then they had to be told what to do. As he