The Art of Saying Goodbye - Ellyn Bache [104]
“Anything can happen,” Andrea says, more gently this time, “but I don’t think it will.” She unplugs the iron, sets it upright on the windowsill to cool. “I think the only thing that will happen to us in the near future is that we’ll go to California.” She begins to fold up the ironing board.
“I can’t go,” Courtney says flatly.
“It isn’t optional any more than the funeral is.”
“What if I get sick?”
“California isn’t a third world country. They have doctors.”
Courtney’s face hovers on the edge of composure, then crumples. She sinks onto the bed. “You act like you don’t even care,” she says in a voice that grows higher pitched with each new syllable.
Abandoning her efforts to fold up the ironing board, Andrea goes to the bed, sits beside her daughter, reaches for her. Courtney shucks her off. Andrea tries again. This time she gathers Courtney in and shifts her weight so her daughter can lean on her. She strokes her gel-slicked hair.
Courtney weeps for a while. “It’s scary,” she whispers, and Andrea knows she means by this not just having the sword of Damocles hanging over her own head, or watching it slice off someone else’s, but the entire specter of the unknown, which to a fourteen-year-old must be enormous.
“Scary, yes, but it could also be exciting. It could be like that”—Andrea struggles to think of something—“like that horrible roller coaster you like.”
“The Dive of Death.”
“Even if it’s not that great, it could be . . .” Andrea waves her free arm to indicate the room, the neighborhood, their world. “It could be better.”
Courtney leans into Andrea, buries her face in Andrea’s shoulder. Andrea pats her daughter’s back. Courtney blubbers. Courtney sobs. Courtney wails. It is the best thing that has happened in months.
When the sobbing slows, Andrea says, “You’re okay, Courtney. You really are.”
Courtney sniffs and sits up. She looks awful. “Yeah,” she says. “Well.”
And this is where John finds them a few minutes later, clinging to each other, faces red and blotchy, having said all they need to, for now, about life and death and California.
When Ginger and Eddie arrive at Andrews Mortuary, the parking lot is overflowing, as everyone knew it would be. They drop Rachel and Max at the door and then search for a space. Paisley wouldn’t allow a visitation and has given instructions that there be no lunch back at the house after the funeral. “One bash in the funeral parlor, and that’s it,” she’d told Andrea, who had passed the word.
Getting out of the car, clutching her coat to her chest, Ginger is glum and silent. Eddie is silent, too. Under these circumstances, he usually tries to tease her out of it.
“Sad?” she asks him.
“Just thinking.”
“About Paisley?”
“Did I ever tell you she was the one who named the Teacher Toolshed?”
“She did?” This is a surprise to Ginger. “I didn’t know you ever even had a conversation with her.”
“That was the only one. I ran into her one day not long after they moved up to Lindenwood Court. She was upset because she’d had a miscarriage not long before.”
“She had a miscarriage?”
“Yes, and when I mentioned the software, she seemed interested. I think it distracted her. I let her critique the names I’d thought up. She told me Teacher Tools sounded obscene. Teacher Gold Mine sounded like a game. Teacher Toolbox sounded too masculine.”
“I could have told you that.” Ginger hears the pettiness in her voice but is stung that she wasn’t consulted, no matter that years have passed and she never gave this a thought until today.
“We went through Teacher Treasures, Educator’s—Educator’s something or other, I can’t remember. And we ended up with the Teacher Toolshed.”
“How many elementary-school teachers do you know who have a toolshed? Most of them are women. If you rejected Teacher Toolbox as too masculine, why was Teacher Toolshed any better?”
“I can’t remember.” Eddie takes hold of her elbow. They become part of a subdued parade from parking lot to mortuary, a hum of muttered good mornings.
“Teacher Toolshed,” Ginger mutters. “I thought it was a product of your own bright mind.