The Art of Saying Goodbye - Ellyn Bache [17]
“Some kind of experimental drugs, I think. I’m not exactly sure.” She lowers her voice. “It sounds like it’s pretty far advanced.” Then, perking up, Marie cocks her head. “One meal? What about that delicious potato salad you brought to the neighborhood picnic?”
Iona is on the verge of being drawn into this. Marie has a rare talent for calling up guilt. Uncharitably, Iona wonders if Marie also elicits this emotion in her husband, Dean, who actually is a dean of student affairs at the community college. His title draws forth sly smiles from the neighbors because Dean has long been rumored to have actual affairs with both students and staff members. Iona isn’t sure she believes this. Marie stays busy raising their eleven-year-old twins, a boy and girl with disturbingly similar faces, which Iona assumes will change once they hit puberty. Marie arranges carpools, serves as parent liaison at their Christian school, hosts a prayer circle from her church, and runs a bible study group that meets weekly at different people’s homes, like a floating crap game.
“It’s nice of you to think of this,” Iona finally replies, “but I doubt the Lamms are going to need dinner or any other meal. They have more friends than anyone I know. Even without a sign-up sheet, people are going to bring enough cakes and casseroles to fill a garage full of freezers.”
“Well, if you’re too tied up . . .”
“I’m not tied up.”
With maddening gentleness, Marie retrieves the clipboard from Iona’s hand. “Thanks anyway.”
Closing the door behind her, Iona is irritated because she’s vowed not to be sharp with Marie and always is, annoyed because she feels she’s somehow been gotten the better of, and angry because she’s been forced to take a stand on casseroles. Casseroles, for God’s sake. Twelve years ago, after her husband, Richard, was killed in a freak accident, her house had been overrun with them. Keeping track of whose dish was whose made Iona forever grateful for people with the sense to use disposable bakeware. At first there was the usual parade of visitors who came to pay their respects and eat some of the stuff. After a while, there were just Iona and her stepson, Jeff, Richard’s nineteen-year-old from his first marriage, who was there for the summer. Somehow the food kept coming, endless containers of lasagna, three-bean salad, tuna-noodle casserole, chicken divan, chili, cookies, cakes.
One day Jeff wandered into the kitchen in scruffy cutoff jeans and a T-shirt, scratching a three-day beard with one hand while running the other through his greasy straggle of shoulder-length hair. Opening the refrigerator, he peered in for a long time as if mystified by the contents. Iona was about to tell him to close the door, they didn’t need to refrigerate the whole kitchen, but before she could speak, he picked up a casserole from one of the shelves, turned around, and flung it onto the floor, where it broke into a dozen pieces. “What are we going to do with all this fucking food?”
Iona was too stunned to do anything but watch the shards of the fluted casserole dish, someone’s good stoneware, scatter across the vinyl, sending crockery and glops of macaroni and cheese into every corner. The commotion brought Richard’s dog, Chance, from the backyard to the porch, where he nosed at the screen in hopes of a snack. Iona ignored him. She stared at Jeff. Jeff stared back, waiting for a reaction.
“Let’s throw all the damned stuff out,” she said.
They mopped up the macaroni and cleaned out the refrigerator. For ten years, from the time Jeff was nine and Iona had married his father, until that day in the kitchen, the two of them had been wary of each other. Jeff resented Iona because she was not the real mother who had left him. Iona resented Jeff because he was living proof of Richard’s fertility, evidence that her failure to get pregnant year after year was her own fault, not her husband’s. Disposing of the funeral food together proved therapeutic. They reduced the refrigerator to bare white walls that reflected the bare-bones truths of their newly