The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [171]
Miss Napp walked her down the hall again, growing confidential. “Miss Buchstabe, you can’t imagine the things I’ve seen here at Golden Days. I could make your hair stand on end. The old do have to make way for the next generation and life is for the living, but there’s such a thing as taking time out to be respectful. Well, at G.D., that is not the policy and you are just whistling Dixie if you go around believing it is.” With that bright-faced admission, Miss Napp wrote out the address of the funeral home on a pad she was carrying and thrust it at Annie with fierce nods. “All a father’s children are equal in the eyes of death. You need to leave now to make the service on time.”
Annie drove to the nearby funeral parlor as quickly as she could. From her Blackberry, she left text messages for Dan Hart, briefly explaining where she was going and why. She stopped at a service station and tried to call Clark in Emerald but he was in the OR and couldn’t be reached. She tried to call Sam, but couldn’t reach her either; she was doubtless still on the road back to Emerald and there were pockets without service on that highway. Nor could she leave a message like, “There’s a chance Dad’s dead.”
She called Georgette. The sound of her old friend’s voice mail (“Hi there. You’ve reached the home of Dr. Georgette Nickerson, where I live with two unleashed Doberman pinschers”) was so reassuring that she could feel her chest loosening. “Georgette, it’s me. I guess you’ve left for work. The rest home down here in Miami says my dad died. People claiming to be his other children are having some kind of service for him right now. He was using the name Ronny Buchstabe. I can’t reach Clark. I don’t want to leave this message for Sam. Don’t tell her anything about Dad’s dying. I’m going to the funeral.”
That she couldn’t get in touch with Sam or Clark strangely distressed her. Here she was, twenty-six years old; it had been a long time since she’d lived at home. She didn’t even see them that often; might not visit them for months on end, might not think of them for weeks at a time. Yet suddenly their not being accessible to her was a wrench. Stopped at a red light, she watched her hand on the gearshift knob; her fingers looked blue; her chest hurt.
Ten minutes later Annie pulled into the new flat parking lot beside the entrance of Rest Eternal. It was an ugly place.
How awful that her father, who had always had, if not morals, certainly taste, should have to leave this world—if in fact he was dead—via such a tacky route as Rest Eternal, a tan concrete cube squeezed between a log-cabin-style restaurant called Good Mornin’ and a car lot called Touchdown that advertised itself with a ten-foot-high balloon of a football player kicking a big dollar sign over a goalpost.
A white stretch hearse waited by the curb at the Rest Eternal entrance. Inside the building, in a fake-marble lobby, an electronic wall scroll listed all the upcoming services one after another, as if the dead were stocks or headlines. Annie slipped quietly into the room where the “Coach Ronald Buchstabe Family Memorial” was just beginning.
In this small auditorium there were fifteen people in folding chairs gathered at one end. They sat dutifully listening to lugubrious music that poured like syrup from large speakers. Floral displays had been tidily spaced in front of a saturated blue curtain on a small stage.
The audience did not look like people Annie would have expected her father to have known, much less bred. The idea kept springing up like a punching bag that Miss Napp’s report of his death was a mistake. In what were clearly three generations of Buchstabes, Annie could see no resemblance to Jack Peregrine, nor to her aunt Sam, nor to herself. It was not possible that these Buchstabes were his. Huge and flat-featured, six men and women sat clumped together, flanked by even larger teenagers, all of whom—both male and female—had long lank brown hair. Two young women struggled to hold onto big red squirming babies.