Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [81]
“Small,” I said. “Just the family.”
“And will you be writing an obituary? We can help with that if you...”
“No obituary.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Are you sure?”
I nodded. The air in the room felt thick and unwholesome. The newspapers had already had enough to say about my dad, after the car accident, after his trial. Maybe they’d use the official notice of his death to dredge up the old stories, and write a piece about the disgraced schoolteacher’s unsavory demise. For all I knew, the shame could have been part of what killed him. My dad could have literally died of embarrassment.
Mr. Hoffman touched my arm. “Are you all right? Why don’t we sit down?” Kimmie poured me a glass of water, and I gulped it gratefully.
“Now. How many copies of the death certificate will you require?”
I looked at Kimmie, who shrugged. “I don’t know. What do I need them for?”
“Your father was a teacher, right?”
I nodded, not bothering to correct him, to explain that my father hadn’t been a teacher for years, that for years he hadn’t been anything but a junkie and a drunk.
“So he’ll have a checking account, a savings account. Investments. Cars and a house in his name . . .” I let him talk, not bothering to correct him as he listed the things that a man of my father’s age and station should have had. We agreed on twenty copies, I wrote him a check, shook his hand, and told him I’d see him at the cemetery.
My mother was waiting in the parking lot, with her cup of black coffee and a book on tape. “Greg called,” she said. The Camry started with an unpleasant grinding sound. I wondered how long it would run and if she’d have enough money to replace it, and whether I’d be able to help. “He’s not going to be able to make it.”
I nodded, unsurprised. Kimmie, meanwhile, was unzipping her backpack. “You hungry?”
I shook my head. Food sounded like a rumor from a distant planet. I couldn’t imagine ever being hungry again.
“Here,” she said, pulling out a granola bar and passing it to me. “Eat.”
I took a bite and chewed lethargically. Behind the wheel, my mother’s face was pale, her eyes circled with purplish half moons. “Can we stop here, please?” Kimmie asked from the backseat when we drove past a supermarket. She trotted inside and came out with a bouquet of flowers, white daisies and pink carnations wrapped in plastic.
We dropped my mother off at her beauty parlor and drove to the apartment building where my father had lived and died. I pressed the doorbell and we stood there, waiting. A pair of women talking in Spanish came out, followed by a grim-faced teenage boy in drooping jeans and a hoodie. MOVE-IN SPECIAL, announced a sagging banner hanging from the fence along the street.
Rita Devine hurried down the hallway. “Come in, come in. My God, I can’t believe it!” she said, in her thick Pittsburgh accent, the kind that would turn the home team from the Steelers into the Stillers and employed yinz as the plural of you. Her eyes darted from me to Kimmie and back again. “Yesterday there was a dead body on my bathroom floor!”
Bathroom, I thought, feeling my body register the news. The lady cop hadn’t mentioned that my father had died in the bathroom. Add one more part to the inglorious sum, this tawdry bad joke of a death. Of course he’d die in the bathroom. His life had turned into a punch line; why shouldn’t his death be one, too?
The apartment smelled cloyingly of air freshener and, underneath it, that strange, acrid odor I’d smelled before on my father’s clothing. Standing in the entryway, I could see the living room, still a mess, filled with jumbled piles and clusters of things—folded-over newspapers with half-completed Sudoku puzzles, soda cans, coffee cups, rolls of paper towels, magnifying glasses. I picked one of them up and peered through it, watching dust motes falling through a shaft of light.
“Your dad’s eyes got so bad.” Rita was wringing her hands. She was a short, chunky woman with a chipmunky face and two inches of gray showing at the roots of her hair,