• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 325 0

father’s too upset, Mrs. Cannon said, so I’m calling. Andy and I met at the airport and rented a car and drove to our house. Mrs. Rachlin greeted us very warmly and Mr. Rachlin waited in the living room, sitting next to my father, who was reading the paper. Mr. Rachlin jumped up to hug us. He jerked his head toward my father. “It hasn’t really sunk in,” he said, and Andy and I nodded. My father said, “Hey, kids.” Mrs. Cannon left a lasagna on the kitchen table. Broadway Delicatessen delivered platters twice, fried chicken from the hospital where my mother volunteered, and right before dinnertime, six pounds of corned beef and pastrami, with a pound each of cole slaw and kosher dills, from my father’s law firm. We let the Rachlins go home and I gave Mr. Rachlin a little kiss for my mother’s sake. My father unwrapped the corned beef and made himself a sandwich.

“You kids want some?”

We said we weren’t hungry. My father ate his sandwich over the sink.

“You slimmed down,” he said to Andy. “The trick is keeping it off. Discipline. Without that, the avoirdupois just piles back on.”

I put all the food in the fridge and, for the same reason that I still recut the flowers in a bouquet before I put them in a vase with an aspirin and always put scented soaps in with my underwear and cedar chips in with my sweaters in May, that is, because I am my mother’s daughter, I made us all sit down in the living room, To Talk.

“Go ahead,” my father said, flirting with a corner of the front page.

“Daddy,” is how I started, and I couldn’t say another word. On the phone I always called him Alvin, as if it were a joke.

Andy picked up the ball and ran with it. Nope, my father said. No sitting shiva; your mother and I didn’t believe in that. And no memorial service; your mother wouldn’t have wanted that. I couldn’t imagine why she wouldn’t have wanted it but my father was adamant about everything. Cremation, he said; your mother felt very strongly about that—you know she hated cemeteries. And I’ll take care of it.

“We’d like to participate,” I said.

“The fact is,” my father said, “I already had it taken care of.”

“Where’s the urn,” I said.

My father laughed. “What, you don’t believe me?” He pointed to the sideboard, and we saw a black box about the size of a lunch thermos and sealed with gold tape, sitting next to a bottle of Tia Maria, two bottles of sherry, and a bottle of Scotch someone gave my father fourteen years ago. Andy and I got up to look at it.

“And the will,” my brother said. “I’m just asking because—

“She left everything to me,” my father said, “but if you kids want something from her jewelry box, go ahead and take it.”

My father picked up the paper in both hands, and we went into their bedroom, which was as neat as it always had been, except for my father’s underwear on my mother’s bargello bench. Her jewelry box was on their dresser, centered beneath their big Venetian mirror.

“I wish she had something you’d want,” I said.

“She kept Poppa’s watch in the bottom,” he said. “I’ll take that. I don’t think the Erwin Pearl clip-ons are going to work for me.”

Our grandfather’s handsome old Hamilton watch was not in the bottom of her jewelry box. And her good pearls were gone and her diamond watch and the sapphire earrings and matching bracelet she’d bought for herself on her sixtieth birthday, cashing in the bonds her father left her.

“Daddy,” I said. “Mom’s good stuff is missing.”

“Nothing’s missing,” he said coldly, and I thought, Christ, I’m going to have to show him, but he cleared his throat and said, “I put all of her valuables in a safety-deposit box. With people in and out of the house, it seemed smart.”

There was no answer to that. “Oh, good thinking,” I said. I went back to their bedroom with a handful of plastic bags.

“Just take half of it,” I told Andy. “In case you have a daughter or you have a friend with a daughter or you start dressing up. Just take half of every fucking thing that’s in there.”

He picked up a turquoise bracelet and a handful of cheap Indian bangles and I nodded. I put the beautiful Italian