Father Gary waited a respectful amount of time for Colette to stop crying. When she didn’t, he said, “The sign-language interpreter will arrive shortly, at eleven-thirty. We’ll end the service by playing Van Morrison.”
“ ‘Astral Weeks.’ ” I pulled the album from my purse. “It’s track one.”
Father Gary was the priest at Dad’s Catholic church. Colette and I were talking with him in what I assumed was the rectory, but it may have been an office. I didn’t really know, since my Jewish mother hadn’t exactly encouraged churchgoing, and Dad only went to mass when his kids weren’t around. Father Gary was unruffled and patient, and I thought I smelled incense on his breath. But, then, did priests swallow incense? I wondered, while my stepmother wailed.
“And the casket won’t be open, Father?” Colette said. She twisted a tissue between her fingers, flecks of white drifting to the carpet. “My husband thought that was kind of—I don’t know—icky?”
“Odious,” I supplied.
“The service will be a fitting tribute to Jim,” Father Gary said, rising to his feet, and then went on to add something Jesus-y, which I didn’t follow.
I hooked my arms under Colette’s armpits and gently helped her up. “Here we go,” I said, unfolding her like a camping chair. I imagined it was what Dad would have done.
Over the past two days, I’d called and emailed everyone he knew, asking them to distribute the details of the service. Because there was almost no money in Dad and Colette’s checking account, I’d put the deposit for the funeral on my credit card. I felt that if I stopped organizing, I might die too. Nobody was acting normal. Van was playing on his phone from morning to night, and Sadie and Anna blitzed themselves with television. Colette spent hours on the couch under an afghan blanket, reading my father’s high school yearbook as if it were a novel. Later, when she fell asleep, I saw that she’d left a mug of tea on top of the yearbook, The Castle Hill Moat. When I picked it up to wash it, there was a ring of damp encircling the word Moat.
While she napped, I had tiptoed upstairs to Dad and Colette’s bedroom. Colette’s bedroom now, possession shifting even as I passed the dresser and the bed, the wooden rocking chair, the chest with Van’s baby clothes, the fan rotating slowly on its axis. I grasped the knob of his closet door in my hand until it jiggled loose in its joint. The door had been shut firmly, and in chafing the old wood against the frame and yanking, I knew I was acting out violence.
Inside, his sweaters were folded on shelves, shirts hung from hangers. His shoes were lined up in pairs like schoolchildren. As I stood before his clothes, marked by his familiar smell, a groan welled up and burst from my throat. It felt as if the air in the closet contained him. Nutty, sweet, laced with the clean breeze of his cologne. I touched the leg of his one suit, kept for formal events and graduations, the suit he would have worn to his funeral had he lived to attend it.
Once, when I was three or four, I had been with him in a crowded room and lost him among the legs of strangers. When I heard his voice behind me, “Ellie, here I am”—the warmth with which he said my name—I had clasped myself against his knee, the rough material of his suit against my cheek. Flooded with a child’s uncomplicated love. My father!
I said aloud, “Here I am, Dad.” My lips trembled. I closed his closet door and opened it again. The air inside was dull, swimmy with dust. I couldn’t smell him anymore.
When my mother called to tell me, two days earlier, I had been at an office party at the editor-in-chief’s house. My Apogee colleagues and I were seated in Steve Glanz’s living room, balancing plates of quiche on our knees. Steve had insisted we come over for brunch before spending the afternoon in a “working session.”
My mother never called at random times; our calls were scheduled in advance via emails with subject lines like “From Your Mother.” I knew instantly that something was wrong.
“Ellie? Terrible news. Your father is gone,” she said. I excused myself and took my phone into the bathroom.
I almost asked where he went.
My mother went on. “I’m so sorry, honey.” When she spoke again, her voice was anguished. “I can’t believe it. Your father is gone.”
I looked up and saw myself in the mirror. I was clutching a fork, which I had accidentally taken with me. Bits of egg were stuck to the prongs. Blood thudded in my ears. My mother was still talking. “…Colette needs your help. I don’t think she’s much with details.”
“How do you know?”
“Know what?”
“My dad,” I said.
“Colette called me. She thought it would be better if I called you.”
“Mom?”
“I’m going to have Boris drive me to the airport. He found me a direct flight to D.C. I’m coming,” she said. “Hang on, I’ll be there soon.”
I managed to leave the bathroom and find Jane, my boss, the sole adult in a room full of millennial reporters. “Jane,” I said. “My dad died.” I watched her face drop from surprise to concern. Why did concern always seem to collect at the corners of mouths? Concern collection, I thought. My father is dead. Where was he? I had to get to him. How would I get to him?
“Oh my God, Ellie, I’m so sorry,” Jane said.
“I have to go.”
“Go,” she said, whisking me toward the door. The angularity of her body, her mind, was now like an arrow, shooting forward, helping me.
“But Steve.” I doubted the editor-in-chief of Apogee would take note of my absence from his brunch; he was like a machine that turned small talk into social capital.
“Don’t worry about Steve.”
I turned. I couldn’t feel my feet on the ground; it was as though I were walking on fog.
“How are you getting home?” Jane asked.
“I have my bike.”
She pulled out her phone. “I’m calling you a cab. You can’t be biking in this state. I took the Metro here, otherwise I’d drive you. My father died when I was seventeen, and not a day goes by when I don’t think of him,” Jane said. “I’m really—”
“Okay,” I said, unable to listen anymore. Jane’s talking like this was making the news seem true. I opened the door and walked out into the hallway, which still smelled like the bacon we’d eaten for brunch.
What I later learned: Dad hadn’t been feeling well and had stayed in bed later than usual that day. Colette, an early riser, heard a crash while she was in the kitchen making coffee and ran upstairs to find that he’d fallen to the floor in his blue pajamas, clutching at his chest. She called 911 and performed CPR for as long as she could, breathing air into his lungs and beating her hands against his chest. When she couldn’t do it any longer, she woke Sadie. They leaned over him. They asked him to come back. My sister’s red hair fell into her eyes as she pressed down on the hollow space between his ribs. She leaned into him with all her strength. “Dad, don’t go!” she cried. “Dad!” It took seventeen minutes for the ambulance to make it to their door. By then, he was gone. An hour south in D.C., I slept soundly.
Outside it was a brilliant day, the sky safe and blue, clouds the color of milk. People began arriving through the open doors with somber expressions, and by ten minutes to noon, the chapel was packed. My mother had flown in from Florida, where she lived with her husband, Dr. Boris Gettleman, an allergist who allowed me to call him Boris, but whom all my friends had to refer to as Dr. Gettleman. I saw with relief that Mom had refrained from wearing anything the color of passion fruit or mango, which had dominated her wardrobe since she’d followed Dr. Boris Gettleman to Tallahassee, “the city for all seasons.” Like me, she was very tall; unlike me, she had zero percent body fat, and looking at her in her brown suit with her silvery bangles and dangling earrings, I thought she looked like an ornamental tree. Barbara, wife number two, had chosen to sit in the third row, clutching a black raincoat on her lap, her hair in its usual tight bun.
I recognized my father’s colleagues from Chesapeake College, as well as various local businesspeople and neighbors. I wondered crossly if they had come just to see all three wives in the same room and realized my sadness was making me uncharitable, sullen. Colette’s artsy friends occupied one of the side aisles. High school friends of Sadie and Anna clustered in the middle rows, wearing short black party dresses that they hadn’t expected to need for an occasion like this, and Van’s friends milled around looking bewildered and formal in shiny shoes. Two of them found Van at the front of the room and signed something before enveloping him in a hug. I pulled out my phone and tapped out a quick text: I’m so glad your friends are here. Van was better at using a cell phone than anyone I knew; it was an essential tool of communication in our family.
I greeted Bruce, a homeless Vietnam vet who often occupied the faded green bench in the center of town, serenading passersby with a chewed-up voice. Dad would sometimes join him for a rendition of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” on his way to get his morning paper. I was touched to see that Bruce was wearing a button-down shirt, his hair ridged with comb lines.
I glanced at the text Lucas had sent me earlier, using it now to calm myself. He’d written, I’m picturing you now, reading your father’s poem at the service. You’ll be wonderful. He would be so proud of you. I mean he was so proud of you. And so am I.
When the service started and Father Gary summoned me, I walked to the pulpit with my back to the bodies, hearing rustling, cough drops being unwrapped, the hush of people settling into pews. I opened the notebook where I’d transcribed Dad’s poem and leaned over the microphone, a little red light pulsing on its base. I knew the poem by heart but worried I would stumble. But no, I would be wonderful; Lucas said I would. I would find a way to summon a reasonable voice, not a sob. I was seconds away from having to speak, but I still didn’t know how that would happen.
Next to me, the ASL interpreter shifted, waiting for me to begin. The whole town peered up at me, eyes bright. Dad’s poem “The Catch” began with the line but, if time could kneel…I wondered how the ASL interpreter would translate that line. Colette once told me that conjunctions worked differently in sign language, though I couldn’t recall how. Maybe she’d said that there weren’t words for and or but in sign language. Could that be it? It made no sense to me, because and linked ideas together, whereas but implied a contrast to what had come before.
In “The Catch,” nothing came before but. The reader had to guess what the speaker had relayed before the poem began. The great absence at the beginning was the mystery. I took a breath and began to read.
but,
if time could kneel, as a catcher
shifts to his knees when the pitch is wild
For the summer we played in ruffled green grass,
or indoors if the sky shivered with rain,
Tossing the ball from end to end
in dusty store aisles.
A door clicked at the back of the chapel, echoing across the room to where I stood. Someone had entered and was leaning against a column behind the pews. The figure removed a gauzy black scarf that had been wound around her head, letting loose a mass of dark hair that fell against her pale skin. From where I stood, she looked beautiful and darkly mysterious, like a lagoon. Who was she?
I steadied myself, studying the glass chandelier that swooped from the ceiling. There was the ancient smell of church, the treated-wood beams, damp plaster, and the smell of grief from the front row. The smell of not me not me not me from the rows beyond. I continued reading.
Would the solid walls still echo with the hollow
slaps of our hands to leather mitts,
Or would I leave you there
your arms outstretched
as if to receive me.
When I finished the poem and looked up, the woman who had come in during the service had taken a seat. She was holding a tissue to her nose, and her shoulders were shaking. What was a strange woman doing crying at my father’s funeral?
From the first row, Colette smiled at me, her chin trembling. Beside her, Anna was pressing her fists into her cheeks. Sadie held Van’s arm. The sign-language interpreter’s hands came to rest by her sides, a symphony conductor in the beat before the applause. But there was no applause, of course. I stepped down from the pulpit, my public celebration of my father done. I imagined him sitting in the audience, holding a video camera, proudly taping my performance, as he had for my childhood musicals and readings and ball games. When a sob rose up through my throat, I let it come.
Colette’s friends had supplied dishes laid out neatly on the kitchen table at my father’s house—thick ham slices with grainy mustard, deviled eggs sprinkled with paprika, pickled onions and gherkins, little white cakes laced with filigrees of pastel icing, a mound of potato salad with plastic spoons sticking out of it like shovels from a grave. I scooped food onto a plate and moved through a sea of people, floating. Their heads were enormous. They said, “Your father bailed me out of jail—twice—when he didn’t have any money to spare.” They said, “Your dad saved me.” They said, “You’re a lucky girl to have had a father like Jim.”
Lucky, lucky, lucky girl. Beautiful speech. What a tragedy. Here’s some cake. Here are some words. I took a forkful of potato salad and chewed it too many times, until it slimed down my throat. Harris, the young guy from the grocery store, swam up in front of me. “Sorry for your loss. He was a nice man,” Harris said.
“Fifty-two,” I said. Had Harris asked me how old Dad was? Harris was balancing a plate of ham and a glass of juice in one hand. I strained to see if my father’s watch was on either of his wrists, but they were covered by the sleeves of an extra-large suit jacket that had clearly been borrowed for the occasion.
Harris sipped from his juice. “If it’s okay to ask, how’d he die?”
“Heart attack.”
Dad was gone in less than than five minutes, Colette had told me. She was trying to be comforting, but I wanted to know everything about his death. What color was his body? What expression was on his face? What did it look like when his soul left? What does a body look like when the soul is gone?
“I wasn’t here,” I told Harris. “It was Summer Christmas Eve, and I always come home for Summer Christmas, but I wasn’t here.” Lucas had invited me to meet at the last minute; I’d made an impulsive decision to be with him, telling my father that I had too much work to come home.
“Oh, okay. Summer Christmas. That’s why you guys have a tree up.” The tree stood in the corner, accosted by the air conditioner in the window behind it. People kept bumping into it in search of a cool spot. Ornaments were on the floor, a string of cranberries loosed from the branches.
“I didn’t know he was going to die,” I said. My voice cracked and I did nothing to smooth it over.
“I’m sorry.” Harris darted forward to touch my arm, jerking quickly away. Looking down, I spied my father’s watch in the dark cavern of his jacket sleeve. Give it back! I wanted to say. I needed every one of my father’s possessions, the number of which would only now diminish, never grow. My tongue was dry in my mouth. I swallowed.
“You can eat,” my mother said, suddenly at my side. She was holding a plate with half of an orange and four almonds on it and peering at the heaps of mayonnaised salads on mine.
Your father is dead and you can eat.
Your father is dead but you can eat.
Your father is dead so you can eat.
She took an almond off her plate and bit it in half. “I wish there was lighter food. All this heavy stuff isn’t good when you’re having emotions.”
“An almond is a bite-sized food, Mom. Just put the whole stupid thing in your mouth.”
“There’s no need to get testy, Ellie.”
“You’re complaining about the buffet at Dad’s funeral.”
“Sweetheart, I’m trying to help you.” She put her plate down and wiped her hands together as if wicking the feeling of food from her fingers. “I know how it is. When my father died, I couldn’t eat for weeks. Then slowly things got a little better, and I started eating, but only the foods I remembered him loving. He used to eat a lot of borscht, which I’ve never liked, but those months after he left us, I had no taste for anything else. Do you remember when I used to make those pots of borscht? I called it purple soup. Let’s see, you would have been six or seven. It turns out borscht is very slimming.”
As my mother talked, I searched the crowd. A group of heads moved off toward the drinks table, and in the gap they made, I spied Colette at the sink with Van, blotting at his tie with a wet paper towel. A couple who lived down the hill pounced on Colette as she held Van’s tie in her hands. “Such a tragedy,” the woman said.
Someone had propped open the back door, and people were emptying out onto the lawn for fresh air. The sounds of the party there were less constrained; there was laughter, voices raised. I strained to see the strange woman in her long black scarf, the woman who had come late, but there were only ordinary townspeople stuffed into church clothes. That woman hadn’t looked like she belonged in this town my father had loved, where little kids pressed their noses against glass cases of saltwater taffy and you could say hi to the teenage clerk at the grocery store and know his grandmother and know his name.
Next to the buffet, I found the guest book from the funeral and skimmed the names and addresses, looking for anyone unfamiliar. My eye caught an entry near the bottom for a Linda T., who listed an address in Lucknow, Maryland. I whipped out my phone and snapped a photo.
“Water?” My mother pressed a cup into my hand. “I’ve been drinking eight cups a day, especially now. We need to stay hydrated. Having intense feelings is very taxing.”
“You don’t have to be here if you find it taxing.”
“Sweetheart, Boris and I would like you to visit us later this summer. He’s putting a small dipping pool in the yard by the orange tree, near where I planted those Drift roses last year? It’s going to be lovely. We’ll figure out some dates and run them by you.”
“Sure, Mom,” I said. I had no idea what she was talking about. I’d been to visit her in Florida only twice. Any break I’d had during college, I preferred to go home to see Dad. Anyway, later in the summer was lifetimes away. I had a job in D.C., and I wanted to be around for when Lucas was free.
Barbara was on the other side of the kitchen, still holding her raincoat, swiveling slowly while looking around the room. Sadie came in through the back door and I tried to catch her eye, but she walked straight across the room to her mother, who dropped her coat and took Sadie into her arms.
So this was how it would be. Our father dead, we would go to our separate mothers for comfort. A lozenge of pain clogged my throat; faltering, I leaned against my mother’s shoulder.
“Ohh!” She jutted her chin out. “That Barbara has always been an unpleasant woman. So sharp you could use her to cut butter.”
Five of us now. Colette, Van, Sadie, Anna, and I sat in the living room among sweating, half-empty glasses. The air conditioner had given a final few chugs and puttered out, unequal to the task of cooling a three-hour funeral reception. All my manic energy was gone, and my face ached as though I’d been struck. I thought to rouse myself to put a load in the dishwasher, to breathe in hot lemony soap, but I couldn’t move. The truth was I hadn’t been cleaning up for Colette or my siblings. I’d done it for my father. Now that the funeral was over, he was seeping away: All the dishwashing in the world couldn’t prevent it. Tomorrow I would be on a train from Maryland back to Washington, and Sadie and Anna would relocate to their mother’s house. I’d overheard them saying that they wouldn’t need to come to Dad’s house as much anymore. Van and Colette would remain here; six would become five would become two.
“Here’s one nice thing,” Colette said. Van’s feet were resting on her knees as he thumbed his phone. Sadie and Anna, curled together on the sofa, no longer at odds, had been reading old children’s books aloud, regressing in their sadness. A ragged copy of Randy the Hippopotamus, their childhood favorite, was open on Anna’s lap.
“Your dad didn’t have much money to leave us, obviously,” Colette said. “And that’s something we’ll have to figure out. But we’ll be good soldiers, won’t we?” She patted Van’s leg, telling him to watch her while she signed. “The good thing is that he left instructions about things he wanted us to have. Special objects he felt would be meaningful to each of us.”
“What are they?” Anna asked.
“He listed them in his will. I can give them out in the morning,” Colette said.
“I want mine now,” I said, thinking of Dad’s lucky baseball, how it would be some small comfort to keep with me always. From where I was sitting, I could see the ball across the room, a bright spot on the shelf above his desk, the flecks of grass and mud that textured it, worn into the leather over decades in his hands.
“Upstairs,” Colette was saying. “Get the folder on the bed.”
I went upstairs and pushed the bedroom door open. There were two patches of evening sun on the unmade bed, separated by the shadow of the window casement. On the nightstand was a biography of Bruce Springsteen, the jacket flap holding the last page Dad had read. If there was a father-aged white man in America who wasn’t obsessed with Bruce Springsteen, I had yet to meet him. But even this bit of contrivance was endearing—my father obsessing over an obvious musician. I knelt on the floor on Dad’s side of the bed, where he had fallen. The floor was scuffed and uneven, with dark slats where the boards didn’t quite line up. He clutched his chest, Colette had said. I straightened up and my head went fuzzy, the tree outside blurred yellow in the window, and the bed was one white wash. Then my breath hitched, and my eyes sought the manila folder lying on the comforter. “Last Will and Testament—James Adler” was written on the folder’s tab in Dad’s handwriting. On my way downstairs, I peeked inside at the typed pages of legal jargon but couldn’t make anything out.
Colette seemed to know exactly which page to turn to. She started with Van, the youngest, her own child, who got all of Dad’s Van Morrison records. Van dragged them out of the cabinet under the TV and sat on the floor, flipping through them, running his fingers over the album covers. He signed to Colette, rubbed his wrist across his forehead; he looked pleased. Van was, after all, Van Morrison’s namesake, and even though he couldn’t hear the songs, Dad had taught Van all the lyrics in sign language. I imagined he would display the record covers in his room. We could frame them for him so they’d never deteriorate, preserve them behind glass like pinned butterflies.
Dad had left Anna his box set of Jerry Lewis movies. They shared a love for slapstick and would watch The Bellboy on lazy weekend afternoons, drawing the shades to produce a murky light ideal for immersing themselves in the physical comedy of Jerry Lewis, who, dressed in a bellboy’s uniform, juggled the four rotary phones that rang angrily at his desk under a fake palm.
“Thank you, Colette. Thank you, Dad,” Anna said, brushing aside Randy the Hippopotamus to take the films on her lap. Her eyes were shining; she’d gotten what she wanted; Dad had known her so well.
Instinctively, I began to feel afraid. Sadie stood up and paced from Dad’s desk in the corner to the bay window. She glanced down with each step, as though to confirm that everything was still there—her pert little breasts, her flat stomach, freckles smashed across her arms two shades lighter than her hair. What had he left her?
I looked around the room at the things my father had spent a lifetime acquiring: the brass lamps, three bookcases crammed full of books, an old barn door repurposed as a coffee table, an armoire loaded with CDs, the oil painting of a pastoral landscape done in rich, dark colors.
“ ‘For Sadie, I’m leaving my hats,’ ” Colette read. Sadie leapt up and emerged from the hall closet with a plastic bin stuffed with baseball caps and fedoras in various patterns and hues. “I never knew a man who could pull off a fedora until I met your father,” Colette said.
“If he pulled it off, then he wouldn’t be wearing it,” I said without thinking. It was the kind of thing I would’ve said to my dad, and he would have laughed.
“What?” Colette asked. “If he pulled it off…?”
“Never mind,” I said.
Sadie picked up a dusky-purple fedora, slid the brim through her fingers. “I’m going to sew a ribbon onto this one.” She looked up at us, her face bright. It wasn’t what I would have done, repurposing Dad’s clothes, but Sadie had an eye for bold design, and I knew that whatever she did with his hats would be impressive and, more important, that Dad would have been pleased.
“And for Ellie—” Colette flipped the page over and cleared her throat. “It says here Ellie will get the glow-in-the-dark gingerbread-man tie rack.”
“The glow-in-the-dark gingerbread-man tie rack,” I repeated.
Colette nodded. She flipped the page over again, squinted at it, flipped it back.
“Let me see,” I said.
I took the pages from her and scanned for my name. For Eleanor, the glow-in-the-dark gingerbread-man tie rack. “What is that?”
Sadie shook her head. “I think I know. Hold on.” She went upstairs and came down a few moments later with a clump of ties Dad never wore, shucking them off like bananas from a tree. “Is this it?” Sadie held up a plastic gingerbread man with a bulky red smile. Hooks stretched down the length of its torso and arms. The whole thing cast a greenish light, like glow-in-the-dark stars pasted above a bunk bed.
“The baseball,” I said hoarsely.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before,” Colette said. “I guess it’s always been covered with ties.”
“Did Dad tell you anything about why—” I stumbled.
“He didn’t say anything,” Colette answered.
“I talked to him the day before he died,” I said. “And every day before that.” I took the gingerbread man from Sadie. On its face were two close-set black eyes shaped like gumdrops.
“I know you did, honey. You were so close.”
For a moment we were still, gazing out the window. The creek rustled and frogs sang from its cold, reedy water. There were bees humming among the tomato plants. Van’s red bicycle was on its side in the grass. A stranger passing along the road might have thought we lived happily, that we lived well.
“Don’t take this as a referendum about his love for you,” Colette said.
I sat up straight. “You mean indication. A referendum is a decision made by many people.” I was aware of my pedantry but did nothing to soften it. My father would never have made such a mistake. “I assume this was not a decision made by other people?”
Colette shook her head.
“What did you get?”
“I got the painting,” she said softly.
The oil painting of the Patuxent River hung on the wall between two ladder-back chairs. The river curved around a bend of grassland in a pink dusk. On the bank were two goats and several sheep, a wild turkey, a pair of speckled white ponies. A thin brown boat held a fisherman in a wide cap, and some distance away, a fish arced out of the water, its scales reflecting the pink sky.
We used to pose in front of this painting for our yearly family photo. I would sit on the far right underneath the fish, and next to me was Colette, who sat next to Dad, who posed next to Anna and Sadie. Van, the youngest, sat in the middle, on a low stool. Everything, everyone, in its place. Did my father put me on the end? Or did I put myself there?
With sudden force I shot up from my seat and snatched the baseball from the shelf above Dad’s desk. “I want his lucky baseball. He never wrote a poem without it. Remember? He’d sit at his desk and toss it up and down. He put it in my crib when I was a baby.”
Colette looked down at the floor. “Your dad actually left the baseball to someone else.”
“Who?” I said. “Is it Van?” The two of them had played catch in the yard on Summer Thanksgiving.
“Not Van. L somebody or other.” Colette ruffled the pages of the will. “Here. L. M. Taylor.”
I closed my fist around the ball. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“I’m sorry, Ellie.” Colette tapped her foot. With each strike of her shoe, a sword rose up through my throat. I sank back on the sofa and brought the baseball swiftly to my nose. It smelled of grass and hide and my father’s hands.
“Who’s L. M. Taylor?” Anna asked.
Van waved at us, asking what was happening, and Colette signed something that caused him to swivel toward the glow-in-the-dark gingerbread-man tie rack. He shook his head slowly, baffled. In that moment, I loved him.
“Who’s L. M. Taylor?” I repeated.
Colette shrugged. “I’m actually not sure. Maybe a friend from college?”
I put the glow-in-the-dark tie rack down on the sofa next to Randy the Hippopotamus. I knew without looking that the first line of the book was Now, where to begin.
“What should we do for dinner?” Colette asked. “Any requests? What about tuna fish and crackers?”
“Yum,” Sadie said. “I’m sorry, Ellie.” The four of them stood and walked off toward the kitchen, holding my father’s gifts. Tuna fish and crackers was his favorite. He used to salt each individual bite and nibble on a pickle in between.
“Ellie, come be with us?” Colette called.
“Right there,” I said, unmoving.
“Want some, Anna?” I heard Colette ask through the open door.
“I’ll have a few,” Anna said. “With less mayo than last time.”
I heard a clack of bowls set out on the table, the scraping of a fork. These sounds traveled from the kitchen as though they had occurred years ago and had only just arrived in the air above the sofa where I sat.
Van appeared beside me, holding out a cracker, a shy smile on his face.
“Thanks,” I signed, trying to return the smile.
I looked down at my hand, still clutching the baseball in a white-knuckled claw. The hand of a lesser child.