In Barbara’s living room, under the big leafy painting, Kyle reclined on the couch, rehearsing telling Sarah that it was all over between them. Nothing to talk about. Their living together was a big accident and didn’t mean anything. She wept, clutching his hand, begging him not to destroy something so precious with these terrible words, and he went right on—he never loved her, he was only using her to try to run away from himself. His true self.
“What do you mean?” she gasped. “Oh my God.” And then she understood. She stood up, pain written large in her face. “Oh my God.” And she turned and bolted out the door. And a moment later came the gunshot.…
His mother entered, with a pitcher of iced tea. Peppermint. “I know you’d prefer beer but work with me on this, all right?”
At the Detmers’ Debbie stood on the front steps, watching Donnie Krebsbach pack her blue luggage into his Chevy van. Donnie, good soul that he was, had agreed to drive her to Minneapolis and drop her at the airport out of the goodness of his heart. She had offered him money but he declined. Not necessary. His pleasure. He was Florian’s son and it was his day off at Krebsbach Chev and it was his pleasure to help her out.
Mother and Daddy stood in the doorway behind her. They hoped she would come back for a good visit soon. She was always welcome, they hoped she knew that.
“I’m sorry about the wedding,” she said, for the tenth time. “Not that it was cancelled, but that it was ever scheduled in the first place. Sorry for the embarrassment.”
They laughed and threw up their hands. Don’t give it another thought. She had given Lake Wobegon something to talk about for the next ten years, right, Donnie? Donnie nodded. He had the bags all stowed and was ready to take off.
“What about the cheese and the champagne and the pâté?” said Mother.
“Keep it. It’s good. And the shrimp shish kebabs. It’ll keep for a few weeks.”
“We don’t have room in our freezer, though.”
“Give it away then.”
Mother took Debbie’s hand—“That’s what I thought too,” she said. “I thought it’d be nice if we gave it to the Lutheran church. Maybe you’ve got your own opinion of Lutherans, but—they do so much good, you know.”
“Fine. Whatever. Not a problem.” And she kissed Mother on each cheek and then Daddy and told him to take his medicine, and got in the car and off they went to Minneapolis.
Watching the Chevy van turn the corner of Elm Street and head down the hill, Daddy knew in his heart he would never see his daughter again, and he got teary-eyed. She would be killed in a freak accident, sideswiped by a semi, the van rolling and rolling, Debbie’s neck broken, lying crumpled under the coroner’s blanket, leaving her parents to grieve. Or she would go down with the airliner. An item on the news, “Passenger jet missing over the Sierras,” and they would spend 48 hours waiting, hoping, praying, and then search parties would locate the wreckage. No survivors. A freak accident. Possibly an aileron malfunction. Investigators trying to piece the parts together. Or she would be killed by Brent late at night in her home. He would slip in through a sliding glass door and smother her in her bed and take the body out to sea and drop it in, weighted with chains, but in his haste he would not secure them tightly and the body would slip free and wash up on the coast and be found by surfers and Brent would be arrested and tried. A long trial. Only a thin web of circumstantial evidence—a vague threat overheard by a waitress, his thumbprint on the glass, seaweed in his shoes. The tabloids would play it up big and they would print a picture of Debbie’s lifeless body. He wanted to marry her for her money and now, in a towering rage, he wreaked vengeance for her cutting him loose. Or she would drown herself in the ocean. She had put on a brave front for her old parents but her heart was truly broken. She flew home to Santa Cruz, wrote a three-page anguished letter to them, put on a heavy canvas jacket, fastened chains to her ankles, and rowed a kayak out to sea and rolled over. Her body would be returned to Lake Wobegon and Daddy would ask permission to make their double plot into a triple. Bury them in a stack. Debbie on the bottom, then Mother—dead of grief a year later—and finally Daddy. He wasn’t sure when he would die. Maybe not for a few years. He would come and trim the grass over their grave every week with a hand clipper and brush the clippings off the stone and tend the geraniums in the pot. He would sit and talk to them and people would see him and think, That poor old man. He lost his daughter and then his wife, all within a year. His life, gone. Everything. And then he would die himself. He would die at home, listening to Chopin, the light fading, and then there would be Mother and Debbie, all happy and dressed in white and welcoming him to an enormous mansion full of happy people where there would never be suffering or grief ever again.
He sat on the porch, comforting himself with these bleak thoughts, as Mother called up Pastor Ingqvist and made the donation, and five minutes later, Pastor rolled up with Clint Bunsen in Clint’s big blue Ford pickup, and they walked up to the house, grinning. Pastor shook his hand. “This is just one of the most generous things I ever heard of,” he said, and he and Clint went back to the garage and started hauling the cases of Moët champagne to the truck. They had already loaded the cheese and would get the frozen shish kebabs from the high school.
“Don’t forget we’re going to need a receipt,” said Daddy. “For the tax deduction, don’t you know.” Suddenly his mind was clear as could be.