Now
The funeral was Sunday afternoon, the same time as the graduation that Harry was missing. Despite Harry telling him not to, Paul Roman skipped the graduation ceremony as well, and drove up to Maine. He arrived just before noon. Harry was in his bedroom, the window open, and heard the car brake sharply on the driveway. He met Paul at the doorway. Alice was out back, cutting flowers, and Harry desperately wanted a little time alone with Paul before he had to change into his suit and attend his father’s service. He took him straight to his room.
“You have any idea what happened?” Paul asked, as soon as the door was shut.
“You mean, how did he die?”
“Yeah. Did he just trip?” Harry had met Paul their freshman year, when they both had single dorm rooms on the same hall. Paul’s second question to Harry, after asking his name, had been: “You sleep with boys or girls or both?”
Harry, flustered into honesty, replied, “Girls. In theory, though, not in reality. Yet.”
“All right. Let’s go find some. Girls for you, and boys for me.”
They’d stayed best friends through four years of college, building a group around them. Well, Paul had built the group, being one of those people who attract friends as easily as a flower draws bees. Harry felt privileged to be in his company, and sometimes overshadowed. Paul was funny and gregarious, filterless at times, but always knowing what to say and what to do. Privately, Harry pictured Paul as a fellow soldier of the social realm who would draw enemy fire in his direction so that Harry could make small incremental advances, trench by trench.
“There’s going to be an autopsy,” Harry said to Paul, now sitting on the edge of the bedroom’s one chair. “But he probably just fell. Just a freak accident.”
“You don’t think anyone else was involved?”
“What do you mean? Like someone pushed him?”
“I don’t know, I’m just wondering.”
“I think it’s more likely that maybe he had some sort of heart attack, or a stroke, and that caused him to fall off the path and hit his head. It was a pretty steep drop.”
“What does Alice say?”
“I think she thinks it was a medical condition. She thought it would be good to find out. For me, that is, in case it’s something that’s genetic.”
“Oh, right,” Paul said, then added, “So what are you going to do? I mean, you going to stay here?”
“I don’t know. I guess I’ll stay for the summer. I can’t just up and leave Alice, and she’s already asked me to help out in the store. Honestly, I have no idea.”
“Don’t figure it out today.” Paul unzipped the backpack he’d brought up from his car. “You want a drink?”
They drank gin and tonics (Paul had brought the ingredients, plus glassware, and even a ziplock bag of half-melted ice) while Harry dressed in his only dark suit, a Ludlow from J.Crew that was a little short in the sleeves. Then together they went downstairs and found Alice, who was in the kitchen, meticulously arranging the flowers she’d cut. Harry thought of the ragged bouquet on the footpath and wondered again who had left it there. He’d forgotten to ask Alice if it was her.
Paul had probably met Alice three times at most, but he hugged her as though she was related, holding on until she let out a small, sniffly sob. “Paul, are you staying? I didn’t make up the guest room.”
“I’m not. Just for the service, then I’m going back to Mather. I’m missing the graduation but I’m not missing the graduation party. Unless, Harry . . .” Paul turned toward Harry, a questioning look on his face.
“No, no, no. Please go back. I’ll be fine.”
“I’ll come and visit this summer,” Paul said, as Alice wiped tears from her face with an index finger. Her blond hair was swept back in a French braid that went down her back. She wore a dark grey dress, low cut in the front, but with a black shawl over her shoulders. Her face was chalky white, more startling because of the bright crimson lipstick she’d put on. Harry tried to remember if he’d ever seen her with lipstick, and decided that the last time had probably been when she had married his father, at a low-key ceremony at a hotel in Ogunquit. It seemed a long time ago, but it was less than four years.
The service was held at the First Parish Unitarian Universalist, a white wooden church with a high steeple that was on the Old Post Road. Harry, Alice, and Paul arrived early, and Harry and Alice spoke to the minister, a grey-haired woman over six feet tall, who went over what she planned on saying. Harry knew most of it already. It was going to be a short service; two hymns, a eulogy, a reading by Carl Ridley, Bill’s cousin from Sanford. Alice had already met with the minister to go over some of the details of Bill’s life, and the minister briefly recounted them now. Harry was glad that there was significant mention of his mother, and how devoted Bill had been to her. It was his only concern, worried that Alice had only seen Bill’s life as beginning when she had come into it. But the words the minister planned on saying comprised all of Bill’s life, including both his marriages, his son, his lifelong affair with books, even his infamous cooking. As Harry, Alice, and the minister talked, a few early-arriving guests filtered slowly into the church. Harry wondered how many there’d be, and how many he would know. The interior of the church was cool, but Harry’s palms were sweating, and he could feel a trickle of sweat along his rib cage. He’d only ever been to two funerals in his life. His mother’s, and now his father’s. He’d never known his grandparents on his father’s side, since they’d both died before Harry was born. His maternal grandparents were both alive, but they hadn’t left their retirement community in Florida in many years.
“And how about you, Harry?” The minister was speaking to him, and he wasn’t sure what she was asking.
“I’m sorry,” he said, aware he was blinking his eyes rapidly.
“Did you want the opportunity to say a few words?”
“Oh . . . Oh, no. Alice already asked me. Thank you, though.”
“Why don’t you two take a seat, up here in front.”
It was a relief to sit, to hear the murmur of people behind him, and know that he didn’t have to acknowledge them, at least not yet. He felt guilty that he wasn’t saying anything at his father’s funeral, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He didn’t trust himself to speak in public, worried that he’d be overtaken by either anger or grief, or a combination of both. He even still worried about his lisp, long eradicated except in his mind, where he often heard the echoes of how he used to speak. There’d be a receiving line after the service, and he’d have to speak then, of course, but just to people one-on-one. Still, the thought of it made his skin feel prickly, and his breathing shallow.
Before the service began, his aunt Anne and her three silent, muscle-bound sons, all in high school now, sat in the pew directly behind Harry. He leaned back to kiss her, and she said: “I still don’t believe it, Harry,” genuine grief in her voice.
“I know,” he said, “I don’t, either.”
“I meant to call you, Harry, but I didn’t have your phone number. I spoke with Alice and she said you’d be coming home soon, but I want you to visit us as soon as you feel able to leave her alone.”
Harry said he would.
She was telling him again how she was still in shock when the service began. Harry turned back as the minister adjusted the microphone at the pulpit. He took a deep breath to prepare himself, but the service was relatively painless. The minister, except for the opening and closing prayers, kept the religion to a minimum, aware that Bill Ackerson was a twice-a-year churchgoer at most (Christmas Eve services and maybe Easter Sunday). For the eulogy she simply recounted his life story, his childhood in Maine, the Peace Corps service in the Pacific Islands, his years as a book scout and then a bookseller in Manhattan, meeting his first wife and having a son, his wife’s brave battle with cancer, then his return to Maine and his second marriage. She talked about his love of the coast of Maine. “Alice spoke to me about Bill’s need to see the ocean every day. How it grounded him. He found his true and spiritual home here in Kennewick, and for that we should all be grateful.”
Alice dipped her head next to Harry, and covered her face with her hands. He slid toward her and put an arm around her narrow shoulders. Behind him he could hear stifled crying.
After the eulogy, Carl Ridley walked gingerly to the pulpit, a trembling sheet of paper in his hand. Tears already streaked Carl’s papery cheeks before he even spread out the sheet of paper in front of him. There was a long pause, Carl smoothing back his thinning hair, but then he was speaking, saying how Bill’s office was decorated by two things: stacks and stacks of books, and one poem, tacked onto the wall. The poem was “If,” by Rudyard Kipling (he pronounced it “Kiplin’”). Harry had heard the poem before, or at least the line that went, “If you can meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same,” but he’d forgotten that the poem was a message from a father to a son. Harry tensed his jaw. His aunt, from behind him, put a hand on his shoulder, making it worse. But then at the end of the recitation—“You’ll be a man, my son!”—Paul leaned close to his ear and said, “Jesus, salt in the wound,” and Harry quietly laughed, feeling better.
When the final hymn was sung and the closing prayer spoken, Harry finally turned around to see a sizable crowd, much larger than he’d thought. In the receiving line, many of the people who shook his hand and muttered their sympathies were strangers, but some were cousins and second cousins whom he barely remembered. No one knew what to say, so everyone said how sorry they were, and Harry nodded and thanked them.
While speaking to a man who referred to himself as Ackerson’s Books’ best customer, Harry noticed a dark-haired woman, probably in her twenties, who had remained seated in her pew, toward the back of the church. Harry thought she was staring at him but couldn’t be sure; maybe she was staring at the reception line in general, wondering whether she should join in. She was vaguely familiar to Harry, and he wondered what her connection was to his father. Was she the daughter of a friend? As though she felt Harry’s eyes on her, she suddenly tilted her head away, revealing a strong jawline and an upturned nose, and Harry remembered where he’d seen her before. She’d been walking along the road near his father’s house on the first night that Harry stayed there. She’d been wearing a headband and had been looking at the house, as though she knew what had happened there.
“Are you also interested in books?” said the man still speaking with Harry.
He was standing too close, his breath sharp with the bitter smell of coffee. Harry willed himself to not lean backward, said: “Not the way my father was, no. But I do like books.”
“Not obsessed, eh?”
“No. Not obsessed.”
The man moved along, and so did the line. When Harry looked for the dark-haired woman again, he couldn’t spot her anywhere.
Alice’s best friend, Chrissie Herrick, had skipped the service in order to set up food and drinks at Grey Lady for a small memorial gathering. There’d been talk back and forth on whether it should be at her house or a restaurant, but Chrissie had talked Alice into the house option, saying she would take care of every detail.
When Harry, Paul, and Alice got home, some guests had already arrived and were milling silently around the spread of cold cuts and salads on the dining room table. Chrissie had purchased a guest book for people to sign and had put together a slideshow of pictures of Bill on a laptop. “At least there’s beer,” Paul said, and pulled two bottles of Shipyard from a cooler filled with ice. Harry told himself that he should talk to his cousins, most of whom he hadn’t seen for two years. But before he could approach them, John Richards cornered him and asked if Alice had broached the subject of him helping out at the store this summer.
“She did,” Harry said.
“Oh, good. And you can, I hope?” John was a local widower, and a retiree, who had asked to volunteer at Bill’s store. Bill had taken him on just for a few hours a day, but John had made himself indispensable, both as an employee and as a late-in-life friend.
“I can help for the summer. You want to keep the store open, then?”
“I don’t know about that, but I do know I can’t just shut it down right away. We’ve got special orders to fill, and cataloguing. Even if we decide to close it, it’s still a lot of work.”
“No, I know. What about the store in New York?”
Harry had actually been surprised that Ron Krakowski, who had bought out his father’s share in the original Ackerson’s Rare Books in Manhattan, had not come to the service. Ron had been Bill’s closest friend for many years, a true savant with an encyclopedic knowledge of the rare-book trade. Harry did remember hearing from his father once that Ron had become one of those city dwellers terrified to step off the asphalt island of Manhattan. That was probably the reason he hadn’t made it to Maine.
“What about the store in New York?” John asked, confusion in his voice.
“I thought maybe they’d buy up your stock, if you decided to close shop.”
“Oh, right. I hadn’t thought of that, but they probably would. When can you come in?”
Harry told John that he’d come and help out in the store on Tuesday. The thought of going in the following day was just too much to stomach. John looked visibly relieved that help was on the way.
His beer gone, Harry checked in briefly with Aunt Anne’s kids; all three were milling around the food, demolishing a bowl of Ruffles and some French onion dip. It was clear that he remembered them better than they remembered him, or maybe they were all at that stage of teenage boy in which conversation and facial expressions disappear. Aunt Anne came over and helped out, repeating to Harry several times that he could come visit whenever he wanted to and for however long. While talking with his aunt, he kept an eye on Alice, who was sitting on one of the T-back chairs, a plate of untouched pasta salad on her lap. Carl Ridley stood next to her, a hand on the back of her chair, while a familiar woman—was she a librarian?—bent at the waist to offer Alice her condolences.
“You should get back to Mather,” Harry told Paul, who had just extricated himself from what looked like a stilted one-on-one with Billy Herrick, Chrissie’s husband and one of those men who had married a talkative woman so that he, himself, could retire from the act of small talk.
“You sure?” Paul said.
“Yes, please. I wish I could come with you.”
“You could, you know.”
Harry made a face. “Not really. I mean, Alice . . . and even if she didn’t mind, I don’t think I could stand hanging around with a bunch of drunks celebrating graduation.”
“You wouldn’t have to go to any parties. We could just hang out one last night in my dorm room. Kim would obviously love to see you.”
Harry briefly considered it. Telling Alice that he needed to tie up a couple of loose ends at college, making sure that Chrissie would spend the night so she wouldn’t be alone, and then leaving with Paul, back to college for one more night before the rest of his life began. The thought was tempting, but also exhausting. More concerned people, more condolences. What Harry really wanted to do was to go up to his room, shut the door, strip off his too-tight suit, and crawl under the covers. And there was also a part of him that wanted to stay close to Alice, to not leave her alone in the house. He told Paul he thought he needed to stay, then waited while Paul said good-bye to Alice.
He walked Paul to his car. They hugged good-bye. “You’re not alone, buddy,” Paul said, and Harry was briefly spooked to hear the words, realizing that had been his primary emotion since hearing of his father’s death. He’d felt alone, the world emptied of his family.
“Yeah, well,” Harry said, and began to back away.
“Something wrong beside the obvious?” Paul asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve been not quite yourself this whole year.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Never mind. Now is not the time, obviously. I’m just worried about you, and so is Kim.”
“You Kim’s spokesperson now?”
“Sure, why not?” Paul said, pulling a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket. “I’m off. You need anything, like for me to come back, or someone to talk with, just text, okay? And hang in there.”
The Prius’s wheels spun on the crushed shells, then the car was speeding out onto York Street. Harry watched as Paul drove out of sight, a trail of cigarette smoke coming from his lowered window. The air temperature had cooled, and the sky above was dark with crosshatched clouds. Paul’s obvious pity annoyed Harry, and he took several deep breaths. Harry considered going back into the party, saying his good-byes, then retreating to his room, but once he’d walked back through the front door he found himself going immediately to the stairs. He’d talked to everyone he needed to talk to, and no one would blame him for wanting to be alone.
In his room he thought again about the dark-haired woman at the funeral service, wondering who she was. It was easier to think of the mystery of her and not the greater mystery of his father’s death. Maybe Alice knew who she was. Alice, as far as he knew, had always lived in Kennewick, and she knew a lot of people. He’d ask her tomorrow. It would give them something to talk about.