Elinor Lipman - The Dearly Departed

“The school is honoring its contract,” Samuels said, his voice now cool and eye contact abandoned. “Golf ends on Friday, May twenty-seventh. Finals begin the following Monday. Graduation is June the second. I’m sure you can appreciate that we’re doing our best under the circumstances.”

“I’ll be gone on the third,” Sunny said.

Mrs. Peacock couldn’t help looking pleased that the next of kin to a tragedy had checked into her motel. There was a connection, she explained: Her husband worked for Herlihy Brothers Fuel, and it was the two bosses, Danny and Sean, who’d fixed the fatal furnace. Volunteered. For free. Not that Miss Batten’s mother was one of their accounts. Not at all .

“That was very kind of them,” said Sunny.

“It’s good public relations. They’re smart in that way.” She ran Sunny’s credit card through her machine, once, twice, frowning. “Sometimes it’s the phone lines and not the credit limit. I’ll swipe it through again.”

“There shouldn’t be a problem.”

“We have a two-night minimum starting June first,” said Mrs. Peacock, whose gray hair had a pale lavender cast and whose coral beads matched her coral clip-on earrings.

“Fine.”

“Don’t think people weren’t upset about all of this happening in King George. First, your mother and Miles Finn, then, before we turn around, we almost lose our police chief. Another few inches and a bullet would’ve killed him, which makes me wonder what’s so great about bullet-proof vests if you consider all the parts of the body they don’t cover.”

“I’m in number ten?” Sunny said after a pause.

“Last unit. Don’t put anything in the toilet but toilet paper. Our septic tank can’t handle anything else.”

“Fine,” said Sunny.

“You can get a decent breakfast—eggs, toast, home fries, bacon, coffee—at The Dot.”

Finally, Sunny smiled. “Do the Angelos still own it?”

“Yeah. He’s sick, you know.”

“Do they still make those maple sausages?”

“I eat at home. You can’t smoke there anymore. Besides, I don’t like paying a dollar-fifty for a fried egg.”

“I’d better unpack,” said Sunny.

At 5,6, and 11 P.M., Joey Loach watched himself on three Boston TV stations looking worse than he realized and needing a shave. No reporter had asked him the question he feared—Why, in a one-horse town with no crime and no criminals, were you wearing a bullet-proof vest?

“Was I wrong ?” he would have said. “Wouldn’t I be dead now if I didn’t arm myself every morning when I left my house?” For three years his vest had been a secret, purchased with his own money, a promise he’d made to his mother and the condition on which she had let him go to the police academy.

Elsie Loach was both inconsolable about her son’s near disaster, imagining the inches in either direction that would have left him dead or paralyzed, and triumphant that she’d saved his life. She wanted him to resign immediately. No one’s son should be a police officer! They should come from the ranks of orphans and middle-aged men whose mothers have passed on. He practically lived at the station, like a firefighter, like a lighthouse keeper, like a monk. She’d brought the braided rug from his room at home and a reading lamp for his bedside, which necessitated her acquiring and refinishing a solid maple night table from the rummage sale at Saint Xavier’s along with a bureau scarf that wasn’t frilly or stained.

Strangers assumed that she was thrilled to have Joey in uniform; exhilarated by the sight of him behind the wheel of his cruiser, pressed and clean-shaven, but she wasn’t. She turned off the news when she saw reports of police officers shot, killed, sued, eulogized. And now it had happened. A crazy man had shot Joey at close range as he ambled in his good-natured fashion up to the half-open window of—as best as he could remember—a Ford pickup with Massachusetts plates. They were out there—nuts and murderers; sociopaths who thought it was better to kill someone’s son than get a ticket. Marilee and her husband had safe jobs—day-care teacher at a state building with a metal detector and dairy manager at Foodland.

Worst of all, the murderer was at large. “He’s gone,” Joey had promised. “Even the stupidest cop killer would get out of town and not look back.”

“Maybe he wasn’t just passing through. Maybe this was his destination. Maybe he was out to get you.”

“I pulled him over! He shot me because he must’ve had drugs in the car or it was stolen, or there was a body in the trunk.”

“Promise me you’ll let the state police handle this. Let someone else go looking for him.”

“I’m not going looking for him, okay?”

“Will you spend tonight at home?”

He shook his head. She walked from the foot of his bed to one side. “Let me see.”

“No.”

“I want to see what he did to you.”

Joey pulled the thin cotton blanket up to his shoulders. “It’s black-and-blue. They told me to expect a few more shades before I’m done. But forget it. I’m not showing you.”

“Is it very painful?”

“No,” he lied.

She narrowed her eyes. “They said on television it was like getting beat up by a heavyweight boxer.”

“Nah,” said Joey. “Bantamweight, maybe.”

She opened the flat, hinged carton that held his new bullet-proof vest, picked it up by its shoulders, held it against her own chest, and said, “It seems so flimsy.”

“That’s the point—lighter; new and improved.”

“But strong enough to stop the bullets?”

“Definitely. More than ever. You’re worrying about nothing. Lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice.”

“That’s not true! If you’re chief of police, you’re a lightning rod.”

“This is King George, Ma. This was a bad break, but it’s not going to happen again.”

“What if he’s never caught? How do I get to sleep at night knowing he’s out there?”

“You’ll sleep fine. So will I. In fact I’ve got a prescription for sleeping pills. I’ll give you one.” He folded the blanket to his waist. “Now I’m getting out of bed and I’m getting dressed, so you may want to leave.”

“I’ll wait in the hall. I want to speak to the nurses anyway.”

“About what?”

“I want someone besides you to tell me that the doctor discharged you.”

Joey picked up a cord and followed it to its grip. “See this? It brings a nurse in five seconds and I’ll tell her you’re harassing me.”

Mrs. Loach looked around the room. “Your uniform. Where is it? Can I mend it?”

Joey’s mouth formed a tight, grim line. He shook his head. “The FBI gets the uniform.”

Mrs. Loach backed up to the visitor’s chair and sat down heavily.

Joey tried again. “I think visiting hours are just about over. Besides, it’s polite to give the patient privacy when he wants to get out of bed and his ass is hanging out of his johnny.”

His mother’s eyes narrowed. “Why does the FBI need your pants if you were shot in the chest?”

“For lab work. Ballistics. Powder burns. You know the drill.”

“I wish I didn’t!” she cried. “I sit around hoping I’ll never get a phone call from the emergency room, and then it happened, like my worst fear come true.”

He sidled out of bed and walked backward to the bathroom. “It wasn’t your worst fear, though, was it, because I’m fine. The vest worked. I’ve made those phone calls to mothers—’There’s been an accident, and I’m sorry, Mrs. Smith or Jones, but your son didn’t make it.’ That ’s someone’s worst fear. This is nothing. Day before last, I had to call the son of the man who died at Margaret Batten’s house. And then Sunny. She’d have been thrilled if her mother was merely in the hospital with the wind knocked out of her.”