Russell Banks - A Permanent Member of the Family

A light rain had started falling. In the parking lot below, Betty walked around the front of the van, checked her watch, and gazed up at the couple. After a few seconds, she walked back to the driver’s side, got into the vehicle and continued to wait.

Finally, after years of weighing her pros against his cons, Isabel and George Pelham agreed to shut down their home in the upstate hamlet of Keene, New York, and spend the five winter months together in a rented condominium in Miami Beach. The condo was a two-bedroom sparsely furnished unit on the twenty-second floor of a high-rise on Biscayne Bay, away from the hotels and nightlife. If they liked the neighborhood and made some friends, they would become snowbirds. For a year. That was as much as George would agree to.

Then, barely a month into that first winter, at the end of his fourth tennis lesson at the Flamingo Park public courts, George dropped to his knees as if he’d won the final at Wimbledon and died of a heart attack. On the recommendation of the young intern who certified his death, Isabel called O’Dell’s Funeral Home and Crematorium from Mount Sinai Medical Center, where the ambulance had delivered George’s body. Then she telephoned her best friend, Jane Deane.

Jane was sitting at her desk in her office at High Peaks Country Day School when the call came. She was the guidance counselor at the school and a part-time psychotherapist in a town where, in the absence of full-time jobs, people more often than not had to rely on two part-time jobs, a reliance in Jane’s case enforced by her husband Frank’s inability to find work of any kind since losing his Adirondack furniture shop six months ago. Her practice was called Peaks & Passes Counseling.

“Jane, George is dead,” Isabel announced. “He’s gone. He had a heart attack this morning, playing tennis. George is gone, Jane!”

“Oh, my God! Are you okay, honey? Is anyone there with you?” A tall, slender woman with dark, gray-streaked hair cut short, younger than Isabel by a decade, Jane had worked alongside Isabel and George since graduating college, until three years ago when the older couple retired from teaching, Isabel at sixty taking early retirement and George at seventy taking late. Jane liked George, there was nothing about him not to like, but Isabel she loved the way you love an older, wiser sister.

One of the work-study students, a junior girl in a dark green dirndl and hiking boots, clumped through the open door of Jane’s office, laid a packet of file folders on the desk, and when Jane waved her away without making eye contact, clumped out in a pout.

“No, I’m alone. Except for the doctor. I don’t really know anyone here yet,” Isabel said and began to cry.

“I’ll come down to Florida, Isabel. I’ll take an emergency leave from school and fly right down to help you get through this.”

“No, no, you shouldn’t do that! I’ll be okay. I’ll call George’s family, his sister and his brothers. They’ll come down. Don’t you worry about me,” she said and broke off in order to cry again.

“I’ll cancel everything and be there by tomorrow afternoon,” Jane declared.

Isabel gulped air between sentences. She said, “It’s just so goddam bizarre, you know? For him to die in Florida, when we only just got here! I was hoping he’d love it here. He was having a tennis lesson. How ridiculous is that? What will I do, Jane? I’m all alone here. I feel lost without him!”

Jane assured her that she wasn’t alone, that she had many close friends, and she had George’s family members from Connecticut and Cooperstown, who would surely be a comfort to her, and she had Jane and Frank, although she didn’t mention that Frank had not been especially fond of George, thought him smug and self-righteous, and while he liked Isabel, he considered her to be Jane’s friend, not his.

“George’s family. Right. They’ll probably blame it on me for talking him into coming here in the first place. And they’d be right,” she said and went back to crying.

“Don’t say that! He would have had a heart attack shoveling snow, for heaven’s sake.”

TWO HOURS LATER, having selected a simple mahogany urn for George’s ashes at O’Dell’s Funeral Home and Crematorium on the mainland, Isabel drove their five-year-old Subaru Outback onto the nearby lot of Sunshine Chrysler on Northwest Twelfth and traded it in for a lease on a new dark brown 200S Chrysler convertible.

The following morning, her best friend, Jane, drove from Keene to Albany in her slightly older Subaru Outback, parked the car in the long-term lot and flew to Miami for George Pelham’s funeral. She planned on staying with Isabel for three or four days. Maybe a week. As long as it took to console her friend and help her with the logistics of sudden widowhood. The school headmaster, Dr. Costanza, assured Jane that she could spend all of her accumulated sick days if need be. It wasn’t as if she had classes to meet. Everyone on the faculty and in town held George and Isabel dearly to their breast, was how Dr. Costanza put it.

Jane found his manner of speaking, like his bow ties and argyle sweater vests, faintly amusing, and sometimes when speaking with him she imitated it. She said she’d reveal her plans to him as soon as they blossomed and revealed themselves to her.

Though Jane’s husband, Frank, had never been close to the Pelhams — he was what was called a Keene native; the Pelhams, like his wife, were “from away,” as local people put it — he respected Jane’s friendship with Isabel and told her to stay down there in Florida as long as she wanted. He’d be in hunting camp up on Johns Brook with the guys for the next week anyhow. Maybe longer if he didn’t kill his deer right off. They could pull in Ryan whatzizname, you know, the Hall kid, to take care of the dogs.

WHEN ISABEL ARRIVED to meet Jane at the Miami airport in her Chrysler convertible, top down, Jane was thrown off by the warm, welcoming smile on her friend’s broad, suntanned face. No grief-stricken tears, no trembling lips. Jane tossed her suitcase onto the backseat, got in and hugged Isabel long and hard, a consoling hug. Isabel was smaller than Jane, trim, and for a woman, especially a woman her age, muscular. She wore a white silk T-shirt and a flouncy pale blue cotton skirt and sandals.

Not exactly funereal, Jane thought. Taking in the new car, she said, “I like the color, Isabel. I bet it’s called something like ‘espresso.’ Am I right?” Actually, she did like the color and hoped she didn’t sound sarcastic.

“Ha! It’s called ‘tungsten metallic.’ I wanted ‘billet silver metallic,’ but this was the only convertible they had on the lot, and I wanted a convertible more. So, listen, do you mind if we pick up George’s ashes on the way home? Since we’re in Digger O’Dell the Friendly Undertaker’s neighborhood.”

Jane said no, she didn’t mind. Isabel’s jaunty tone confused her. “Is his name really Digger O’Dell?”

Isabel laughed. “No, but he is friendly. Maybe too friendly. I think it’s Rick. Ricardo O’Dell. He’s Latino, despite the name. Argentine, maybe.”

While she drove she punched a string of numbers into her cell phone. Steering with one hand and holding the phone to her ear with the other, Isabel cut swiftly — expertly, Jane thought, for someone who never drove in traffic like this — through the snarl of cloverleafs and on- and off-ramps that surrounded the airport. In minutes they were up on Route 112 speeding east toward Biscayne Bay.

Isabel pulled into the sunbaked lot next to the large cinder-block cube that O’Dell’s Funeral Home shared with a tire store, and parked. She asked Jane if she’d like to come inside with her. “It’s kind of creepy,” she said, “but interesting.” Rick O’Dell had told her he’d be with a client in the Comfort Room when she arrived, but he’d leave the urn with her husband’s cremains in the reception area. She could simply take them. Nothing to sign.