Russell Banks - A Permanent Member of the Family

She thumb-typed: I solve problems before they happen, and u solve them after they happen. She read the text over three times, then deleted it. She began again and this time wrote: When I need R & R I go 2 the monastery. When u need R & R u go 2 your man-cave. She half laughed to herself and deleted this text, too.

She stood and walked to the window and looked out. A half moon hung in the southwest quadrant of the sky. The lights of the city glistened on the rippled black surface of the bay, and the headlights of cars on the arched causeway steadily crossing from the mainland to Miami Beach looked like gold beads sliding down a string. She could understand how the prospect of living out her sixties and then her seventies and maybe even her eighties alone in Miami Beach had excited Isabel. It was a new world, a semitropical, Latin American city where everything worked because it was not in Latin America. A wholly new life awaited her here. After almost forty years of marriage, Isabel, like any woman, had made so many small compromises and concessions to align her view of what was desirable and necessary with her husband’s view that she probably didn’t know any longer what was desirable and necessary to herself alone. Jane understood how, suddenly cut loose from George’s cautious, reticent nature, Isabel might find the idea of living here six months a year exciting, enticing, liberating. Becoming a snowbird was the really big thing, the thing that George himself would never have embraced. He might have been willing to try it out, but only to demonstrate what a bad idea it was.

In many ways it was a young person’s city — especially over here in Miami Beach, a chain of barrier islands made glamorous by movies and television, made famous by drugs and violence and illicit wealth and stylish by fashion shoots and art deco architecture. It seemed that every smart, ambitious person under thirty who couldn’t get to New York City or Los Angeles came to Miami. And it was also a city where for generations elderly people from the north had come to sit on benches in the park with the sun on their faces, an unread book or newspaper on their laps, while they waited for their breathing to stop. Isabel was not a young person drawn to the glamour, fame and style of Miami Beach, obviously; but neither was she one of those old people waiting to die. Jane stood at the window with her cell phone in her hand and typed: Isabel in v. rough shape. May need to stay here longer than planned. Call me when back from camp. XX J. She quickly hit send —before she had a chance to hit delete .

GEORGE’S FAMILY FLEW BACK to their homes, jobs and schools in New England and upstate New York, and the following day Isabel and Jane turned to packing George’s belongings. With the convertible top down and Jane in the passenger’s seat, Isabel drove to the OfficeMax on West Avenue and bought a half-dozen banker’s boxes plus several larger cartons, packing tape, labels and Magic Markers. On the way back she stopped off at the Public Storage facility on West and Dade and reserved a five-by-ten-foot climate-controlled storage unit. Then the women went for a long lunch at the outdoor bookstore café on Lincoln Road.

When they had ordered lunch, Isabel lifted her water glass and declared, “I’m really glad, Jane, that you of all people can be here with me in Miami Beach. I’m really glad I can share both the work and the pleasures of setting up my new life with you.” She extended her glass, and Jane clinked it with hers.

Jane said, “Actually, I came mainly to hold your hand and help you cope with George’s death. This is a lot more… I don’t know, fun, I guess. More than it should be. So it’s like a guilty pleasure. You don’t need much hand-holding, and you seem to be coping surprisingly well. If I lost Frank…,” she said and trailed off. She watched a pair of Rollerbladers, suntanned, hard-bodied men in their twenties, shirtless and hairless in tight shorts and wraparound sunglasses. They darted past the café and swooped like raptors through the shoppers and gawkers strolling along the sidewalk and were gone. “If I lost Frank…,” she began again, “well, for one thing, I’d be unable to hold on to the house. We’re second-mortgaged to our eyeballs, first to help the girls finish college, now to help them pay off their college loans. The last few years, with the store failing and Frank out of work a lot, it’s been mean. At times we’ve had to live pretty much on my income alone, which ain’t much to shout about, believe me. But I guess it’s different for you,” she said.

“Financially, yes. My little pension from High Peaks Country Day and our joint account at Adirondack Bank should more than cover my living expenses until I go back up to Keene and settle the estate. Something I can’t say to anyone, except you, Janey, so don’t quote me,” she said and lowered her voice, “but knowing that soon I’ll be a very wealthy woman has made George’s death a lot easier to bear,” she said. “Sounds awful. But it’s true.”

“I thought you loved Frank!” Jane said. “I mean George. I thought you loved George.”

Isabel smiled. “Of course I loved him! And I’ll miss him terribly. We were married thirty-seven years. And I could concentrate on that, on what I’ve lost. Maybe I should. Most widows would. Or I could concentrate on what I had, thirty-seven years of companionship, and be thankful. But when you spend your life married to someone and he dies, in a sense you die, too. Unless you choose to be reborn as someone else, as someone unformed. And then it’s almost like you get to be an adolescent girl again. And right now, that’s how I’m feeling. Like an adolescent girl. Honestly, Janey, I haven’t felt this way since I was fifteen!”

“So weren’t you guys happily married? I always thought you were happy together. Like me and Frank.”

“Well, sure, Janey! A lot like you and Frank. Better keep that in mind, girlfriend,” she said and laughed.

JANE WAS TOUCHED by how neatly George had arranged his clothing. She could picture him taking his clothes out of the dryer and carefully folding each item. His socks were rolled and lined up in rows by color, shirts folded and stacked in their drawer by color and fabric, neckties racked in the closet by stripes, patterns and solids, suits, sports jackets and slacks hung by color and material from light to dark, thin to heavy, shoes lined up in pairs on the floor beneath his suits and jackets like the front paws of large mammals, brown first, then black, then sneakers. Even his underwear was folded and stacked for easy access, as in a men’s clothing store. “George liked to say he did it so he could dress in the dark if he had to,” Isabel said. “But he never had to.”

The files that George had shipped down from Keene for the winter, so many that he’d installed a two-drawer cabinet in their bedroom to hold them, now filled four banker’s boxes. Isabel said he was a pack rat who carried his pack with him. She’d decide next winter which files to keep and which to shred, she said. Most could go. For now she would hold back only the papers and records she’d need for negotiating the purchase of the condo. She’d close on it in the summer, after George’s estate and insurance were settled. To get the paperwork started she had already scanned and e-mailed digital copies of George’s death certificate to Ron Briggs, his attorney in Lake Placid, and Tim Lynch, his insurance agent. The reading of George’s last will and testament could not occur until Isabel met with Briggs, who had drawn it up and had amended and revised it annually according to George’s changing instructions. She did not know what was in her husband’s will and had never had much desire to know. It was like his investment portfolio — not really her business — more his hobby or a low-intensity obsession than money management, just something he enjoyed poring over, rearranging and reconfiguring on his computer late at night before coming up to bed.