Christine Schutt - Florida

Aunt Frances and her S&H stamps. Yes, I remembered her slimy economies, her slapping after dust.

“We’ve more or less taken care of Arthur these last few years, and we were glad to and lucky we were in a position to do it.” North facing at the table, in less light, Aunt Frances sat to her breakfast, saying, “But what would you know, Alice; you don’t live here.”

For the funeral Aunt Frances wore a nubbly suit and on the jacket some jewel the size of a rodent. A rabid, clawed thing was crawling up her shoulder and the heavy folds of her neck to the harsh hair, dyed rust and shapelessly arranged — some nest!

When did my aunt grow homely?

When did she start to drive?

I followed her driving the second car, so that I wouldn’t have to stay long at the funeral home but could go back to Uncle Billy’s and read. That is if I could find my way back to Uncle Billy’s. Aunt Frances was going too fast, was speeding through four-way stops and leaving me behind with more cars insinuating themselves, and I didn’t know where we were going exactly, making a left and then a right in a neighboring town I had never known well and to a business I had never noticed. LEONARD CRADLE’S FUNERAL HOME was a sign I could not recall although it stood out like a marquee as we drove to it. She forced me to drive over the railroad tracks when the crossing gate was clanging down. She forced me to gun through yellow lights and to pass other cars when the double line said not to. Leonard Cradle’s Funeral Home, Leonard Cradles Funeral Home, Leonard Cradle’s Funeral Home was blinking closer.

I shouted at her for real in the parking lot until Aunt Frances slapped me, and I slapped at her rodent.

“Is this how you show your respect?”

“Fuck off.”

“Is it, Alice?”

“Is it?” from Uncle Billy, leaning on a cane, I noticed, from Nonna’s collection — since when had he taken those? “This may be how people act where you live. …”

I followed them inside and saw faintly familiar town faces. Two women, one from the Piggly Wiggly where Arthur liked to shop and the other from Bold Motors, named Barbara.

Barbara said to me, “I know where you live,” and she smiled a crooked, idiotic smile. “I can’t imagine it,” she said. “Will you ever come home again?”

“Home?” I asked back, and I hoped Aunt Frances heard me.

Who came through the line then? Duane and the unkempt men from Pat’s Hardware, Mr. Philco, the bakery ladies, Rita from the dentist’s, Victor’s Drugstore, and others: They all said, how sorry, how sudden, how sad.

It must be sad for you to come home this way. When was the last time you saw him?

The last time?

I tried to remember while driving back to Uncle Billy’s, but the back roads rolled up and down — a field, a copse, a field, a muddy trough with guernseys ankle-deep in muck, filthy — and nothing came back to me.

I wondered in what colored suit they had dressed Arthur, and why I thought it was turquoise when turquoise didn’t make any sense except as a tuxedo to a prom. Was the coffin’s interior turquoise? Should I have looked?

I put the car in the garage and looked instead at what Arthur had touched here where he had lived and worked. Here was an orderly garage glossed in a color called serviceman’s gray that when beaded in water shined. Fivey Farms, hardly a farm, Uncle Billy’s house. Labels taped on everything he owned in Arthur’s unassuming hand — meek loops, short stems, no flourishes. His labels on the light switches dispirited me, their homely thoroughness, and I hesitated to switch on the overhead lights in the greenhouse where Aunt Frances coaxed into frail growth what Arthur then had planted in the garden. The garden just behind the greenhouse sloped toward the raspberry patch and what would be tomatoes and lettuce. Exotic, coddled, fragile fruits, like the fig trees, were covered in carpet; the strawberry beds were blanketed in straw, and only asparagus grew unimpeded by the fluctuating cold. Baskets, shears, twine for tying up — who would do this work now that Arthur was dead?

Aunt Frances at the funeral said, “We’ll have to find someone, but I don’t know how.”

Arthur had said he wanted to see the country, but he had only his Sundays off — and only one vacation in all the years. Totem poles were what he said he best remembered; but the soggy trip explained his understanding of Mother’s need for sunshine: Florida in a box Arthur built for her to lie in. Arthur, on vacation in the north woods, slept fitfully. A week was all it was, and it must have been enough for him; besides, Arthur was needed on the lake. Uncle Billy needed Arthur to settle the groundswork, needed Arthur to negotiate with the quarry and so finish the rock garden; Uncle Billy needed Arthur to make note of the work to be done and to get estimates and to calculate the cost. This is a big place, goddamnit, Uncle Billy was saying. Electricians and tree surgeons, contractors, painters, sailmakers, plumbers — Arthur knew where to find such men, knew them by first name. Some of them, Ray, for instance, Mr. Hornburg and Gassmussen, were like Arthur and volunteered for charitable causes. Arthur liked to play Santa for sick kids, and Arthur must have had more of a life than this, more than just the one I saw in the garage, but I never asked him really.

Oh, all those many ways I didn’t know Arthur!

He must have had a hobby — look at the way he kept the garage! He must have had interests — look … but I didn’t, had never … hopelessly self-involved.

From the lake-facing rooms in Uncle Billy’s house I saw the lawn’s precipitous drop to a shoreline propped with rocks, and I went there and walked around the boathouse snarled with whips of forsythia not yet bloomed. Arthur would have to die in such a month as this when the light hurt, when the pinked bark of bare trees and sodden beds of last year’s leaves, the simple barrenness of things, strained my eyes, and I could make out no shore but fuzzed horizon. Sad or thuggish month March, pricked with deceiving, infant colors: chick-yellow, baby-pink, and quickly fading violet. The forced hyacinth blooms, although fragrant, looked plastic; no wonder then that I saw cheap when I thought of Arthur’s casket, saw turquoise when I put him in a suit.

I walked back to the garage and found the door to his apartment was open — so Aunt Frances had come, I thought. She had neatened his rooms. The mail was unopened and on the table, in her hand, was a list: Goodwill, Gassmussen, sink. I guessed she had been in Arthur’s closet; Aunt Frances had picked out a suit and watered his exhausted plants: on a tiered and tottering stand, African violets, so dusty and rag-eared, they looked to be a hundred … almost as old as Arthur was, Arthur, here from the beginning.

I opened his bed.

The light turned the paper shades into tea-colored parchment, and the heat, not long off, meant the bedroom still had his smell, a close, fruity smell as of a used comb while the rough sheets on his bed were oddly odorless. I shuffled my feet under the covers, then curled and was still and when I woke, I was not so surprised to be in his bed as to remember that Arthur was dead. “When I woke, it was dark; when I woke, the driveway lights goldly framed the shades, halfway soothing.

MOTHER GUESSED SHE MUST have been sitting on the shelly edge of the Pacific, tadpoling in the ocean when Nonna died.

And what had she been doing when my father died? Did she remember, or was it up to me to remake him? I wanted to ask did she know on the instant where she stood that he was dead? “Was she struck in the side as by a sword, was she blinded? Surely she was overcome when she was told, and then when it appeared to be a suicide? What then?