The Hour I First Believed. Wally Lamb
My father, too, I think. Or did we? Jesus, that’s weird.”
“What?”
“I can’t remember my father’s funeral.”
“Well, you were so young.”
“No, I wasn’t. I was fourteen.” For a second, I caught myself thinking I’d have to ask Lolly about it.
Maureen said I should tell the hospital to notify Gamboa and Sons.
“The Mexican funeral parlor? I don’t think so, Mo. I doubt Lolly would have wanted a ‘cat licker’ sendoff.”
“A what?”
“Nothing. Never mind.”
Mo said Lolly had used Gamboa and Sons for Hennie’s services—that Lolly and Victor Gamboa had been friends since the days when they’d worked together at the prison. “Lolly’s preplanned and paid for her funeral, Cae. After Hennie’s burial, she decided to do that. Which makes it easier, right? Now you won’t have to second-guess what she would have wanted.”
“Typical Lolly,” I said. “Miss Practical. So what do you think? You going to try to get back here? Because I’ll understand if you don’t think you can—”
Sure she was coming, Mo said. She’d call Galaxy Travel as soon as they opened and let me know when she had the details. Now that she thought of it, she’d better call the kennel, too. “Sophie drove them crazy last time, and they were hinting about not taking her anymore. But under the circumstances…Maybe you should try to plan the wake for Wednesday and the funeral for Thursday,” she said. “That way, if I can’t get everything in place until—”
“Today is what day?” I asked.
“It’s Monday, Caelum. Monday, the nineteenth.”
“Monday. Yeah, that’s right. I’m a little disoriented.”
“Well, that’s understandable. You were traveling all day yesterday. Plus, the time change. And you’re probably overtired on top of that.”
It wasn’t those things, though. It was being back home: remembering, not remembering. How could I not recall my father’s funeral? “I guess you better bring my suit,” I said. “And those shiny loafers you had me get.”
“Sure. Should we go over what you’ll need to do today? Make that list?”
I grabbed a pen, a scrap of paper. “Yeah, okay. What?”
First, I should call the hospital and tell them about the funeral home—get that done. Then I’d need to make an appointment with Gamboa’s to go over the details. “And you’re going to have to make some phone calls. Let her friends know.”
“How am I supposed to do that? She wasn’t exactly the Rolodex type.”
“Look in that little telephone table by the stairs. I bet she’s got an address book in there, or numbers written inside the phone book. Call the people whose names you recognize, and ask them to call whoever else they think might want to know. And Ulysses. Call him. I guess you’ll need to start thinking about what to tell him, job-status wise. Whether or not you’re going to keep him on for a while to look after the property. You’re her executor, right?”
“So she said.”
“Then you can probably write checks from her estate—pay him that way—but I’m not sure. I guess you’d better try to get an appointment with her lawyer, too.” Oh, great, I thought. Lolly’s lawyer was Lena LoVecchio, the attorney who’d represented me on my assault charge against Paul Hay. Just what I wanted to do: revisit that whole mess. “I’m sure most of the legal stuff can be put on hold,” Maureen said. “But there may be some short-term decisions to make, and while you’re back there, you might as well—”
“Oh, man.”
“What?”
“I suck at this kind of stuff. I’ll probably screw everything up.”
“No, you won’t, Cae. People will help you. They’ll want to help.”
“And you’re going to get here when?”
“Tomorrow, hopefully. Tuesday. Wednesday morning at the latest.”
“Oh, man.”
“Hey,” she said. “You know what? After you call the hospital, why don’t you go for a run? It’ll help clear out the cobwebs, get rid of some of that tension. Then go back, take a nice hot shower and—”
“There’s no shower here. Remember?”
“Oh, right. A nice hot bath, then. Even better. And eat breakfast, Caelum. You need to remember to eat.”
“What else?” I said. “For this list?”
She said if she thought of anything else, she’d call me, but that she’d better get off. The dogs were chafing to go out.
I didn’t want her to hang up. “Hey, I forgot to tell you. I saw Velvet before I left. At the airport. I guess she’s on a cleaning crew?”
“Was,” Mo said. “She called last night to tell me she quit. She saw you, too, she said. Oh, that reminds me: I better try and get ahold of her. She was going to meet me at school tomorrow to talk about reenrolling, but if I get a flight…okay, the dogs! I’ll let you know when I’m coming. Call me if you need to. I love you, Caelum. I’ll get there as soon as I can.”
I DIDN’T RUN, AS MO suggested. I wandered, from room to room downstairs and then up to the second floor. At the top step, I looked down the hallway. Stood there, rocking on the balls of my feet. I couldn’t do it.
From the house, I headed up the gravel road to the barn. Undid the latch, flipped on the overhead lights. Empty of cows, with its floor hosed and swept down to bald, cracked concrete, it was nothing but a glorified garage now—a parking place for the tractor and Lolly’s truck. “Come, boss!” I shouted, calling in the ghost-cows for morning milking. “Here, boss! Come, boss!” My voice bounced around and rose to the empty loft.
At the height of things, Bride Lake Farms had milked a herd of sixty-five registered Holsteins. Every other day, the Hood Dairy truck would pull up, pump nine thousand pounds of raw milk out of the tank, and drive it off for processing. As a kid, one of my chores had been to take care of our personal milk supply: put out two big pans for the barn cats and carry six quarts back to the house whenever we got low. Damn, but that was good milk: icy cold, cream on the top. “You drank it unpasteurized?” Maureen asked once, when I was comparing farm milk to the watery gray skim milk we bought at the KwikStop. “Yeah, and look,” I said. “I survived to tell you about it.”
I walked over to Grandpa Quirk’s beat-up wooden desk, still parked against the barn’s south wall. It was covered now with half-empty cans of paint and turpentine. Back in the day, Grandpa had sat there, hunched over his bills and receipts and ratios. He’d hated that monthly math, I remembered, but God, he’d loved his milkers. Named them after movie stars: Maureen O’Hara, Sonja Henie, Dorothy Lamour. Whenever one of his girls started producing, he’d take three Polaroid pictures of her: a head shot, a body shot, and a closeup of her udder. He’d label them on the back, date them, and put them in his big tin box. Standing there, I recalled something I hadn’t thought about in years: a game Grandpa and I had played. I’d pull one of the udder shots out of the box, hand it to him, and he’d look at it—study it at arm’s length, hold it close, scratch his chin. Then he’d identify whose milk bag it was. He never got any wrong. Had there been some trick to it? Could Grandpa really recognize all those girls by their udders?
I spotted his cowshit shovel, still hanging from its same nail in the wall, identifiable by its chipped red handle. As a girl, Lolly’d painted it for her father as a birthday surprise, but she’d overturned the paint can in the process and gotten a surprise of her own: a spanking. Most, but not all, of that red paint had worn off the handle now. I lifted the shovel from