When she’d called me, three days before, I had been sitting on the deck of a nice, small hotel on De la Vina in Santa Barbara. I was temporarily unemployed, or unemployed again, and using my scant savings on an undeserved vacation. I was sitting with a good bottle of local merlot in front of me, and efficiently making it go away. It wasn’t the first of the evening, and so when my cellular rang I was inclined to let the message service pick it up. But when I glanced at the phone I saw who the caller was.
I hit the TALK button. ‘Hey,’ I said.
‘Ward,’ she replied. And then nothing.
Finally I heard a sound down the line. The noise was soft, glutinous. ‘Mary?’ I asked quickly. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Oh, Ward,’ she said, her voice sounding cracked and very old. I sat up straight in my seat then, in the vain hope that faux readiness, last-minute rigour, would somehow limit the weight with which this hammer was going to fall.
‘What is it?’
‘Ward, you’d better come here.’
In the end I got her to tell me. A car crash in the centre of Dyersburg. Both dead on arrival.
I’d known immediately it would be something like that, I suppose. If it hadn’t involved both of them then it wouldn’t be Mary on the phone. But even now, as I stood with her in the graveyard looking down upon their coffins, I was unable to truly understand a sentence framing their death with its full weight. I also could not now return the call that my mother had left on my machine, a week before. I just hadn’t gotten round to it. I hadn’t expected them to be erased from the surface of the earth without warning, and put below it, down where they couldn’t hear me.
Abruptly I realized that I didn’t want to be standing near their bodies any more. I took a step back from the graves. Mary dug in the pocket of her coat and brought out something attached to a small cardboard label. A set of keys.
‘I put out the trash this morning,’ she said, ‘and took a few things out of the refrigerator. Milk and such. Don’t want them smelling it up. Everything else I just left.’
I nodded, staring at the keys. I didn’t have any of my own. No need. They’d been in, on the few occasions I’d visited. I realized that this was the first time I’d ever seen Mary somewhere other than my parents’ kitchen or living room. It was like that with my folks. You went to their house, not the other way round. They tended to form a centre. Had tended to.
‘They spoke of you, you know. Often.’
I nodded again, though I wasn’t sure I believed her. For much of the last decade my parents hadn’t even known where I was, and anything they had to say concerned a younger man, an only child who’d once grown up and lived with them in a different state. It wasn’t that we hadn’t loved each other. We had, in our ways. I just hadn’t given them much to talk about, had checked none of the boxes that make parents prone to brag to friends and neighbours. No wife, no kids, no job to speak of. I realized Mary was still holding her hand out, and I took the keys from her.
‘How long will you stay?’ she asked.
‘It depends how long things take. Maybe a week. Possibly less.’
‘You know where I am,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to be a stranger, just because.’
‘I won’t,’ I said quickly, smiling awkwardly. I wished I had a sibling who could have been having this conversation for me. Someone responsible and socially skilled.
She smiled back, but distantly, as if she already knew this was not the way things worked.
‘Goodbye, Ward,’ she said, and then set off up the slope. At seventy she was a little older than my parents, and walked awkwardly. She was a lifelong Dyersburg resident, an ex-nurse, and more than that I didn’t know.
I saw that Davids was standing by his car on the other side of the cemetery, killing time with his assistant but evidently waiting for me. He had the air of someone ready and willing to be brisk and efficient, to tidy loose ends.
I glanced back once more at the graves, and then walked heavily down the path to face the administrative tasks created by the loss of my entire family.
Davids had brought most of the paperwork in his car, and took me to lunch to deal with it. I don’t know whether this ended up being any less unpleasant than doing it in his office would have been, but I appreciated the courtesy from a man who knew me barely at all. We ate in historical downtown Dyersburg, at a place called Auntie’s Pantry. The interior had been slavishly designed to resemble a multi-level log cabin, the furniture hand-hewn by elves. The menu offered a chilling variety of organic soups and home-made breads, accompanied by salads largely predicated upon bean sprouts. I know I’m out of step, but I don’t regard bean sprouts as food. They don’t even look edible. They look like pallid, mutant grubs. The only worse thing is cous cous, of which there was also plenty on offer. I don’t know of any aunt on this planet who eats that kind of shit, but both staff and patrons seemed about as happy as could be. Almost maniacally so.
After a brief and somewhat stilted wait we scored a seat by the front window. This annoyed a spruce young family behind us, who’d had their eye on the table and didn’t understand how being first in line entitled you to certain benefits. The woman outlined her dissatisfaction to the waitress, loudly observing that the table had space for four people and we were only two. Normally this kind of thing brings out the very best in me, particularly if my foes are all wearing identical navy blue fleeces, but right then the well was dry. The husband was no competition, but the two children were blond and solemn and looked like a pair of judging angels. I didn’t want to get on their bad side. The waitress, who was of the genus of tan, pretty but rather hefty young women who flock to places like Dyersburg for the winter sports, elected not to get involved, instead staring brightly at a patch of the floor approximately equidistant between the two sets of combatants.
Davids glanced briefly across at the matriarch. He’s of my parents’ age, tall and gaunt with a good-sized beak, and looks like the guy who God calls on when he really wants Hell to rain down. He opened his briefcase and drew out a lot of documents, making no effort to conceal the kind of event they pertained to. He laid them out in front of him in a businesslike way, picked up the menu, and started to read it. By the time I’d finished watching him do these things, the family was all studiously looking elsewhere. I picked up my own menu, and tried to imagine why what it said was of interest to me.
Davids was my parents’ attorney, and had been since they’d met him after moving from Northern California. I’d spoken to him on a couple of previous occasions, Christmas or Thanksgiving drinks at their house, but in my mind he was now simply one of a number of people with whom my acquaintance was about to draw to an abrupt close. This bred a curious mixture of distance and a desire to prolong the contact, which I was unable to translate into much in the way of conversation.
Thankfully, Davids took the lead as soon as the bowls of butternut and lichen soup arrived. He recapped the circumstances of my parents’ death, which in the absence of witnesses boiled down to a single fact. At approximately 11:05 on the previous Friday evening, after visiting friends to play bridge, their car had been involved in a head-on collision at the intersection of Benton and Ryle Streets. The other vehicle was a stationary car, parked by the side of the road. The post-mortem revealed blood-alcohol levels consistent with maybe half a bottle of wine in my father, who had been the passenger, and a lot of cranberry juice in my mother. The road had been icy, the junction wasn’t too well lit, and another accident had taken place at the same spot just last year. That was that. It was just one of those things, unless I wanted to get involved in a fruitless civil litigation, which I didn’t. There was nothing else to say.
Then Davids got down to business, which meant getting me to sign a large number of pieces of paper, thereby accepting ownership of the house and its contents,