Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral (16 page)

Why indeed, the women agree as Rebecca flips the conversation and asks everyone about their first great loss of love.

“Isn’t this a conversation for the beach tonight?” Katherine asks, realizing as she says it that the loss of her first love is almost as painful that moment as it was the day it happened.

“Ha!” Rebecca mockingly laughs. “Apparently you should go first.”

“She doesn’t have to,” Laura says, rescuing Katherine from a memory that surprises her with its intensity. “Maybe we should continue with the pet stories for a while.”

Quiet erupts for just a moment while the women tuck their love stories back where they came from and think about the burden sorrow often brings to its bearer. They think about how all those years ago they wondered how they would breathe, get up in the morning, live until the end of the week when what they thought was a major tragedy had struck them. They think about the weight of loss and how age has given them a view of life that is so much different than it was when they were 18, 28 or 38. They think about wisdom as being a gift from time but they also know that often time skips a beat because no matter where you are in your life pattern, sorrow can cripple and maim the hearts and hands of anyone—14 or 45 or 105.

“It doesn’t matter sometimes, does it?” Katherine asks and then continues to talk almost as if she is alone. “You look at yourself in the mirror, see the laugh lines getting longer and think that you can handle life now, you can handle what it brings and where it takes you and that nothing, no pain, will ever be as great as the one before it.

“But . . .” She trails off and begins to cry.

Jill reaches over to place her hand on Katherine’s cheek. She lets Katherine’s tears fall into the folds of her fingers and then she says, “But what? Tell us, Katherine. It’s okay.”

“This trip, Annie dying, my damn favorite bra falling apart, the loss of my mother—I feel as if everything has changed and it’s unsettled me in a way that I am having a hard time understanding.”

Jill takes her hand away. Katherine swallows and searches for what she wants to say because she isn’t certain. She doesn’t know what she wants to say. All she knows is that the day the red shoes arrived everything changed. Or maybe everything just started to change
faster
.

“This traveling funeral has made me think about everything, every aspect of my life, and I am wondering now how happy I have been or could be,” she confesses. “It’s not like I’ve ever even focused on what I want or where I am going. It’s like life has been driving me and I have not been driving my life.”

As she says it, Katherine realizes that is exactly what has happened. She realizes that her life has become a pattern of routines, routines that she always thought were necessary, have turned her into a person she no longer recognizes when she bothers to stop and look.

“I think maybe we are all feeling like that,” Laura shares. “I mean it’s not like my life has had rich consistency to it except for always hoping my daughter will come home again, but how often do we get a chance like this to stop and fan through things to see if we’ve become a damn zombie? I’ve got my job at the women’s center and a husband but what does any of that even mean anymore?”

“I suppose Annie thought about all of this,” Rebecca whispers from the back seat. “I suppose she knew we’d go beyond honoring her and find out where the empty spaces in our own lives have been hiding. It’s good. It’s all good.”

They decide to think about the traveling funeral as a pause, like a chance to take an extra breath, and then they each say what they would have been doing at that exact moment if they had not disrupted their life patterns.

Work.

Crying on the porch.

Work.

And more work.

Grieving for Annie.

And all of it, every single part of it okay, they decide, until this moment or one last night or the one when they decided to go on the traveling funeral when they opened up a chasm of thought, of time and thinking about not only Annie’s life but their own lives with and without her.

“Listen to us,” Jill says softly. “I think we all thought about this trip as our last gift to Annie. That’s what I thought, anyway. But it seems as if there are other gifts exploding all over the place.”

No one says anything. No one can say anything.

“Katherine, didn’t you say once that funerals are for the living?” Jill asks.

Miami disappears into the flat Florida horizon very quickly then as Annie Freeman’s pallbearers drive toward a long bridge that leads them deeper and deeper into a conversation that centers more on living than on dying. Which, they all agree, is exactly the kind of conversation Annie G. Freeman would have expected them to have.

18

John Chester is looking underneath the side of his wooden pier, his glasses tucked into his buttoned front shirt pocket and is busy untwisting anchor ropes and fishing line when he looks up, spots a blur of red moving toward the pier, realizes it’s a group of women and mumbles to himself, “Jesus, what the hell do they have on?”

By the time he drops his lines, fishes his glasses out, stands, and realizes it’s the Annie G. Freeman gang, the four women are rocking the pier with so much movement he’s afraid he’s going to go ass-end-first right into the bay.

“Hey, ladies!” he shouts as they move toward him to the end of what is the longest and best built pier in Islamorada. “Spread out a little bit and slow down or we’ll all be going swimming.”

Laura, Jill, Katherine and Rebecca have been in a trance for the past hour. Their conversation trickled into short sentences as they drove through the top of the Florida Keys, past Key Largo, Tavernier and Plantation to the front door of the Harbour Haven Bed and Breakfast. Their serious conversations about life and love and what death does to both those glorious elements tapered off as they started focusing on the glorious spot where Annie’s traveling funeral had delivered them on the second part of their journey.

None of the women had ever been to the Keys before—Miami, Tampa, the sandy and college-student-filled beaches along the Atlantic, maybe, but never to the dark green land meshed against sky the exact same color as the ocean that now seemed to be seducing them in waves that called their names constantly.

“Oh my gawd,” Laura had said so slowly as they drove earlier in the day toward the Keys and the other women wondered if she’d ever get it out as they crossed over a long bridge that seemed architecturally impossible and then dipped down so close to the water it looked as if the van would end up as a submarine. “I had no idea it was this gorgeous here.”

“Paradise, from the looks of things,” Katherine agreed, pulling over at the edge of the bridge so that everyone could get out and put their toes in the water. “Let’s go feel the water.”

Rebecca says it first, daring to break their moment of delicious nature loving. She bends down to splash the salty water on her face and to run her fingers in the sand and then she asks, “Does anyone know why we are here? Does anyone know what this place meant to Annie?”

The other three women turn to look at Rebecca as if they are waiting for her to answer her own questions. Rebecca doesn’t move. She lets the sun warm up her face and her closed eyelids but she doesn’t speak.

“Until the trip I didn’t even know she had been down here,” Katherine says, verbally deepening the idea that none of them knew as much as they thought they did about Annie. “That doesn’t mean anything, I don’t think, because there are those gaps in all our lives when we were doing things like having babies, going to graduate school, trying to decide what was up and down. I’m not sure when Annie would have been down here and why.”

“Something romantic,” Jill suggests. “Look around. Everything reeks of romance. Either that or you’d come here in the dead of winter to get away, especially if you grew up someplace that was cold.”

Laura tries to act like she doesn’t know anything. But dozens of images have seeped into her mind. She looks at each one of the women as they wonder about Annie and this place and she trails her hands back and forth in the soft waves until Jill realizes she hasn’t said anything.

“What?” Jill demands to know, throwing water from her fingertips onto Laura’s face. “What are you seeing when you close your eyes that we don’t see?”

Laura braces herself for the way her mind floats as if it is suspended when she sees something. From her perch at the edge of her own mind she can see the past and present in frames that present themselves like old movies—dark shadows, swift movement, the cloudy film of white gauze hanging over faces and places and tiny pieces of the future. This is how she sees. This is how worlds come to her. This is how she is able to know some things and parade into places that she is certain others could see if they would only try hard enough.

She doesn’t know everything about Annie’s Florida wanderings but she tells the other women that it feels to her as if it was definitely romance. She tells them she thinks the details will fall into place when they get to where they are supposed to stay and she thinks that is going to be someplace where Annie once stayed, too.

“How the hell do you know these things?” Katherine asks her, more than slightly astounded by her often-perfect perceptions. “Do you have psychic blood?”

It is hard for Laura not to tell the others everything. It is hard for her not to tell them things they do not even know about themselves. It is hard for her to explain how she has worked to place her own hands on the inside of herself, like continuous fingerprints on the kitchen walls, so that she can feel who she is all of the time. It is hard for her to explain that yes, some of what she has was passed down to her from wise aunties and a great-grandmother who loved to tell fortunes by reading the lines on the palms of people’s hands. It is hard to tell them that she knows there are worlds close to them that they cannot even see as they sit at the ocean’s edge and ponder the mysteries of Annie’s life.

It is hard, but she tells them in a way that does not make her sound as crazy as she sometimes feels and her fellow pallbearers rise as she finishes her story and then they want to know more. More about Annie and what it could have been but then she rises, too, and tells them that she doesn’t know everything. She tells them that the rest of the story, if it even matters, is theirs—all of theirs—to discover so they’d better hurry and get back into the van and get there.

That’s why Annie Freeman’s entourage is in such a hurry to get to the edge of the pier on which John Chester is now standing. It looks as if they are trying to locate Annie’s body floating off the shoreline when they charge poor John. That’s when Jill points out they have an entire day to figure it out and to grill the living hell out of him, so they back off and John is relieved but also terribly happy to see all of them.

John introduces himself as half the owner of the fine establishment they are in the process of taking over. The other half, his work and life partner Ben Cluskey, attorney-at-law, breakfast cook and fisherman extraordinaire, is scheduled, he tells them, to man the pontoon boat at 5:30
P.M.
for a cocktail cruise, hors d’oeuvres and conversation that could last all night.

“One of those men knows something,” Laura whispers to Rebecca as they climb the stairs to their rooms on the second floor of an old beach home that has been renovated to look as if it is a wild Italian villa. Laura has seen a musty version of something dangerous, emotional and a bit saucy.

“Wow,” Jill tells John as he opens the door to her room and her vision explodes with colors that have been blended to match one of the sunsets she expects to see outside of her window in just a few hours. Her room is a kaleidoscope of oranges. “This is lovely.”

“My sister did it,” he says, laughing. “If I decorated this place it would look like the inside of the storage shed, which is kind of a neat idea, now that I think about it. My grandfather built half the houses in this town and this is where my parents lived.”

Jill knows right away by the way he looks at her that John is the one here who knew Annie. John and Ben maybe both knew her but John surely knew her if she’d been at the house, stayed here or close by. She was dying to ask him but didn’t dare to do so without the other women in the same room to hear all the answers.

He tells her without her having to ask. He stood by the door as she dropped her bags on the bed, then asked her if she was the retired professor.

Jill smiled and he confessed quickly. “I knew Annie,” he admitted. Maybe it was because they were the same age or maybe it was because she was letting him do it in his own way and in his own time but he told her that yes, he had known Annie G. Freeman and they had stayed in touch for years and that he had indeed helped her arrange this part of what he had just learned from Jill was now a traveling funeral.

“Can you wait a few more hours until Ben gets here and we take our boat tour and I’ll tell you the entire story?”

“Does anyone else know that you knew Annie?”

“Laura. But then again Laura knows everything from what I hear.”

“I’ll just tell the others that you knew our Annie because if I don’t I’ll burst and yes, yes I can wait and we can wait but it won’t be easy.”

The women have captured the entire bed-and-breakfast, much to the delight and relief of John, who throws them a bone with the words, “Annie would love to know that you are in there messing the hell out of Ben’s kitchen and every other room in the joint. So go. Do. I’ll be on the dock where I belong.”

They each have their own rooms and while John goes back to his fishing lines and his whistling they descend on the house in pairs—Katherine and Laura and Jill and Rebecca following a fast call from Marie, and another from Balinda to ask them to keep a light on and the door unlocked because she is going to get there terribly late. Marie has missed the last possible flight and will now try and surface at the Miami airport or during the next leg of the funeral.

Katherine decides to take over the kitchen and make them a late lunch but Rebecca shoos her outside with the funeral book and reminds her she is way behind in taking a turn. Rebecca joyously embraces the refrigerator and the yellow dishes and the huge wine rack as if she has just bumped into a long-lost friend. “Alleluia,” she shouts as she opens every single drawer and touches every hanging pan in what is obviously a kitchen manned by a real cook.

While she writes, Katherine is surprised that she feels so tired. She grabs a pillow off the wicker chair, slides it under her head and begins writing with the funeral book propped on her chest.

K
ATHERINE
T
HOUGHT:
I suddenly feel exhausted. It’s odd almost and close to overwhelming to have this much time to dissect emotions that I did not even know I had. Well, I knew I had them but they’ve been sleeping quite soundly for a long time. And Annie—such remarkable and wonderful women you have picked for this funeral, which is loaded with surprises, like the two gay men and now this woman from Chicago who is joining us and the guessing games we play about the probable reasons for these funeral service locations. The Florida Keys. Why have I never been here and what did this place mean to you? Were you on this porch? Did you lie on this couch and look out across this bay? It is astonishingly beautiful here and I had no idea I was this tired. Come take a walk with me, Annie.

A
NNIE
T
HOUGHT:
Oh, Katherine, you are tired because you never stop. You are exhausted from planning and working and sharing and taking care of half the world. That’s okay—just remember once in a while to stop and purchase new underwear. Watch the sky here, Katherine. Let go of something. Listen and for crissakes have fun. Do you hear me, girl?

Katherine hears but what she hears is their kind host whistling and Rebecca moving through the kitchen as if she has just won the lottery and Jill and Laura talking while they dangle their feet at the edge of the pier. She turns so that she can wedge her back up against the seat cushions on the couch and catch a piece of the breeze that is slipping around the corner of the house and she thinks for just a moment that she hears her daughter as she drifts into an easy and sweet sleep.

Sonya, who balances a schedule and a life that would make two racehorses tired and who has in her seventeen years already witnessed through life with her own mother the stress and hurt of the loss of love and the death of a grandmother whom she saw disappear in every possible way right before her young eyes.

“So much,” Katherine murmurs, rocking in and out of sleep and finally allowing herself to fall into a slumber that only deepens her thoughts about her daughter. Thoughts that turn into a raging dream that she will later describe as a memory of something that must have really happened once.

Her daughter, hair dangling in braids and small enough to be clinging onto her knees. Katherine has her hand resting on top of Sonya’s head and she is winding her fingers in and out of her braids. They are watching a parade that seems to grow larger and larger with each item that passes.

First there is a truck and then there is a tank. First there is one boy playing a trombone and then there is an entire band. First there is a small float being pulled by a bicycle and then there is a float that goes on and on for so long they cannot see the end of it and Sonya looks up at her mother and says simply, “That’s enough, Mama.”

That is what Katherine will remember and toss around in her own head after Rebecca shakes her gently and tells her that she has been sleeping for nearly two hours and has missed lunch. “Wait,” Katherine begs, grabbing Rebecca’s arm to wriggle up into a sitting position. “You have to hear about this dream. . . .”

Rebecca smiles and then she sits next to Katherine and they rock together on the couch that can also be used as a swing and they share Katherine’s dream.