Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral (7 page)

“Please let it not be too hard,” she whispers to herself as Katherine asks her if she is ready for the request, and then she lies and answers, “Yes.”

Then Katherine tells her about the traveling funeral. She reads the notes and tells the story of the UPS woman, which is already becoming, in one short day, the thing legends are hatched from, and she puts her hand right on top of the red tennis shoes as she says how no one could be more astounded than she is to have to be doing something like this.

This makes Rebecca laugh even louder and say, “Not.”

“What do you mean, ‘Not’?”

“It all makes sense. She was into place and capturing moments and my guess is that if I went over there and went through the house I would find detailed diaries about exactly what it was that happened in each one of those spots . . . where the hell are they?”

“Here, Santa Fe, New York City, Florida Keys, Lake Superior, some island near Seattle.”

“Jeezus. How many days?”

“Ten.”

There is a quiet moment while Rebecca adds it all up in her head and subtracts those days from her remaining sick leave—none—her remaining vacation days—none—her remaining personal days—none—and the remaining days for the rest of her life when she will regret not having gone, not having seen what Annie wanted her to see. Everyone is dead and she cannot remember the last time she went on a retreat, spent more than a handful of hours with a group of unfamiliar women. Took her clothes off in front of anyone but the cat. Stayed up talking for hours. Told someone everything. She’s suddenly just a bit terrified.

“Shit.”

“Well?”

“What happened in those places she wants us to go to? What could possibly have happened that we don’t know about? Where the hell did she come up with this idea? What if we don’t get along? What if I need to be alone for an hour?”

Katherine starts laughing again and they launch into a discussion about the possibilities of the trip. The possibilities of five women mixing hands and hearts and pouring their grief on top of it all and then waiting for the whole damn thing to come out of the oven. The possibility that someone will be in menopause and crabby as hell, that someone will not be in menopause and be crabby as hell. The possibility that it may ruin the casual relationships some of them already have. The possibility that some or all of them might not want to come back. The possibility that it may be an impossibility to even think about going.

“She’s paying for it all,” Katherine says, as if she were reading Rebecca’s mind.

“It’s not the money. It’s the time, and I—”

“Think about the word ‘time,’ Rebecca,” Katherine interrupts. “Think about that shitty word right now and tell me what you see when the word flashes across that screen in your mind.”

Katherine is pacing now. She has turned into the assistant district attorney. She needs to sway this conversation fast. She has her left hand on her hip and with her foot she is pushing her toes up against the side of the red shoes so that they move back and forth like the ticking hands of a huge clock.

“Here’s the deal,” Rebecca finally says, surrendering to Annie, doing it for Annie, thinking it’s just for Annie. “I’ll ask for a short leave of absence. They are used to me doing this at the real estate company. For God’s sake, I’ve been gone more in the past ten years than I have been there and I’ll promise them something. I’ll develop a new marketing plan. When we sell Annie’s house I’ll donate some money in their name to some hospice group or to cancer research. They’ll do it. They loved her too. They’ll do it and you know I’ll do it. You knew that before you even called me on this shitty phone.”

“Are you sure?”

Rebecca is sure of many things. She is certain that her daughter loves her in a way that will last forever. She is sure that she has this moment, this day, and maybe a few hours after that. She is sure of the past and of what might linger on the horizon only as far as she can see. She is certain that if you take your grief and you hold on tight to it, it multiplies and divides and soon conquers you so that it wins a war that was never meant to be started.

She is sure that she loved Annie G. Freeman in a way that many times made her want to cross a boundary that she was sure she was not meant to cross. She loved this friend, this woman, this neighbor in a way that opened up a world to her that changed her very heart, what can fit inside it and where it was meant to go.

She is sure that tomorrow is not guaranteed and that too many women and men wait so long to say something, feel something, or go someplace. Too damn long.

She is not sure she could live with herself if she didn’t go, if she didn’t do one last thing for Annie. She is not sure she will ever love again the way she loved Annie. She is not sure about looking out into Annie’s backyard for the rest of her life and seeing someone who is not Annie running through the sprinkler in August. She is not sure she will ever be done grieving.

“Oh, baby, you know me,” Rebecca tells Katherine. “No matter how hard it has been and remains—I have to do one more thing for Annie. I’d do anything for Annie.”

“I do know that, but in this case we are reading the same book but on different pages. I have things, you know that, that place me in the ‘undecided’ category. I could use a flipping traveling funeral. I have not stopped to take a breath in a long time and to take it for Annie, well, that seems like it could be grand.”

“I suppose she knew that too.”

“What didn’t she know?” Katherine shoots back.

“She didn’t know it would be so quick. She didn’t know it would happen to her. She didn’t know that it would be as easy as it was in the end. She didn’t know what she would see from the last turn.”

“Stop, please stop,” Katherine says, bending to touch the tips of the shoes with her fingers. “We’ll get to this. We’ll get to it all but I need a breath now.”

Rebecca thinks that what she needs is to take a walk and get the blood moving into her face and she needs to move fast so that she doesn’t linger in the impossibility for more than just a few minutes.

“Is there anyone else to call?” she asks Katherine.

“One more woman.”

“Who is it? Anyone I know?”

“Marie Kondronsky.”

“Shit.”

“Her hospice nurse. I have no idea how this is going to work with her and her patients. We have to figure that out this week, too. Can you help me do that, Rebecca? I think I am going to have my hands full.”

Rebecca thinks for a second. Marie has a schedule that would cripple a young and healthy pope. She has four half-grown kids, a husband who runs a huge construction company, and she’s the hospice nurse in Sonoma County for at least eight dying neighbors, friends, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers.

“No problem,” Rebecca tells Katherine. “If there is one more thing that I know it’s that we can pretty much do anything. I’m thinking about lifting up the edge of the house with my bare hands before I go back to work in the morning. I’ll figure that part out. What else is there? Is there something else I can do?”

Katherine gets up again. She feels woozy, as if she is about to spin into a place that is just a bit frightful.

“I’m just a little, what? I don’t know . . .” she confesses.

“The word is temporarily ‘overwhelmed.’ Don’t worry. You know we’ll all be fine but we had better bring along a shitload of Kleenex.”

“Good idea. I think I may just be a bit tired.”

“One more thing,” Rebecca tells her. “We have to call this something. You know she loved that shit. Naming things. Putting headlines on her papers.”

“You’re right. I can see it now: T-shirts, hats, we can put logos on cars and buses. You won’t have to sell her house now and we can run tours through the damn place.”

“I have it,” Rebecca admits.

“Hit me.”

“Let’s call it Annie Freeman’s Fabulous Traveling Funeral.”

Katherine tilts back her head so far when she laughs that she almost tips over and lands on top of her dear friend’s ashes. When she speaks it’s a raspy whisper because the laugh feels so damn good she does not want to let go of it.

“It’s perfect.”

“Well, it’s something. Perfect is in question,” Rebecca adds, ready now to get to it. Ready to put all the pieces of the funeral train in motion. Ready to keep laughing and then maybe pause occasionally for a remarkable cry.

“I do know this,” Katherine tells her, “it will be fabulous.”

Rebecca laughs even louder. Laughter is her new fuel, what she will use to get her through the next seven days until she has to get to the airport. What she will use to help her get a leave for yet another funeral. What she will use to finish sorting through the rest of her dead friend’s clothes and the yard and about two thousand boxes in the garage.

“No shit,” she finally says.

“No shit,” Katherine promises.

9

Annie and Rebecca

Santa Bonita Estates,
Section 38, House 42, 1993

It’s past midnight when Rebecca Carlson throws back the first sip from her fourth beer and breathes a sigh of relief that would fill up one of her three empty beer cans and knock the teeth out of anyone in recovery.

“She’s done,” she tells herself, still not willing to leave her post by the living room window. “Maybe she’ll leave.”

Rebecca has been watching her new neighbor pile rocks in the soon-to-be shape of a house. A new house. The house Rebecca has decided she will hate the rest of her life.

“Damn it. Damn the house.”

Rebecca has not noticed that her soon-to-be-neighbor has been watching her. When Rebecca moves to the kitchen for another beer or to skip to the bathroom, the neighbor woman wishes she’d stick her head out the door instead and invite her over for a beer. She’d just about kill for a beer after hours of hauling rocks so the construction team can at least try to get her house in the spot where she’d like to see it built.

Annie G. Freeman has spent hours outlining the shape of the house that will soon throw a late afternoon shadow across the side garden of Rebecca’s yard. The garden that doesn’t really need the sun that late in the day and would welcome the new fingers of a fine woman to snap dried leaves and pull the tall grass off the tired roots.

Mystified by her neighbor’s reluctance to forge a neighborly partnership, Annie has surrendered to the silence that erupted following the final negotiations for the sale of the land. She knows of her neighbor’s losses, her struggles—both financial and personal—and yet she also knows that once they cross the trenches of the invisible war that has been declared, Rebecca will see and know for certain that everything is going to be just fine.

But this day, this first day after the signing and when the wings of change have brushed against her life yet again, Rebecca Carlson just wants to be pissed off.

She wants to be angry at the woman who on one hand saved her from financial ruin and the loss of her own house, and on the other changed her view, disrupted the quiet of her hillside life and made her somewhat angrily step into rhythm with a world that seemed to shove her into places that she had no desire to see, feel or experience.

“Shit,” Rebecca said, moving the word through her mouth as if she were about to swallow something that tasted just as nasty as the word itself.

Annie catches Rebecca’s shadow dancing close to the window and she smiles. She focuses for a while on the struggle often associated with the word “change.” For her, for even this woman next door, she thinks, that sure thing that brings comfort is not really sure at all.

“Come on,” she says out loud to Rebecca. “Come to mama.”

The rocks have made Annie’s hands sore. The tops of her knuckles are bleeding and she’d love to run her hands under some warm tap water and then rest them gently in her lap. She’d love to sit out on the back step of Rebecca’s old house and swig a beer or two and memorize the shapes of the trees, the flow of the sky from west to east, the way the far house—barely visible—looks like a ship about to fall into the deep side of the square earth.

Rebecca does not know if the woman she is about to call neighbor has a family. She has not seen anyone else come to the land. She has not asked the woman about relatives or sons or daughters or a husband. Annie signed the papers alone. She owns the land now. But Rebecca wonders. She wonders how long she can hold out and what she will do if she needs one more egg for the cake or what she will do if her car won’t start and she sees that Annie is home. She wonders what it will be like the day the walls of Annie’s house go up and then the roof goes on amidst the constant drum of hammers and trucks and the sideways glances of the construction crew. She wonders as she drinks her beer standing up and leaning against the window and then shutting her eyes for just a moment to see it all.

That is when Annie places the last rock in place, wipes her hands on her jean-covered thighs, and takes a step toward the back door of Rebecca’s house.

Rebecca does not see this. When she opens her eyes Annie is no longer in the yard and it’s about to get dark, and she murmurs, “What the hell.” And then she hears the knock.

“Shit.”

Annie looks exhausted and Rebecca, who has a heart that is truly a flower, melts instantly when she sees spots of blood on Annie’s knuckles when she raises her hand to push the hair out of her eyes.

They both just look at each other for one of those moments when words would be meaningless. One of those moments when someone should say “Hi” or “I’m sorry” or “Please come in.” One of those moments that erases everything bad and opens up a door into a place that is hopeful—awkward for another inch or two—but still hopeful.

Annie speaks first.

“I don’t know what I need more: a beer, a kind word, or some warm water across the tops of my hands.”

Rebecca cannot help herself. She can no longer be angry at this woman who is in the process of saving her from financial ruin, who needs something now that Rebecca is perfectly capable of giving her.

“How about all three?” she answers, opening the screen door so that Annie can come inside.

“Beer first?” Annie asks.

“A woman who understands priorities,” Rebecca answers as they waltz slowly into something as new and fresh as the stone outline of an unbuilt house.

The beginning stretched into hours. There was more beer, the rewarming of yesterday’s pasta dinner, a tour through every room in Rebecca’s house, and then a pause long and sorrowful in front of the photos that lined the wall going into the kitchen.

“My parents, my sister, my aunt, the wild daughter alive but gone to seed,” Rebecca whispers as she shows her photo gallery to Annie. “All gone. Now you know why it was so hard for me to let go of one more thing.”

“The land?”

“The land, the view, a sense of something, one thing just staying the way I thought it should be.”

“Control.”

This word stops Rebecca. It stops her and she wants suddenly to lean into this woman with the strong voice and bloody hands. This woman who will most likely become the best neighbor in the world and who will lend her books and sleep on her couch when she is lonely and never lock her door and open her world and life to Rebecca in a way that changes everything—every single thing.

“I’m tired,” she tells Annie. “Tired of losing ground, of losing control, of losing so many people that I love. I fought this sale because of that, losing control, which is ridiculous because in the end selling you the land will give me something back. I’m so sorry.”

Annie does not want Rebecca to be sorry. She does not want her to take back her words or her actions or how she feels inside of her wounded heart. She puts her hand on the side of Rebecca’s face and Rebecca does not try to take her hand away.

“It’s going to be okay, you know that now, don’t you?”

“I know there will be something else but I also know that it will be okay, it has to be okay, you are right.”

That first night turned into a second day and the beer turned into wine and the wine turned into breakfast after a night on the couch from the beer and wine and a conversation that launched a friendship and gathered strength as the walls of Annie’s house went up and then the damn slanted roof came into view and a garage that was scaled back so that Rebecca could look out of her kitchen window and still see the top of her favorite hill.

Strength as the daughter and sons came and went, as one job became a struggle and the other job a delight. Strength as the grass took hold and the trees grew and as one romance soured and another erupted like a well-tended fire and then burnt out at the mere hint of a strong breeze.

Strength finally to the end. Through that day when Annie slowly crossed the yard and cried in Rebecca’s arms and beyond that, those months beyond when it seemed as if Rebecca had moved in and without knowing it passed a notebook into the hands of her dying friend so that she could design a traveling funeral.

Annie Freeman’s fabulous traveling funeral.