Red Hook Road (13 page)

When Ruthie stood up, Iris opened her eyes. The undertaker’s assistant offered Ruthie a miniature shovel. Ruthie scooped up some dirt from the small pile next to the graves and set off across the plank of wood covering the raw earth. She was shaking, and so dirt sprinkled from the shovel, like flour sifted for a cake, until finally the shovel was empty, even before she reached the graves. The undertaker’s assistant tried to hand her a long white rose from a basket he had looped over his forearm but she ignored him. She turned back to the pile, dropped the shovel, and scrabbled with her hands in the dirt. She walked quickly along the plank of wood to the open grave and dropped her handful in, carefully sprinkling some over each coffin.

Daniel went next. He, too, stepped past the rose-bearing attendant, took the shovel from the pile, and began to shovel dirt into the grave. The shovel was bright and shiny with a small blade. The muscles of Daniel’s back strained against the fabric of his jacket as he dug the toy shovel into the pile of earth. He planted his feet in their bright white running shoes and heaved load after load of earth, as if it were his job to fill the entire grave. The dirt thunked and rattled on the coffin tops. The undertaker, a man whose profession demanded the capacity to be unsurprised by any expression of grief, glided smoothly over to Daniel and put his hand under his elbow.

“How about I take that for you, sir?” he said, indicating the shovel. “You did a good job.”

Daniel straightened up and blinked sweat out of his eyes. He looked into the undertaker’s blank and comforting face and turned the tiny shovel over, spilling the dirt back on the depleted pile.

The undertaker raised an eyebrow to his young assistant, who lifted an edge of the sod covering the mound next to the double grave and shoveled a little more dirt onto the pile. Then the young man stood the shovel back in the pile and stepped away, his head bowed.

It was her turn now, but Iris found that she could not get up. She tried to stir herself, but she was too heavy, too tired, too sad. She turned a panicked face to her father, who nodded his head once and mouthed the word “Sit.” She relaxed against the chair as if she had sought only his permission, and watched as Maureen grabbed a rose and, her bulk precariously balanced at the lip of the graves, tossed it into the hole. Her two
daughters followed their mother’s example, but when Samantha’s turn came the girl hesitated, glancing from Jane to Iris. She took two roses, but also scooped up some dirt in the small shovel, which was for her the perfect size. She tipped the dirt into the grave and then carefully dropped the flowers into the grave, one on Becca’s coffin, the other on John’s, as if trying by her meticulousness to make up for her failure with the bridal flowers.

Slowly people began stepping forward to make the choice between flowers and dirt that their heart or heritage demanded. Some followed Samantha’s lead and took both. Iris hated the white roses, waxy and coarse. Yet if they had been beautiful, it would have been worse. A crime, a kind of vandalism, to crush the loveliness of flowers beneath shovelfuls of earth. She closed her eyes and listened as handfuls of dirt whispered onto the caskets.

It was only after everyone else had finished filing past the open grave and moved on that Iris realized Jane had also stayed in her chair. For a moment the mothers of the dead remained in their places. Then, as if resolved to do what must be done, Jane rose. She stared at the grave, at the mound of earth, at the shovel and the nearly empty basket of flowers. Then, with a shake of her head, she grabbed her folding chair and collapsed it with a loud snap. She handed it to the disconcerted undertaker’s assistant and marched away, without a glance at her family, leaving them to follow after.

Mr. Kimmelbrod planted his cane into the ground and rose unsteadily to his feet. “Iris?” he said.

She closed her eyes again. For the past four days the funeral had loomed, an end in itself. As if
this
was what she had to get through;
this
was the miserable task she needed to accomplish. Every action she had taken—confronting Jane at the church, approving Mary Lou and Vienna’s menu, ironing her skirt—had been geared toward this moment. Now the funeral was over. Now there was nothing but the hollow expanse of a life without her daughter.

“Iris,” Mr. Kimmelbrod repeated. “It’s time now.” He took one hand off his cane and held it out to her. “I need your help to walk across the grass.”

Iris looked from her husband to the child that was left her. They
waited on the other side of the grave. Then she turned to her father, standing beside her. Finally she rose. Mr. Kimmelbrod put his hand in the crook of her elbow and together they turned away from the graves.

“Wait a minute, Dad,” Iris said. Stepping carefully on the plank, she knelt down, and smoothed out the wet, wadded tissue she held in her hand. She took a handful of dirt. It was dry and pebbly, and some leaked through her fingers. She poured the dirt into the tissue and then folded it into a tiny bundle. She hesitated for a moment, wondering where to put it. She had neither purse nor pockets.

“Give it to me,” Daniel said.

She handed him the soggy tissue and rubbed her gritty palm on her hip, leaving a smear of dirt on the khaki fabric of her skirt. She clasped her daughter’s hand, gave her father her other arm, and led them across the grass to where the cars were parked, Daniel trailing a few steps behind.

A dozen books piled in her arms, Ruthie bumped her hip against the handicapped-accessible button and stepped back to allow the library doors to swing slowly open. She strode through the door, eyes down to elude any random sympathetic glances that might be cast in her direction. She made it to the circulation desk just as she began to lose her grip on the books.

It was Mary Lou Curran’s day volunteering behind the desk, a task that members of the library board shared during August when, with the influx of late-summer visitors, the circulation of books doubled. Normally, Iris would have been obliged to take a shift or two, but after the accident the board had met in special session and voted to absolve her of the responsibility for the rest of the summer. Mary Lou’s hand had been the single one raised in opposition to the motion. Without knowing it, she and Ruthie shared similar notions about the burdens of sympathy. Mary Lou was convinced that it would have done Iris more good to stick to her usual routines than to hole up in the house.

“My goodness,” Mary Lou said, stacking Ruthie’s books neatly on top of one another. She flipped open a book, and glanced at the due date. “Overdue,” she said. “That’s not like you. And since when do you read John Grisham?”

A few days ago, Ruthie had received an e-mail from the head librarian gently informing her that a number of books checked out by Rebecca Copaken were now long overdue. “I don’t want to trouble your mother at such a time,” the librarian wrote. “But there are nearly twenty people on the waiting list for
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
, and almost as many for
The Last Juror
.” Ruthie had not been willing to trouble Iris, either—about the books or anything else. In the six weeks since the
funeral her mother had burrowed deep. She spent hours in her saggy armchair on the screen porch, sometimes not even bothering to change out of the old plaid pajama bottoms and white T-shirt of Daniel’s that she slept in during the summer. For hours she intently perused back issues of Oxford University’s
Holocaust and Genocide Studies
, which was not that different from the way she’d passed all the previous summers of Ruthie’s life, Ruthie supposed, except that now Iris no longer punctuated her days of grim research with jaunts on the whaler, sailing with friends, or picnic excursions to Red Hook Hill. Ruthie was not surprised that her mother had become more remote and inaccessible in her grief, nor did she begrudge her for needing to do it; but understanding and accepting her mother’s reaction did little to alleviate her own loneliness.

Like her mother, books had offered Ruthie refuge since the accident. Ruthie had retreated to the familiar, rereading all of George Eliot from
Adam Bede
to
Daniel Deronda
. In her return stack was a copy of
Middlemarch
, which was one of her favorite novels. This time her melancholy had infected her appreciation of Eliot’s wit.

Ruthie had taken upon herself the task of tracking down and rounding up Becca’s library books. This was, in truth, not much different than what Ruthie had always done for her sister. Even as little girls, Ruthie had been neat and orderly, Becca sloppy. When Iris would demand that Becca clean her room, as often as not Ruthie would do it for her. Ruthie had always organized Becca’s closet, added her name to cards on presents to make up for her forgetfulness, and returned her library books.

The legal thrillers and murder mysteries that were all that Becca ever read had been scattered and secreted all over the house. Some had even migrated onto the bookcases, where they hid next to generations of summer reading, her great-grandmother’s bloated paperbacks, her mother’s various literary volumes, her father’s biographies and histories. Armed with the e-mailed list, Ruthie found books that Becca had borrowed months before, and one, a water-bloated copy of a Stephen King novel, another edition of which Ruthie knew resided on the bookshelf in Daniel’s office, that had been due in June. Of last year. Ruthie arrived at the library this morning with eight of the eleven overdue titles. She had a good idea where the other three were, but she had not been able to bring herself to enter Becca’s room to search for them.

Mary Lou took her hand-held scanner and began scanning the bar codes. “Ah,” she said. She gave Ruthie a small but understanding smile.

Ruthie said, “They’re all really late. Some of them …” She fumbled for her purse.

“Oh, don’t worry about the fines,” Mary Lou said. She tapped a few keys on the computer. “All gone.”

“It’s all right,” Ruthie said. “I brought money.”

“Absolutely not,” Mary Lou said, pushing away the wad of bills Ruthie pressed on her.

“Please,” Ruthie said. “I insist.”

Mary Lou considered the matter. “If your money’s really burning a hole in your pocket, you might want to bail your young friend here out of trouble. She’s a notorious deadbeat.”

Ruthie turned and found little Samantha Phelps standing behind her, clutching a substantial pile of books in her skinny arms. Her hair was done up in two painfully tight pigtails and she wore a pair of cutoff shorts and a T-shirt that was at least two sizes too big.

“They’re
not
late!” Samantha said. “I know they’re not late.” She dropped to the ground and began flipping through the books. She seemed to be both outraged and terrified by the idea of having incurred overdue fines. “See!” she said. “August fifth! That’s tomorrow. They’re not late.”

Mary Lou smiled. “Of course they’re not, honey. I was just teasing.”

Ruthie helped Samantha get to her feet and gather up her things from the carpet, where, in her haste to defend herself, she had dropped them.

“You like audiobooks,” said Ruthie, handing Samantha a plastic box containing cassette tapes of Kipling’s
Just So Stories
.

“I like the ones with music,” Samantha said.

“Classical Literature with Classical Music,”
Ruthie read. “That sounds fun. Did you like the Kipling?”

“It’s okay.” Samantha shuffled her feet, clearly eager to slip away. “I like the Bach.” She pronounced it to rhyme with catch.

Ruthie wrinkled her brow, unable to understand the mispronounced reference. “When I was little
Rikki-Tikki-Tavi
was my absolute favorite story. Do you know that one?” Introducing someone to a book she might love had always been one of Ruthie’s greatest pleasures.

Samantha said, “It’s on the tape.”

“Oh, good. Well, did you like it?”

“Yes,” Samantha said. “Especially the music.” She looked down at her feet, her long bangs falling across her eyes. Ruthie felt the urge to smooth them away, but instead she crouched down next to the girl and said, “How’s your aunt?”

“Okay.”

“And Matt?”

“Okay.”

“Everyone’s pretty much okay, huh?” Ruthie said, gently teasing.

Samantha flushed and glanced down at her feet. She was wearing sandals a size too big for her, her toes hidden beneath the Velcro strap. Ruthie gave into her urge and reached out and tugged gently on one of Samantha’s pigtails. The girl stilled beneath her hand. Ruthie could not tell if she found the touch pleasant or disturbing.

“You remember me, right?” Ruthie said.

“You’re Becca’s sister. Ruthie.”

“Yes,” Ruthie said. She wanted to say something more, to continue the conversation, maintain the connection, but couldn’t think of anything. “Well, you tell everyone I say hi.”

“Okay.”

Samantha slipped out from beneath the unbearable burden of Ruthie’s palm and ran down the hall in the direction of the children’s room.

“She’s an odd little duck,” Mary Lou said. “She’s had a hard life, though, hasn’t she? That poor mother of hers. It was sweet of Becca to include her in the wedding. I’m sure it meant the world to her.”