Happily Never After. Kathleen O'Brien

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СКАЧАТЬ and the entire piece would always be vaguely unsatisfactory.

      She picked up a second leaf, twirling it slowly in her bandaged fingers.

      Natural laws.

      She picked up the picture in her other hand. Two of those smiling people were dead now. Did that follow the laws of nature? Two of ten was twenty percent. If you took any random group of ten relatively intelligent, well-to-do twenty-somethings… Would twenty percent of them be dead within ten years?

      The phone rang again.

      She dropped the picture but held on to the two leaves. She clicked the talk button.

      “Hello.”

      “Is this Kelly Ralston?”

      “Yes. Who is this?”

      “This is Phil Tammaro.”

      At first Kelly didn’t recognize the name. Tammaro? Did she know anyone named Tammaro?

      “I’m Dolly’s husband.”

      Oh, of course. She’d left a message there, after she’d finally tracked Dolly down through three completely different marriages, names and addresses.

      “Yes,” she said, eager to make up for not remembering. “Yes, Phil, thank you for calling me back.”

      “I just came in. I heard your message. I thought I’d better tell you—”

      His voice broke, and at the sound Kelly’s heart stopped.

      “—tell you about Dolly. You see, Dolly was in an accident. She—she’s dead.”

      TOM HAD BEEN LOOKING for Jacob more than an hour before it occurred to him to check the cemetery.

      It was a beautiful Saturday morning, still warm but with a crisp hint of fall. After the funeral, Jacob had asked Tom to stay in Cathedral Cove a few days. Jacob didn’t need to be alone right now, and since Tom wasn’t eager to get back to the whole stupid Coach O’Toole mess—not to mention the phone messages that would be waiting from an injured Darlene—he’d said yes.

      He’d let his office know he was taking a week of vacation time, which hadn’t gone down well with Bailey, but so what? Every vacation Tom had taken for the past five years had been a working trip, schmoozing some potential client or attending some business conference. They owed him.

      Besides, there wasn’t really any such thing as “getting away” if you had a cell phone and a laptop.

      Yesterday, Jacob had slept late, so Tom had spent all morning answering e-mails, issuing instructions to his paralegal and hand-holding a couple of clients who wanted to know why you had to notify everyone on the planet before you set a court date for a hearing.

      He assumed today would be the same. This morning, though, by the time he got off the phone, Jacob was gone. And he’d left his cell phone behind, which seemed to hint that he’d like to be alone.

      It had been a sticky moment. Tom didn’t want to crowd Jacob, who was free to go wherever he wanted. Tom wasn’t exactly the prison warden. But still…though Jacob seemed to be pulling himself together a little, it had been only a week since his wife had died. He was still fragile enough that Tom would rather keep an eye on him.

      Finally, just when Tom was starting to admit he was worried, he spotted Jacob’s car. It was pulled off the road, near the entrance to Edgewater Memorial Gardens.

      Great. Just perfect. Tom felt for Jacob, really he did. Losing Lillith had put the man through sheer hell. But to tell the truth, Tom had endured all the hair-tearing and teeth-gnashing he could take for a while.

      This definitely wasn’t how he handled his own challenges. His personal recipe for emotional recovery was a fourteen-hour workday followed by a run of maybe ten miles, or fifteen, or whatever it took to wear out every muscle and brain cell he had.

      Cemeteries were for wallowing, and he didn’t wallow. His own parents, who had died when he was in college, had been cremated and scattered at sea. Clean and sensible. No desolate angels clinging to crosses, no granite effigies, no gut-wrenching epitaphs. No tilted, weed-covered tombstones and withered flowers to remind you that, in the end, even love gets tired of grief and forgets to mourn.

      But what could he do? He couldn’t exactly call Jacob’s friend Joe and say, Hey, could you go get him? He’s in the cemetery, and I don’t do cemeteries.

      So, indulging himself in one heavy sigh, he parked his car and began walking around, looking for Jacob.

      This particular cemetery was a pleasant surprise. It was restrained, with no marble explosions of showy grief. Just neat rows of well-tended headstones, and comfortable benches under apple trees and spreading oaks.

      For a cemetery, it seemed strangely full of life. The trees were restless with chattering squirrels and noisy birds, and ahead of him on the path a young couple walked slowly hand in hand, as if this were just another pretty park.

      Off to his right, toward the river, a funeral service was in progress. A soft blue tent held a dozen mourners and a priest. The priest smiled at him as he passed. Smiling back seemed strange, so Tom merely nodded and walked on.

      To his left, where the cemetery blended comfortably into a neighborhood of old, charming, well-kept houses, Tom saw three little girls, maybe ten or eleven years old, playing among the trees. One girl had a sword made of an apple branch, and the other two wore crowns of tinfoil and Shasta daisies.

      Jacob sat on a bench very near the children, though he faced the other direction. Tom braced himself, took another deep breath, sat on the bench beside him.

      “Hey, buddy,” he said. “You had me a little worried there.”

      Jacob looked over at him. Just as Tom had feared, Jacob had been crying. But for the moment, at least, his red eyes were dry.

      “Sorry,” Jacob said. “I just felt like I had to come see her.”

      Tom glanced over at the lawn. Though he could tell where the freshly dug grave was, he saw no headstone. Of course not, he thought. It wasn’t ready yet.

      “I haven’t even decided what it should say.” Jacob had followed Tom’s glance. “We never talked about it. You don’t think of things like that, not at our age.”

      “No,” Tom said. “Of course you don’t.”

      “We had wills, of course,” Jacob went on. “We were lawyers. We took care of that. We thought of everything. But we didn’t for a minute think we’d ever need them.”

      “No,” Tom said. For an uncomfortable moment, he imagined his own neatly typed will, duly notarized and filed. Everything went to charity. Everything, right down to the pictures on his walls and the ties on his rack. It was the will of a completely unencumbered man.

      But here, next to Jacob’s aching grief, in the presence of all these dearly departed, Tom realized how pathetic his will would sound when it was read. Like the antiseptic record of a thoroughly unlived life.

      Maybe, he thought impulsively, he’d go back and change it. СКАЧАТЬ