Free A Good House by Bonnie Burnard Page A

beside her. He woke from a dream of rolling fingers and knew without looking.
    He took a few minutes for himself, stayed mute on his side of the bed, resisting full consciousness, making it wait. As was his sleepy habit, he reached to smooth her eyebrows, to try to smooth the lines from her forehead. Then he sat up, stood up in his pyjamas. He tidied her hair the best he could and straightened the pillow and then he made himself search beneath the quilts to find her hands, to bring them out over the quilts because she looked so strange lying there without her hands.
    He manoeuvred through the hall and up the stairs to wake the kids, sitting for a few minutes on the top step to listen to the memory of Sylvia’s voice telling him what to say to them when this day came, but by the time he reached the first warm bed he had nothing in him but silence. He couldn’t help them when they opened their eyes.
    When their first wretched grief, loud and clumsy beyond remembering, was almost spent, when the July sun, which was nothing more to him now than the blunt instrument, the mindless impulse of an emptied day, was fully risen, Bill went into the kitchen to phone Cooper and they all stayed in the living room until they heard the Cadillac pull into the driveway. Cooper brought fresh morning air in with him and turn by turn he put one warm arm around their shoulders, which quieted them and brought them back to their separate, independent selves, to the floating, airless absence that each of them had already begun to define as differently as they might have defined Sylvia’s full life, given the chance. Then he asked that they go out to the kitchen.
    Bill poured himself a glass of orange juice and sat down at the table, and because he couldn’t bear the quiet now, because it was making him sick to his stomach and dizzy, he began to walk his kids step by step through their mother’s funeral. He’d done nothing about it before, had been repulsed by the thought of anticipating it.
    Paul and Daphne sat down with their father but Patrick opened the fridge door wide and slammed it shut, twice and hard. When he asked, “What the hell difference does it make what happens now?” Bill nodded yes and yes again, told him, “This is what we do.”
    After Bill finished outlining his plans for the funeral, Paul went outside to stand in the gravel driveway and Daphne went after him. The sun was over the garage now. It was promising to be a very hot day. They stood together for a few minutes and then she pulled on his arm to bring him back to the cool of the kitchen.
    Cooper had called the undertaker and he must have called Margaret too because she was soon there, standing at the counter with her long back to them, opening a can of salmon, buttering a double row of bread. Bill went upstairs to get dressed and when he came back down he made the call to the grandparents.
    Murray came in the kitchen door just after the undertaker. He sat down at the table and cried on his arms like a child, which caused Daphne to move across the room to stand close behind him.
    Then Bill told the kids they might as well go and get dressed, so they went upstairs. After they had their clothes on, Daphne sat with Paul on his bed, her own tears mysteriously stopped by the racked renewal of his. Murray was slumped on the floor, leaning against the other bed with his back to Patrick, who was silent. They stayed that way until they heard Margaret come up the stairs to look through Sylvia’s closet. Soon after she went back down they heard the unmistakable sound of the hearse on the gravel, backing carefully out of the driveway.
    *   *   *
    A WEEK AFTER Sylvia’s funeral Margaret came through the kitchen door on a Sunday afternoon with a mostly roasted chicken. They had been given so many meals that week, scalloped potatoes and baked ham, meat loaves, baked beans, angel food cakes and butter tarts and fruit pies. A