Free Pontoon by Garrison Keillor

to burst in like this. Didn’t mean to wake you up.”
    “What’s wrong?” He opened the door. She wanted to tell him that Mother was okay. Waiting in the car in her beach dress, ready to fly off to Cancun and go snorkeling.
    “Mother died last night.”
    All the air just went out of him whoosh and his face went blank like he’d been shot in the back or hit with a telephone pole.
    “She died in her sleep reading a book. I found her this morning. She didn’t suffer or anything. She must’ve just slipped away in the night.”
    “I tried calling her just last night—”
    “I know. I listened to it on the answering machine.”
    He stepped out and shut the door. An elderly tabby cat looked out through the screen and made a faint scratchy meow.
    “Do you think she listened to it?”
    “You mean, before she died?” Well that’s a pretty stupid question , Barbara thought. He nodded. “Did she get my message?”
    “Yes, she did. It had been saved. She listened to it and then she saved it.” Lie, lie, lie .
    Big tears in his eyes. She put her arms around him and he clung to her and they sort of waltzed backward into the living room. The place was soaked in cigar smoke. Mother was death on secondary smoke. Couldn’t bear it. Had she ever set foot in this house? She must have. He turned off the record player. She noticed a recent photo of the two of them in a black frame, his arm around her. She was half a head taller and grinning as if she’d just won first prize in a three-legged race. He sat down on a hassock. The cat brushed against his bare leg and made a faint scratchy meow.
    “She went out for dinner last night with Margaret and Gladys and she was fine when they dropped her off and this morning I found her. She must’ve listened to your message and went to sleep and didn’t’ wake up.”
    He started to say something about Mother and then excused himself and slipped around the corner and blew his nose. A longtime bachelor from the looks of things. Boxes of stuff on the sofa, the glass-top coffee table, the carpet, open boxes of old clothes, magazines, gewgaws, rummage, as if he’d started to straighten up the joint and gotten disoriented. A hubcap for an ashtray and a Mona Lisa picture puzzle, half assembled. A picture of a wolf on a snowbank on a moonlit night hung on one wall and a wrestlingposter on another—the Ayatollah Khomeanie vs. Jesse (The Body) Ventura, two gargantuans, one in a turban, one in a boa and pink glasses. And in small type: “refereed by Raoul Olson of Channel Four.” The TV was on, the sound off: a newscaster in a blue suit, the state capitol behind him …
    Raoul came back, two glasses in one hand, a bottle of Jim Beam in the other.
    “We found a letter with her last wishes and everything, and I guess she opted for cremation and a memorial service, not a church funeral, so we’re going to do that on Saturday. Down by the lake. I hope you will come.”
    “Yeah, she didn’t have much use for the church. She told me that. They were too narrow-minded for her. Oh God. What are we going to do?” He choked up for a moment. “I sure was in love with her—“He dug in his pocket for a hanky and blew his nose again. He looked like he might’ve lifted weights at one time. A big chest and a headful of hair, newly dyed blue-black. A red splotch of broken veins on each cheek, a big nose with cavernous nostrils. He gestured with the whiskey bottle and Barbara shook her head and he poured some in a glass for himself and tossed it back and closed his eyes and shook his head hard and a long sound came out like quacking.
    “Sorry,” he said. He gave Barbara a long look and thanked her for driving down to tell him in person. He looked shaken. Queasy.
    “Your mother and I met in 1941. I came down from North Dakota and went into nurse’s training. I’d enlisted in the Marines and it turned out I had flat feet so they made me a medic and they sent six of us to Swedish Hospital and she was