Free The Adults by Alison Espach Page B

hand to the dog.
    “I was giving her a walk,” Mr. Basketball said. “I live two blocks down, off Crab Apple. And then I ran into this whole mess.”
    My nipples were still cold through my shirt and on any normal occasion I would have thought of a reason to go inside and help my mother with breakfast. But I sat there, looking at him. It didn’t seem necessary to get embarrassed about being a woman in front of Mr. Basketball. It was as though that was exactly what he had wanted me to be from the start.
    “Breathe,” he said, to signal that this wasn’t going to be a good one. He removed the last visible piece of glass. It cut my foot more as he removed it, and blood spotted the cement steps, but I didn’t cry. It was a relief to know that I was still a person, connected inside by a network of nerves and blood, and Mr. Basketball was here to observe that. Sometimes, I didn’t even notice I was alive until somebody else did, and what was weirder, more incomprehensible than that?
    I reached out and put my hand on Mr. Basketball’s arm like my mother would have. “Thank you,” I said.
    He was an older person I hardly knew, a teacher at my school, a man , and I should never casually touch a man, Janice told me once, because a casual touch reminds a man of a less casual touch and so on. But everything seemed arbitrary all of a sudden. Right or wrong, things happened anyway. Suicide or no suicide, at eight A.M ., Mrs. Bulwark would pull out of her driveway in her blue minivan, my mother would get in the shower, and the sky would open up. Alfred would walk to the end of his driveway and get his paper. The dogs would begin to bark, and it would sound like an act of charity, the animals filling the silence, starting the day when we failed to notice it had begun, the sun already tired above us.

7

    W ho knows what would have helped him, you know?” I said, suddenly the expert three days later in my mother’s bedroom preparing for Mr. Resnick’s funeral. My mother was drawing a thin black line across her lids, and somewhere else, Mr. Resnick’s eyelids were being sealed with glue, his lips tied with sutures.
    I was fidgety, sleepless from the previous night when Janice and I had read from the “Embalming” section of the encyclopedia. I was overheated in long sleeves, laid out on my mother’s bed in a black polyester dress and my hands crossed over my chest like today was my burial. I told my mother I’d do her makeup. She looked at me like I asked to file the taxes, shifted in her brand-new off-the-shoulder chiffon dress, picking lint from the hem, and said, “No, thanks.”
    Germicide-insecticide-olfactant rubbed inside his mouth with cotton swabs, Janice had read. Massage cream rubbed onto his face for softness.
    “Don’t you think you’re a little dressed up?” I asked my mother.
    “It’s a funeral,” she said. A burst of anger hummed between us. As though I had not been aware. As though I had not watched the man die. As though I could not feel the lanolin, carboxymethylcellulose, humectants, hydrolyzed proteins being injected into his arteries while the blood was drained from his heart.
    My mother leaned closer to the mirror and swept purple eye shadow across her lids.
    “That’s a mistake,” I said.
    There was an energy that came with sudden death. My mother sprang to life, shut off the television, curled her hair for three days straight, listened to the weather report on the radio as though it suddenly mattered what the chance of rain was, while my father fell farther away from us, sequestered in the basement with a phone and a new computer that virtually connected him to any part of the world he wanted, except the upstairs of our house. I didn’t know what to say to my family in the car on the way to the funeral; death made everything so awkward all of a sudden. Surely my mother thought the suicide was all Mrs. Resnick’s fault, and surely my father thought the suicide was all my mother’s fault,