Free A Permanent Member of the Family by Russell Banks Page A

called it our building.
    There was something weird going on with Isabel, Jane thought. She was not prepared for her friend’s sprightliness or her suddenly fortified willfulness and new enthusiasms. This was not the Isabel she had known for more than half a lifetime, the woman she had come here to console.
    Isabel said, “I love that there are so many blacks in the building and that most people in the city speak Spanish. I never realized how sick I was of being surrounded by people who look and sound just like me. I’m going to learn Spanish,” she said. “You hear a lot of Haitian Creole, too. I’m becoming a permanent legal resident of Florida,” she added. “I’d rather vote here where my vote counts, rather than in New York where I’m just another liberal Democrat. I made an appointment this morning online to get my Florida driver’s license.”
    â€œWill you live here year-round?”
    â€œI’ll probably use the Keene house in the summer months. At least for now.”
    â€œI thought you and George planned on eventually moving into that Christian retirement community, the one down in Saratoga Springs. What’s it called, Harmony Hills?” They were Episcopalians, the Pelhams, not really churchy, but believers. And do-gooders, as Frank called them. At least George was. For years he had spent his summer vacations building houses for Habitat for Humanity. Isabel was sort of a New Age Christian, Jane thought. Isabel and George were more conventionally religious than Jane, who described herself as a Buddhist, and her husband, Frank, who’d been raised Catholic but pointedly claimed to be an agnostic, as if it were a religion.
    Isabel said, “God, no. That place was always George’s idea. Not mine. He turned seventy-three last June and planned to check into Harmony Hills before he turned seventy-five. While he could still enjoy it, he used to say.”
    Jane knew all this, but had never done the math. “Wow. If he’d lived, you’d only be, what, sixty-four? Awfully young to be living in an old-age home, Isabel.”
    â€œNo kidding. We had a crisis coming down the road like a sixteen-wheeler. It’s not really an old-age home, though. It’s called an ‘adult community,’ with an assisted-living facility and a nursing home attached, so as your body and mind deteriorate you get shuttled from one stage to the next without having to leave the premises until you’re dead. So, yeah. Close call.”
    Â 
    T HE FUNERAL SERVICE was held at All Souls Episcopal Church with a small group in attendance. The urn holding George’s ashes was placed on a pedestal in the nave with George’s Yale class of 1962 yearbook photograph beside it. George’s tennis coach was present, along with the rental agent for their condo and six or eight acquaintances from the building, retired northerners, couples they had intended to get to know better but hadn’t quite got around to yet. Otherwise the congregation was made up of George’s three siblings and a sprinkling of their spouses, children and grandchildren. And Jane, of course, who sat in the front pew next to Isabel throughout the brief service, after having declined the priest’s invitation to say a few words about George, share a few memories, tell a personal anecdote about George’s lifelong love of the Adirondack Mountains, which the priest mistakenly called the Appalachian Mountains. Jane was slightly phobic about public speaking. One of George’s younger brothers spoke of George’s love of the Adirondacks, and one of his nephews reminded the gathering of George’s willingness to write recommendation letters to Groton, his alma mater, whenever a male Pelham applied for admission.
    Except for Jane, there were no representatives from the High Peaks Country Day School or the town of Keene. Which made sense, Jane said to Isabel when she groused about