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

the absence of mourners from the north. It was an expensive full day’s travel each way, and most people up there no doubt assumed that there would be a memorial service in Keene in June or July, after school let out and the summer people who knew George personally had come back from their winter homes and Isabel had returned from her own sojourn here in Miami Beach.
    â€œYeah, right,” Isabel said. “ If I return to Keene for the summer. And if I decide to hold a memorial service.”
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    A T THE RECEPTION back at the condominium, Isabel set the urn with George’s ashes on top of the sideboard in the dining area, then stood next to the urn as if to lend George’s authority to her words and announced in public for the first time that she had decided to stay on alone in the condo in Miami Beach for the rest of the winter. “I’ll have George’s ashes to keep me company,” she said. “But only until I take them back to Keene and scatter them from the top of Mount Marcy, which is what he always said he wanted. By then I should be able to live without him beside me any longer.”
    She added that she planned to use George’s life insurance money to buy the condo they’d been renting and from now on she’d winter over here permanently. She was so uncharacteristically firm that no one in George’s extended family tried to dissuade her.
    After the other mourners had departed, George’s family members, who were staying at the Lido on Belle Isle, took the opportunity to go out for Chinese food. They wanted to discuss among themselves George’s money, most of which, since he and Isabel were childless, would soon belong to Isabel. George and Isabel had worked as underpaid teachers their entire married lives and between them had built up a million-dollar TIAA-CREF retirement account. But George, his two brothers and his sister were descended from early-twentieth-century owners of mountains of Minnesota iron ore plus several subsidiary steel-dependent industries in Pittsburgh, and George’s portion of the family estate was many times the size of his half of their TIAA-CREF account. From the start George had micromanaged both his and Isabel’s modest personal finances, so there was reason for the family to fear that their sister-in-law, who as far as they knew had never paid a bill on her own or written a check for more than the weekly groceries, would not be a responsible custodian of her new wealth.
    George had taught math and geometry, but Isabel had taught literature and art history, and the family viewed her as mildly eccentric, possibly artistic. Isabel’s background did not reassure them, either. Her parents had owned and operated a small motel in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. A bright only child, she had been a scholarship student at Smith when she met George, who had just taken a teaching position at nearby Deerfield Academy. They hoped that George had had the foresight to establish a trust naming one or all three of his siblings as trustees, a trust that would provide Isabel with a monthly income sufficient to cover her ongoing expenses, while preserving the rest of George’s estate for future generations of Pelhams. They wished they had discussed this eventuality with him years ago. But when it came to money, George, like his siblings, was as closemouthed as he was tightfisted, and no one had been willing to broach the subject with him.
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    I SABEL AND J ANE, like teenagers, ate standing in front of the open refrigerator, picking with chopsticks from cartons of leftover take-out curried chicken salad and couscous. Afterward, Isabel opened a chilled New Zealand sauvignon blanc, and she and Jane went out onto the balcony, carrying their wineglasses and the bottle. They sat and drank and watched the evening sun slide across the darkening sky. The coin-sized buttery yellow disc, when it slipped behind the skyscrapers and glass and steel office towers on