Free The Obituary Writer by Ann Hood Page A

so,” she said as she hurried past him.
    “ Ciao ,” he said.
    She murmured a goodbye.
    Outside, Vivian paused on the sidewalk. The rain yesterday seemed to have washed everything clean—the sky was a bluer blue than it had been, the morning glories climbing the fence a more vivid pink. The air itself smelled of spring and new beginnings. Vivien breathed in a deep lungful. It was almost April. In just a few weeks it would be thirteen years since she had last seen David.
    She remembered how only a few nights before the earthquake they had gone to Coppa’s for dinner and David noticed that someone had written on the wall: Something terrible is going to happen. Vivien had feared it was prophetic, but David had laughed. “Probably your friend Jack London,” he’d said. “Afraid that I’m going to marry you sometime very soon.” He’d asked his wife for a divorce, and even though Vivien was afraid to hope she would grant him one, David had been full of optimism.
    Vivien closed her eyes against the memory and thought instead of that man in Denver. The room they had stayed in at the Hotel Majestic was number 208. She imagined that key held in David’s pocket all these years, waiting for her to find it.
    “This is crazy,” Lotte said. “You know that, don’t you?”
    “But that key,” Vivien said for what seemed like the hundredth time. “To the Majestic.”
    Lotte sighed and went back to attending the large pot of beans on the stove.
    What if it was Robert? Vivien wanted to say. Wouldn’t you try anything to find him? But maybe Lotte wouldn’t try anything. Her friend had always been practical, the one to worry over consequences and risks. As children, she’d kept Vivien out of danger many times. Lotte had warned Vivien not to get involved with David in the first place. He’s married, Viv, she’d said, horrified and concerned. You just don’t do that.
    Lotte lifted the long wooden spoon to her mouth and tasted, frowning. She took a hefty pinch of salt from the canister and tossed it in, stirring. Lotte’s life had a rhythm, a predictability that Vivien sometimes envied. The tending to Robert and their three children, feeding her family and all of the workers at the vineyard. In September, when it came time to harvest the grapes, Lotte was out there with all the men, from first light until it grew too dark to work. Her once-smooth ivory complexion had grown ruddy from years in the sun, and lined enough to make her look her age, or more. Although her long legs were muscled and her arms strong from the physical labor of having babies and working the vineyard and doing the laundry and cooking for so many people, Lotte had gone thick around the middle.
    “You probably won’t hear till Monday at the earliest,” Lotte said, hoisting a ceramic platter of chicken. The chicken had been sitting in oil and lemon and garlic all day, and pressed flat under heavy bricks.
    “I know,” Vivien said. She’d gone straight from the library to the Western Union office: MIGHT HAVE INFO ON AMNESIAC IN YOUR HOSPITAL. STOP. IS HOTEL KEY FOR ROOM 208? STOP.
    Lotte paused on her way to the large outdoor grill where she would cook the chicken. “I just don’t want you to get hurt again,” she said softly.
    “Grief is a strange thing,” Vivien said. “There isn’t an again. Not really. It’s always there, always present. Again implies it can end and then start up anew. But it never goes away in the first place.”
    “Once a teacher always a teacher,” Lotte said, laughing softly.
    Vivien watched her friend’s broad back as she walked outside. Were all old friends this way, somehow stuck in time? To Lotte, Vivien was still a teacher acting foolish over an older married man, instead of an obituary writer, a woman who had lived alone for over a dozen years. A widow, Vivien thought, though Lotte wouldn’t grant her that status.
    “Vivvie!” Lotte’s daughter Pamela screamed. “I didn’t know you were coming