Free No Time to Wave Goodbye by Jacquelyn Mitchard Page A

Harrington wasn’t really a town but instead a pretentious cluster of one-acre houses on one-acre lots plopped on some of the best farmland on earth—had renamed the church St. Lucrative the Gas Grill. It was tiny compared to the Lutheran church, which was the size of a Sears store. Pat said the Lutheran church confirmed his belief that there was a WASP plot to take over the world.
    Eliza and Ben were staying at Beth’s house the night before the christening and the night after as well because Beth’s children hadn’t seen each other since the screening—Vincent had worked overnight so many times before the film was finally released, two weeks late, that he’d literally slept through Christmas Day. As godfather, he was not only coming to Chicago, but staying a few days afterward. Beth couldn’t wait for a chance to photograph all three of them, as well as Eliza and Stella.
    “Who are all these people?” Candy was asking, holding up the handwritten list and shaking it.
    Beth agreed but asked, “Who would you leave out? The old people? The Mob guys? Janice Dicksen from the movie? She lives on the South Side, right here.”
    “You invited all of the people from the movie?” Candy said. Beth shrugged.
    “Ben wanted to,” she said.
    At that moment, Candy’s pager went off and she answered without preamble, “Where? I am out almost to Rockford. Get Jimmy to come in. NO. Not Emma Witcherly or Ray. Jimmy. And I’ll be there by … later on. By tonight. If you like the father anyhow…. He is, huh? Well, isn’t that fucking spectacular.” Candy snapped her phone closed. She wrote out two more invitations in silence. Then she said to Beth, “It’s freezing in here. Do you have a sweater I can use?”
    Beth trotted up the stairs and brought back a thick nubbly cardigan. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Do you want to tell me?”
    “No,” Candy said and went back to addressing the invitations.
    “Okay,” Beth agreed, as she always did when Candy threw up the shield of her professional life.
    “It’s a baby. Murdered and thrown in St. Michael Reservoir like a piece of garbage. Dad’s an old friend of ours, nice druggie snitch. But he changed his ways recently. Discovering the glories of crystal meth.”
    “St. Michael Reservoir is the first place …”
    “We looked for Ben. Uh-huh.” Candy covered her face, then glanced up at Beth. “Can you finish these? I have to go. I have to.” Beth stood up and tried to hug Candy, who shrugged her off with a repentant touch on Beth’s wrist. “I can’t bear it. These things drive me nuts. They did since Ben’s case. And it was worse when I got Eliza. Now, with Stella …”
    “Keep the sweater. It’s cold today.”
    “That’s how they found her. The creek froze.”
    Three weeks later, Beth’s job was to pick up the Madonna and child (and Ben, too) the night before the ceremony. That meant also picking up about eighty bundles of silver-and-pink-wrapped packages—the trunk overflowed, and there was barely room for Stella in her car seat in the back of Beth’s Range Rover. She was glad, for the first time, that she had the bigger car, although Pat had needed to pry the keys of her eight-year-old Toyota out of her hands and give them to Kerry.
    “Presents just keep coming, Auntie!” Eliza said, with childish glee. “Some of them are from people who aren’t even going to be there. They don’t even get food!”
    It was at times like these that Beth was reminded that once, Eliza used to line up with thirty other children, by order of height, to receive a single blue cotton shirt and pants, which, after she turned five, she was expected to wash weekly by hand. Candy used to find her daughter in the laundry room, patiently watching the clothes spin in the machine. She worried that Eliza was autistic until Eliza learned enough English to explain that she was trying to look behind the washer at “the lady making it go.” In Bolivia, a baby at the orphanage