Free River Angel by A. Manette Ansay Page A

their pretty legs, Bill told Anna Grey how his father owned a funeral home in Ambient, Wisconsin ( Where? Anna Grey had said), and how he’d offered Bill a junior partnership when he’d graduated from high school. But Bill was worried about the draft, and he had an idea about becoming a veterinarian, so Bill senior gave his blessing, even paid Bill’s tuition on the condition he spend his summers at the morgue. Now, three years into his undergraduate degree, Bill was failing all his science classes. The army had stopped drafting people, and Bill wished he had the guts to drop out and go home. If he’d taken his father’s offer, he said, he’d be out in the real world, making money, instead of studying abstract ideas that meant nothing. As he talked, Anna Grey kept looking at the curious gray streak in his hair. (Later, his mother would tell Anna Grey he’d been born with it. The devil’s kiss, she said.) She wrote her phone number on a corn dog wrapper, and the other teacher giggled about it all the way home. “Imagine all the dead people he’s touched,” she said. “Imagine him combing some dead person’s hair.” In spring, when he bought the ring with his fall tuition money, the other teachers teased Anna Grey that he’d taken it off a dead woman’s finger. They said that on her wedding night, he’d ask her to hold her breath, tell her not to move.
    Opposites attract: That was what people always said about Bill and Anna Grey. She was short, fair, talkative, while he was the quiet type, tall and dark. Back in those days, she was interested in politics. She supported environmental causes, hunger drives, and women’s rights. It was true that Bill seemed to have no opinions whatsoever on any of these subjects. But she’d grown bone weary of her life in Indianapolis, and she was still young enough to believe that change could only mean something good. Bill hada solid future; he loved her, he wanted a family. At the time, it had all seemed simple enough.
    Math period ended; science began. Anna Grey divided the students into task groups, ignoring the groans of the three girls who got stuck with Gabriel. Their assignment was to design an ecosystem. All parts of the food chain were to be represented. If they didn’t finish their ecosystems today, they could work on them again during science period tomorrow. She gave each group a poster board, tracing paper, and a stack of National Geographics ; they already had glue and scissors and markers in their desks. “Plan the whole thing out in pencil first,” she warned, and then she went back to her desk, where she took three Tylenol caplets with the gritty dregs of her decaf. She thought about Bill undressing for bed, his spare tire spangled with varicose veins. How last night, again, she’d laid a warm hand on the small of his back and he’d twisted to look at her curiously. “What?” he’d said. “ What ?” She thought about Marty, how he’d fumbled with the front of her bra until she guided his hands to the back. How she looked away, shy, when he kicked off his trousers and how then—too quickly—he’d slid up inside her so that she never actually saw him, and this left her even more unsatisfied than his odd, staccato rocking. He’d looked at her , afterward, spreading her with his fingers to blow cool air on the place that didn’t want cooling, and yet she had held his head between her hands until. he had blown the last of her desire out.
    The lunch bell rang. Half the day down. At noon recess, a group of boys led by Bethany Carpenter’s own Robert John—a troublemaker if Anna Grey had ever seen one—pinned Gabriel down and made him eat chunks of dirty slush that shot through the fence from the highway. The teacher on recess duty was Maya Paluski; she called Bethany at home, but Bethany had to clean house for someone in Killsnake and