Free Natural Order by Brian Francis Page B

point bringing it up.”
    Timothy looks from the picture back at me. I feel as though my clothes are suddenly made of Saran Wrap.
    “He was thirty-one,” I say. “If that’s what you’re wondering.”

CHAPTER FOUR
    A NOTHER DAY , another funeral. This one for Louise Arnold. According to Fern, she’d been dead a few days before she was found face down in her laundry room, the spilled contents of her laundry basket around her.
    “Can you imagine?” Fern said, looking like she’d just sucked a lemon wedge.
    “Who found her?”
    “Her neighbour. Apparently, Louise’s son was trying to get in touch with her. He lives in Andover, you know. Anyway, he called and called and never got an answer. The neighbour had a key and went in. I can’t imagine. If I ever don’t answer the phone, Joyce, call the police. For god’s sake, don’t come into my house.”
    I made date squares yesterday for the after-service luncheon. I’m nervous about them, even though they look more or less like I remember them. I tasted a few oats off the top. The possibility of food poisoning worries me. I hear about these things on the news sometimes. Bake sales that lead to manslaughter charges. One bad egg and your entire life is over.
    I’m also nervous because I haven’t made date squares in I don’t know how many years. I can’t remember the last time I did any baking, for that matter. I’ve got a whole Tupperware container full of index cards and torn magazine pages and spiral-bound church cookbooks, but I never look at them. The box is an artifact from a previous life, when I had people to bake for.
    Besides, most things you can buy. They taste just as good and look so much better. Icing smooth as glass. Nuts chopped finely as sand. Loaves with splits running down the centre like healed scars. That’s the convenience of modern life for you. I remember my mother baking up a storm. It was work to her in a way it isn’t to me. She’d be appalled at my laziness. She’d tell me to take pride in my efforts. She’d say something about tasting the love in homemade goods. Mother died when she was only fifty-eight. Heart attack. My father died of leukemia at sixty the following year. I don’t think he knew how to live without her. For reasons completely unknown to me, I’ve somehow outlived them. Last month, I turned seventy-two.
    In spite of my reservations, I decided to make something from scratch for Louise. It was the least I could do, given the unfortunate circumstances around her death, although I don’t think she’d care one way or another. She wasn’t much of a baker herself. We used to bowl on the same team. That was back in the late ’80s, when I decided to make an effort again. I’d spent too long inside the house, roaming from room to room, my grief a worn carpet trail. I needed something to take my mind off things, even if it was only for a few hours on a Tuesday afternoon. The league was called the Silver Balls. Charlie had a comment or two about that. I bought a pair of ugly shoes, a carrying bag and a ball that looked like Jupiter. I’d make small talk with the other women, concentrate on the crimson arrows and dots painted on the alley’s floorboards and bring my arm down in finger-snapping frustration every time I missed a spare—which was most of the time. Sometimes, after the game, we would all go to the bowling alley’s restaurant for coffee and club sandwiches. They’d talk about their children and grandchildren and I’d listen, jabbing my thumb under the table with a cellophane-tipped toothpick.
    Louise had big hair back then. It was burgundy—much too dark for someone her age. Some women think they can keep up the same styles as their younger days. She had silver rims around some of her teeth, and her fingertips were always slick with nail polish. She was a good bowler. And a nice person. The last time I saw her was a few years back in the watch department at Sears. Her battery had run out.
    “No