Free Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral by Kris Radish Page A

view.”
    Rebecca let go. She had no choice. Depleted resources. A mother and a father who gave her everything and then took it all back and then some as she nursed them over and through and then way beyond a valley of sickness so dark and thick and wasteful that it was a wonder Rebecca could wake and walk and breathe in the morning.
    Then she dragged herself through a succession of funerals. Father. Mother. Aunt. Then her sister. Her lovely, young beautiful sister, who bounced against the steering wheel and then flew out of the car window as if she were trying to grab something off the top of the tree she hit. An endless succession of improbable loss.
    And then there was Annie G. Freeman with her wide life and her damn earthmovers and those young men of hers and Rebecca could not help herself. She could not keep from falling into the arms and life of her sassy and sometimes shitty neighbor who had the gall, the goddamn gall, to die.
    “She died too,” Rebecca whispered into the phone, thinking that maybe Katherine would not hear her.
    But Katherine was ready. She knew this story and she was ready to stretch her arms across the miles from where she was standing in her kitchen and fool this woman, this Rebecca Carlson, into thinking that her own fine limbs could substitute for the limbs and heart of the neighbor who had turned into family—solid, true, loving, forever lasting.
    “Give me a minute,” Rebecca says. “Don’t go. I just need to catch my breath. To sit.”
    Rebecca sits. Grief had exhausted her. She sits where she can see Annie’s house, dark and quiet and nestled against a small hill that she had always imagined, since the house was built, was put just there to help support a home where a woman lived who could hold up the entire rest of the world. A house where Rebecca learned how to keep moving and to allow herself to feel and to love again. A house where Annie pushed her fingers against Rebecca’s not-yet-healed scars of loss and grieving that had barely disappeared when she had to do it all over again. And again and then one more time.
    And the day Annie told her. Rebecca moving from the gate and garage toward the house and then catching a glimpse of Annie walking slowly, her hands tucked inside of her blue down vest that she wore so much it had faded three shades up so that it was more white than blue. Annie walking with her eyes on Rebecca’s face, a face covered in an ocean of wetness, and then a cry of anguish that came from a place so far away that it was not real, could not be real, was nothing more than an imagined echo from an ancient time and place.
    “Honey,” Annie cried. “Oh, honey.”
    They moved from the walk to the porch to the living room couch where they had spent so much time, so many hours of talking and solving and sharing and getting on about every aspect of life that it had become their four-legged oasis, a harbor, a place to nest and heal before they threw themselves back into the orbit of the real world.
    And now the real world would never be the same. Everything would change and for once Rebecca knew, she knew exactly what would happen next and what she could do and could not do and she knew, too, that her heart had healed just long enough to be severed in half one more time.
    “Oh, Rebecca, I’m sorry to do this to you again. I’m so sorry and I’m so damned scared.”
    They talked after that with Rebecca holding on to her as tightly as Annie was holding on to Rebecca. Hours of touching and talking that set them on a course that took them to a place that was not and could never have been imagined.
    “Rebecca?” Katherine asks.
    Katherine asks this question because she imagines that Rebecca, like Jill and Laura, has fallen into a place of remembering, into the heart of her grief, into that place where when you close your eyes you can still feel the faint breath of your friend when she kisses your cheek, the warm fingers of her hands supporting your arm when you scurry