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

up the hill during a hike, the call at one A.M . when you see her bedroom light still flickering through the trees at the edge of the lot line, the waving hand on your way to work, the six-pack of beer on a Friday night that she leaves on your doorstep, the edge of laughter that has been pounded like an ancient drum against your own laugh line.
    “I’m here,” Rebecca responds, lifting her head and then turning so she moves away from the view, that shitty shared horizon.
    “These have been tough weeks. I haven’t called in a while and now I have something else to tell you.”
    Rebecca laughs and the laugh, which is raucous and bold—almost something you could lift over your shoulder it is so real—makes Katherine laugh too.
    “This isn’t really funny,” Katherine says through her own machine-gun giggles. “But we both know something else had to happen. We both know that Annie would have to do something else.”
    “Please do not tell me you are dying,” Rebecca begs in all seriousness.
    “No, Rebecca, that’s not it. We should all have known that Annie had one more request up her sleeve for us. Something she wants us to do. One last thing.”
    “Nothing, so it seems, is ever really over.”
    Rebecca is thinking of her own divorce when she says that. The painful throb of the mere word makes her laughter shriek to a halt, and the last laugh, for now, the last laugh lingers while she pauses to hold that anguish from his leaving, her wanting him to leave, the idea that was once an eternity will now be locked forever at 7.7 years and that the one daughter they have managed to create will now become a tool, a pawn, a poker chip that he will choose to throw on the table, take back and then throw again so many times it almost blinds Rebecca with anger.
    “Should I go?” the tiny voice of her daughter Marden asked her so many times when she was eight and then nine and then twelve and then finally when she was sixteen and said, “This is enough. Now I know I should go.”
    The phone calls about insurance and who pays for what and the screams of his new babies in the background and the unmistakable pounding of the new woman’s hands on the table as she locked his eyes with hers and most likely mouthed, “Hang up on the bitch,” while Rebecca waited for an answer about the band trip, summer vacation, a car, college tuition, the rest of their daughter’s life.
    Even now, random phone calls: “Did she move?” “How can I get hold of her?” “Did you take my name off of her insurance?”
    You think it might be over and then something turns up in the basement boxes that throws you into a place of swift agony. The shitty photos from the trip to Mexico the year before the divorce. Remembering things now that should have been a tip-off. A phone number on the bill that he said “must have been a wrong number.” The way he looked away when you asked him to make love to you on the beach, “Too much sun,” he’d said and added, “Maybe tomorrow.” Tomorrow there was the fiesta and then the bus tour and then in six months the fighting and what you considered trying without knowing that he was already gone, that he had left so long ago it would be impossible to remember back that far.
    “Rebecca, she wants us to do something,” Katherine says again, shaking loose the divorce memories for just a moment.
    “God, yes, it was always one more thing with Annie. This proj-ect. That project. A party. Another party. Another article. Rounding up protesters this week, getting them ready for the week after that. What am I telling you this for? You know all of this. It was constant and endless and I miss every damn minute of it.”
    Katherine misses it too. She misses the phone calls and the wild trips north to attend a party or rake a yard or plant a new row of trees or bail Annie out of jail again.
    “How many times did I end up on your couch because there wasn’t enough room at her house?” she asks Rebecca.
    “Was I