Free The Beginner's Goodbye by Unknown

worn all day, I would snap at her once again: “Back off, I tell you! I’m fine!”
    I fell asleep almost instantly, the first time I’d done that since Dorothy died. I dreamed that Jimmy Vantage still lived next door, although in fact he’d moved away at the end of seventh grade. We went to Stony Run to look for turtles. But Jimmy walked too fast for me, and I couldn’t keep up. At one point I was actually crawling on the sidewalk and shouting for him to slow down. Which was odd, because in my dreams I tend to be assertively able-bodied. I practically have wings. But in this particular dream I was twisted into knots, hampered and gasping for air, and when I woke up I thought for an instant that I could still feel the grit from the sidewalk on my palms.
    Nandina said she knew just whom to call: Top Hat Roofers. They’d been replacing the slates on our parents’ house for as long as she could remember, she said, and she was sure they would understand that this should be given priority. “I’m going to phone them today,” she told me. “And you, meanwhile, should call your insurance agent. Or have you already done that?”
    “Um …”
    She gave me an ultra-patient look, an “I know you , buster” look. I was not a fan of that look. We were seated at the kitchen table with tea and cornflakes—our family’s traditional breakfast, which I had exchanged years ago for coffee and toast—and shehad a memo pad in front of her that she was making notes on. I was not a fan of her memo pads, either. I said, “Forget it. I’ve got everything under control.”
    “What do you mean by ‘everything’?”
    “I mean the insurance agent, the roof … and it’s going to be way more than just the roof. Shows how much you know about it. I need a general contractor.”
    “And you have one?” she asked.
    “Of course.”
    She looked unconvinced.
    I said, “His name is …” Then I started over again, like someone retracing his steps to take a long, running jump. “His name is … Gil Bryan.”
    It was the image of the shining skin beneath his eyes that brought it forth, finally. I said, “I’ll just give him a call today to let him know about the hall ceiling.”
    “Well,” Nandina said. “All right, I guess.”
    She seemed almost disappointed.
    We drove downtown in separate cars, at my insistence. I said, “Who knows? We might want to leave at different times.”
    “I don’t mind adjusting my schedule.”
    “But also,” I said, “I may run by the house after work for a few of my things.”
    “You want me to come with you?”
    “No.”
    In fact, I had no intention of going to my house. I had cased the bureau and the closet in my old room and found more than enough clothes to suit my purposes, provided I wasn’t too picky: stretched-out, kiddie-looking underpants, and jeans that fit finealthough they seemed a bit high in the waist, and a button-down oxford shirt that I remembered from eighth grade. You would think oxford shirts would be timeless, but this one was kind of spindly in the collar. Well, never mind. For shaving, I’d made do with a disposable plastic razor I found among Nandina’s backup supplies in the bathroom. I use an electric shaver, as a rule. I made a mental note to buy a new one on my lunch break.
    That was the first time I admitted to myself that I couldn’t face the sight of my house: when I realized I was willing to spring for a new electric shaver rather than retrieve my old one from my medicine cabinet.
    So, as soon as I reached work, I shut myself in my office and started making phone calls. First I left a message on the answering machine at my insurance company—just the company in general, because I had no recollection as to who my personal agent was, never having had to use him. Then I searched the Internet for gil bryan contractor baltimore . No Gil to be found, but there was a Bryan Bros. General Contracting Co. I tried that number, and this time I reached an actual