Free Rides a Stranger by David Bell Page B

I heard the ripping noise again. “I’m going through your father’s things. I started … well, you know, before. I took away a number of boxes. But somehow it didn’t seem right. You know … when he was still … here. But now, there’s a lot to go through.”
    My mother might sound business-like. Even cold. I don’t want to give the wrong impression of her. She could be business-like, even in the most stressful situations, but she was also very loving. She read to me constantly when I was a child. She encouraged my scholarly career. She was— is —an excellent mother. But her and my dad? How do I put this? They really weren’t in love. They were companions. Roommates. Partners in the strictest sense. They raised a son together. They rowed in the same direction. But it wasn’t a love affair. I’m sure Mom saw Dad’s death as a passage from one phase of her life to another. When she called to tell me Dad had died, she simply said, “It’s over.”
    “Are you okay being there alone now?” I asked. “In the house?”
    “Am I okay being alone?” she said. “Don, I’ve been alone in this house ever since you moved out. Your father and I were both alone here. It’s no big deal.” The ripping noise again. “And your father has so many books. So many.”
    I suddenly figured out what the ripping noise was. Tape. She was taping up boxes of Dad’s books. Probably sending them to the library book sale. Mom volunteered there twice a year. It was her pet cause.
    I wanted to ask her so much more. I wanted to ask her why she married Dad. I wanted to ask why they stayed married. I wanted to ask about Dad’s last words. “Good will.”
    And I wanted to ask the biggest question of all: Did you know Dad? Did you—or anybody else—really know him?
    But Mom moved things along.
    “So,” she said, the ripping sound of packing tape coming again. “Tuesday then? Don’t be late.”
    In the funeral home, during the viewing, I stayed at the back of the room. The casket remained open, and even though I’d seen my dad just three weeks before his death, wasting away to a stick man, I couldn’t bear the thought of being close to his dead body. Even though the funeral home had done a good job on him—according to my mother—and I imagined that he probably looked peaceful or any of the other clichés people threw around on such occasions, I knew Dad wouldn’t like it. The whole event felt … embarrassing somehow. The old man up in a box, wearing a coat and tie he never wore when he was alive. He seemed exposed. Vulnerable.
    And very, very dead.
    The family members—cousins, aunts, uncles—as well as the women and men my mother knew, found me despite my lingering at the back. They shook my hand, pecked me on the cheek, hugged me, and fussed over me. I was an only child and I had lost my father. Mom remained stationed at the front, accepting condolences and occasionally smiling.
    It’s over.
    When the man first approached me, I assumed he was another friend of Mom’s, someone she knew through church or volunteering at the local school. Except he didn’t look like anyone my mother would hang out with. He was short, just over five feet tall. And round, almost as wide as he was tall. His brown suit coat was frayed around the edges of the collar and the sleeves, and his once-white dress shirt looked dingy gray.
    “You must be the son,” he said. He shook my hand. “I’m sorry about your father.”
    His voice carried the trace of an accent, something from the East Coast.
    “I am,” I said. I did the same thing with him that I did with everyone else that night—I pretended I knew who he was. “It’s good to see you.”
    The man smiled. “You’re trying to place me,” he said.
    “No, I … well, to be honest, there are a lot of relatives here—”
    “I’m no relation,” he said. “And I’m really not a friend.”
    “Not a friend?”
    He held his smile. “Not a friend of yours, yet,” he said. “But