Free Final Arrangements by Nia Ryan Page A

which he had strong
opinions.
    She should have told him she was leaving. But
somehow, she couldn't. She was running away from him, unable to
face his strong convictions. Later, she'd see him again. In a few
days, in fact. They'd pick up where they left off. Continue with
the final arrangements. Get Dad out of the morgue and into a nice
sunny side plot on the hill overlooking Riverside Drive and Warner
Studios. With Mother beside him.
    No. She and Stretch wouldn't be doing those
things together. Because she realized now if she left, she probably
wouldn't be back. Things would be different immediately after the
signing of General Kremsky. The world would be a different place.
An expanding universe, one in which guys like Stretch Murphy, who
fiddled with hoses and tried to learn to play chess from lonely old
men, and who helped the daughters of those old men with funeral
arrangements, wouldn't feel comfortable.
    Their destinies were entirely different, she
could see that now. Even if he was genuine, if he was for real, he
would be making his vocational decision soon, probably selling his
pool cleaning business and starting seminary, living in a one-room
dormitory on some campus in a State where they grew corn 100,000
acres at a time. While the corn was growing, they watched their
many tow-headed children parade prized sheep of assorted qualities
at 4-H contests.
    If Stretch was for real, where he was going,
God, the Bible, and the weather report, not necessarily in that
order, were all anybody was really interested in. She, on the other
hand, would probably be off to New York. The financial capital of
the entire world. A place where anything one imagined and many
things one could not possibly imagine, would, and regularly did,
happen. Where the term "laid back" simply did not apply.
    She wondered what Stretch thought of the New
York scene. Tried to picture the two of them, attending a large
closing dinner someplace, maybe at one of the smaller but important
boutique galleries. A gourmet feast for a couple of dozen world
beaters.
    They'd all be staring at him. Wondering if he
played basketball. Wondering what other things he did they might
find intriguing or useful. And then, during the soup course, he'd
start praying out loud without bowing his head or closing his eyes
and embarrass everyone. Totally insensitive to the fact none of
them believed in God, or if they did, kept their God at home with
the rest of the antiques. Later that evening, on the steps in front
of the gallery, there would be a mugging attempt. Stretch would
perform his lucky judo move and wrap the mugger into a pretzel and
hold him face down in the gutter until the cops came. That night
she'd hear him out on the balcony of their Bronxville condo. Angry
because he'd bumped his head on the hanging plant. Wishing he were
someplace where corn was growing. Fiddling with the hose. Wondering
what life would have been like if he had been better at
basketball.
    If Stretch were for real. If he wasn't, he'd
continue cleaning pools, continue to believe that all the things he
dreamed of were just on the cusp of coming true. And even if she
had started to believe that she could make a life with him, even if
he were somehow different from everyone else, even if she thought
she could bring him into her life, she understood that she could
not. Her attraction had been just that--an attraction. But without
real world substance.
    He wasn't real. She remembered his remark
about finding a hippopotamus in a swimming pool. That was the
remark which told her everything. The one truly insane slip he had
made thus far. In his totally strange but believable fantasy world,
he had made that single bizarre statement and it was his
undoing.
    There. She had her answer from God. Stretch
wasn't in his right mind. Because he actually believed that he'd
seen a hippopotamus in a swimming pool. And having seen it, had
jumped in and pumiced the beast clean. No, Stretch wasn't real--but
he was