![]() ![]() ‘You’re bleeding into the Caesar salad.’ So she gets up and he figures she’s going to the ladies’ room. She says, ‘Is something wrong?’ ‘Yeah,’ Eddie says. This woman got a nosebleed, but didn’t seem to notice it. Anyway, they ordered some salads at the bar. He said she seemed nice, but a bit goofy. Let’s get physical.’ But when Eddie met her she weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds. She put a caption under it: ‘I like working out. “One of the women he met had posted a picture of her much prettier sister, wearing a tracksuit. Voices on the car radio grated on me so did music, so did pity. I felt fragile in my grief, hypersensitive to sound. ![]() What I dreaded were the futile formulas of consolation from people who never knew him. I was resigned to my father’s passing: we had no unfinished business, and he knew that I loved him. He was one of those people whose death, I knew, would be a problem for me. Murray Cutler had been our high-school English teacher. I took a deep breath and nodded, reflecting on the news. He cocked his head to look at me, clamping his mouth shut and widening his eyes. When I asked, “How sick?,” Hankey said, “He’s at a hospice.” His lisp made the word juicier and more emphatic. Perhaps Hankey already knew about my father and was avoiding the subject by mentioning Murray Cutler. I was headed to Gaffey’s to meet my mother and my sister, to choose a coffin and arrange the viewing. Family tangles, bereavement, and failure send us home, seldom happiness. So I didn’t want to reply by explaining that I was back in Medford Square after so long because my father had just died. I hadn’t seen Hankey for more than twenty years, and I assumed that this abrupt announcement was a tactic to overcome his awkwardness. Sometimes bad news takes the form of a greeting. He said, “Jay,” then, “Guess who’s sick?,” then blinked and concluded, “Murray Cutler.” I was walking down High Street to the funeral home when I spotted Ed Hankey coming toward me. ![]()
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