An Available Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

about going to the Morgansterns’ dinner party, or anywhere else besides school since Bee’s death, Edward was the first to arrive. The occasion, or non-occasion, as Sybil assured him—“The usual, just a few of us getting together”—had been called for seven o’clock and it was almost a quarter past, but there were no cars parked in the driveway or on the street right near the house, where the drapes were pulled open and the front windows blazed with light.
    The porch lights were on, too, and the little hooded electric lanterns that lit the way up the leaf-littered path. Wood smoke was in the air and Edward, his Honda idling at the curb, saw Sybil and Henry move about their living and dining rooms, passing each other like the wooden figures in the Swiss clock on their mantel.
    Henry’s shingle swung and creaked in the wind. His medical offices, with their own entrance, and with cutouts of menorahs and Christmas trees taped to the windows, were on the side of the house. That was where Bee had taken Julie and Nick for checkups and childhood illnesses until they’d graduated from middle school and Henry’s pediatric practice. Sybil, so efficiently in charge, was Henry’s office manager.
    Edward drove around the corner and parked midway between two streetlamps. In the relatively dark safety of the car, he contemplated continuing on back home, fixing himself a sandwich, and taking the dog out for a bonus walk. He was like a savage summoned into civilization, or someone suffering from a kind of behavioral amnesia. Maybe he’d forgotten how to be in company or eat with implements. Maybe he’d beat his chest and howl instead of shaking hands with the men and accepting the kisses of the women.
    His hands, still holding the steering wheel, were trembling, and he was aware of his own heartbeat, the cooling tick of the car’s engine. He could call them on his cell phone and claim a sudden illness, a stomach thing. There really was a vague cramping somewhere in his abdomen or chest. It was a sensation he remembered from his first days at a new school or a new job. He took the phone from his pocket.
    But instead he called his own number and heard Bee say, “Edward and Bee aren’t home right now. Please leave your name and number after the beep and one of us will call you back.” Before long, one of their friends—probably bossy, outspoken Sybil—would challenge him about not having changed the message, and he’d have to claim that he’d simply forgotten and promise to take care of it.
    In the meantime, though, he could still listen to Bee’s voicein his ear and their names said together like that. Not that he did it often, just once in a while—from a private corner on school grounds or sitting in his parked car somewhere, like this. And he wasn’t so far gone that he felt compelled to actually leave a message for Bee, although there were so many things he wished he could tell her: that the first African American president had been elected, that several of her clinic clients had sent Edward notes expressing their own sense of loss, that he would always feel grateful for the family she had given him.
    “Edward and Bee aren’t home right now …” Recording those outgoing messages had always been such a hilarious hassle. Bee had to revise hers a few times over the years: first to exclude Bruce, then to include Edward, and finally to leave off the children’s names, one after the other, as they left home. Each time, something had gone wrong. Once, the doorbell had rung repeatedly in the middle of a taping. And the kids had started a screaming battle as soon as she’d started another. During the final recording, when she was joining Edward’s name solely to hers, she’d said, “Bedward and Bee” at first and began to laugh until she got the hiccups. He ran off, laughing, too, to get her a glass of water, and then she made him leave the room so she could resume recording without cracking up again.
    That’s