Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral Read Online Free PDF

nice thing before she died, and then she slipped away to the edge of a place that was just a breath away from what she thought she really wanted.
    It wasn’t the end, and it was barely the beginning, but Katie didn’t let go and Annie held on at first to her smallest finger and then to two more and then to her entire hand until she was in a place where her mind could heal and where she could see the light, the trees, the wisp of air off the lake in the morning, the sincere words from the mouth of her mother, everything in her world for what it really was and not what the thin ledge at the bottom of her brain tried to tell her it was.
    She lived and Katie helped her live and the salvation of their friendship—of two girls becoming women and ascending the next mountain and the one after that—became a bond that lasted through forty-two more years and to the moment when the sudden arrival of a brown box filled with red shoes launched Katherine Givins to the edge of one more mountain and made her remember the bathroom floor, the power of caring, and the love she felt for a lifelong friend who apparently had one more thing to say from the depths of a pair of shoes that were now resting comfortably on the dresser and screaming every second of the day for attention.

4

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    Jill Matchney gets the first call.
    Sitting outside, not more than a mile from the backyard of Annie Freeman’s back porch, with her feet propped up on the edge of her deck, she can see stars bounce like fireflies against the bank of clouds that open and close just long enough to expose the tiny planets she loves to watch.
    When the phone rings, Jill is right there in the clouds, all those hundreds and thousands and millions of miles away, floating through this day and the one before it and the one she anticipates tomorrow. Jill watches herself and her life like she would watch a movie—pushed back against the side of her house, legs dangling off the edge of her porch, a glass in her hand, imagining in the center of her analytical mind how the end will match the beginning and the middle.
    “The smell of roses, someone singing at the end of a long hall, all my papers in order, a small dinner party after the ceremony . . .” she says to herself, planning her own funeral as she watches another cloud bump into another set of stars and then swallow them.
    Jill, the retired educator, is like this and she has no intention of ever changing. She always had her papers graded before they hit her desk, loved committee work, swelled with the challenge each new student brought to her table, and each time a new and naive faculty member blew into her office she would look them in the eye and promise herself that she’d turn them into a diamond, a living promise, one of her own stars.
    That’s what she vowed when she first saw Annie Freeman—wide-eyed and naive but far from quiet. Annie Freeman who galloped, not walked, into her office and shared a litany of excited prose about her classes and her own promises and a dozen other wide-eyed calculations that made Professor Jill Matchney close her own eyes in eager astonishment at the abrupt appearance of her protégé—the successor she had been searching for ever since she had been appointed the head of the English department.
    Annie G. Freeman.
    “Damn her,” Jill grumbled, pushing herself away from the wall and toward the end of her deck so that her voice would spread out across the dark, empty yard and into the sky, toward one of the stars where she imagined Annie G. Freeman was even now holding court.
    “Damn you, Annie.”
    The phone rings then, splinters this thought, and every one that might have come after it. Thoughts that someone like Jill craved like sugar to keep her existence in line, to adhere to her patterns, to keep her knowing what might come next.
    “Is this Jill Matchney?”
    “Yes,” Jill responds, knowing that only the chosen few who have this number would dare to call her past 10:30 P.M