Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    “My name is Katherine Givins. We’ve never met but you sort of know me.”
    At this, Jill smiles and then looks at the stars, selects the one she imagines is now inhabited by her fine friend Annie Freeman, and then she listens, grabs the edge of the tall banister to support herself while she hears the entire story about the funeral, minus the bra, and realizes that something fierce has unexpectedly grabbed hold of her fairly empty appointment calendar and is about to swallow it whole.
    Jill, who should have been the hardest sell, did not seem to hesitate.
    “I’ll be there,” she told Katherine, and “Yes,” with a slight chuckle, “I know who you are and I imagine I know everyone else you are about to call.”
    And call she did.
    Jill first. The retired professor who knew there had been no formal funeral. Jill who talked softly and who quickly but surely promised to be at the San Francisco airport in nine—wait, now only eight—days with equipment for something that Katherine has already begun calling The Traveling Funeral.
    “Well,” Katherine says, thinking as she speaks because she is shooting from the hip or really from the knees because she is moving so quickly she can barely pick her words off the ground—shooting from the hip would be way too late. “I suppose you need to bring something for hiking, something for sitting in the car we rent, something for sleeping—if you sleep in something—a bathing suit . . .”
    Katherine stops.
    Jill Matchney laughs.
    “What’s so funny?”
    “She knew this would happen.”
    “What?”
    “Annie knew we’d have this discussion. And she would have laughed and then told us we were predictable.”
    There is a short pause. Both women have jumped into the same track. They almost talk at the exact moment but Katherine, edged with coffee, gets there first.
    “She thought about this for a long time, didn’t she?”
    Jill speaks in a kind of whisper when she talks about her friend. She misses Annie so much sometimes that she drops to her knees because the burden of sorrow, the empty shadow of what once was is too much for her to bear. She really drops to her knees.
    “I don’t know you, but I know you because of Annie,” Jill says slowly to Katherine, who is listening with her eyes closed, her fingers wedged on either side of her temples, her mind focused on this memory of Annie speaking about this woman, this teacher, this Jill, with such respect and love that Katherine felt jealous because she had not yet met her. “She’s already linked all of us and she knows that we may end up loving each other, not like we love her, but in new ways that take us to places she went to before she left all of us—”
    Katherine cuts her off. “Maybe.”
    “Maybe?”
    “She was dying. Remember that. Everything changes when that happens. I think she simply planned a funeral and that she wanted the women in her life to be her traveling attendants. Call us the moving female pallbearers. That’s what we are—this is our duty because we loved her and she loved us.”
    Jill leans forward and moves her eyes off the horizon. She thinks that maybe she doesn’t really know what will happen in eight days. She thinks that maybe she should stop thinking so much. She continues thinking anyway because she cannot stop herself from thinking after all the years of school and classes and schedules and students—oh, the students!—that set her days and weeks and months and years into such distinct and precise patterns. She thinks that maybe her intellectual inner guideposts may need to be retired for a while, just like the rest of her life. She thinks that the loss of her friend coupled with the loss of her students, her administrative post, all the patterns in her life that gave her comfort and something to spread out in front of her to see day after day, has dimmed everything she thinks she knows.
    Everything has changed.
    Everything is changing.
    “You don’t know?” Katherine