Eating Heaven Read Online Free PDF

coming. It’s just a little snow.” He sounds lonely, and I resolve to spend more time with him, make Mom call him. It wouldn’t kill her.
     
    When I first saw my father at the funeral home two years ago, I was amazed that the clichés about death were true. Without his energy, his body was no longer him. His face had gone flaccid, losing the tension between his eyes, along his jaw. His sandy gray hair had apparently been washed as he lay on his back, drying perpendicular to the floor. Days later, at the funeral, someone had styled it like a newscaster’s.
    Coworkers found him at his desk at the Clackamas County offices on a Monday morning, slumped over his Day-Timer, coffee pooling under his elbow. The autopsy showed cardiac damage and scars from previous incidents that had gone unnoticed. We had a simple service on a gray but dry winter afternoon, and it puzzled me how genuinely saddened the people from his office seemed to be.
    “He was such a good man,” said a bird-faced woman, a geologist like Dad. I fought the urge to say, “Really?” and nodded instead. To me he was the Invisible Man, nothing but a ghost in the basement, a dent on the couch, a disembodied memory when he’d take one of his long business trips. Mom told us he loved us, but I didn’t buy it. How could he love us if he never talked to us about anything other than grades and chores, and later, when we were adults, jobs and money?
    The last thing I remembered him saying to me, a month before he died, was, “Are you making any money yet? Why you ever quit that cushy PR job is beyond me.” I wanted to say, “And why you ever had children is beyond me,” but even as an adult I could never bring myself to talk back to him.
    The funeral was over in half an hour. It was more like a perfunctory church visit, like the ones we’d made each Christmas Eve and Easter, than mourning the passing of a human life. Mom was quiet most of the day, and Christine had blubbered like a baby at the service, but Anne and I remained steadfastly dry-eyed.
    Mom had a reception after the service, putting out clam dip and tiny cheese-filled sausages, carrot and celery sticks, Ritz crackers and canned olives. Her former idea of gourmet. The only clue that she wasn’t truly enjoying the opportunity to entertain was the grip she kept on her glass of vodka and tonic, and the frequency with which she refilled it. My mother rarely drank more than half a beer.
    Late in the day, as people began to filter out and Aunt Yolanda helped my sisters and me clean up, Mom headed for the basement. We looked at each other, shaking our heads, figuring she was going to sit in Dad’s den, commune with the spirit of the man who’d sat alone there so often, unencumbered by human interaction.
    Moments later, Mom appeared at the top of the stairs, face bright, eyes shining. “It’s perfect,” she said. Even at sixty-four, she had the exuberance of a schoolgirl.
    Not quite knowing how to respond, we all just stared at her. Benny, deep in a discussion with one of the neighbors, looked over at the sound of my mother’s voice, and then excused himself to walk to her side.
    “Bebe?” he said, and we all waited.
    “The den will make a perfect darkroom,” she said.
    Benny tipped his head and frowned at her. “You sure you should be making those kinds of decisions right now? I mean, it’s only been—”
    “Of course I’m sure.” She laughed, looking around the room. “My God. Richard would have wanted me to have a darkroom, wouldn’t he? And Benny,” she said, hooking a conspiratorial arm through his, “I’ll even let you use it. It will be like old times.”
    The platter Yolanda was drying dropped to the floor, smashed against the tile, scattering pink and blue flowers across the room and bringing all conversation to a halt.
    “Oh, my, and your good china, too,” Yolanda murmured, and my sisters and I kneeled down with her on the floor to gather the pieces.
     
    At four o’clock,