Funerals for Horses Read Online Free PDF

to come. We listened to every conversation, and although cryptic, heard only from his end, a pattern emerged.
    “Yes, Manny,” our father would say, “it’s worse than I thought. No, worse than that. No, nobody said a word to me—the kids never said a thing. No wonder it was such a strain on the girl, god keep her... Well, I know, Manny, but I’m her ex-husband. I know that, but I’m the children’s father. Well, somebody has to— that’s my point, that’s all I’m really trying to say.... No, I called her long distance. She hung up on me, that’s what. Like this is a big surprise. Then I called back but she wouldn’t answer. You know how much she hates me. You know what she said to me, Manny? Before she hung up? Before I could even tell her what I’d called to say, Manny? She said, ‘What daughter? I have no daughter’.... I know—that’s exactly what I said. But you know what she’s like. . . . Not living, no. . . . Well, somebody has to, that’s my point. That’s all I’m trying to say.... Well, me, of course. I mean, somebody has to take care of them. They’re kids. They can’t raise themselves.”
    My brother Simon and I stared into each other’s eyes, and at the walls, alternately, feeling a sense of the unspoken factor, searching for some clarification of it in our mutual understanding.
    Then a number of additional calls, in a tone more formal.
    “I’m calling to inquire about your facility.... Well, how much of that would the state pay... ? I see.”
    In the morning he sat us down, said our mother had a sickness that didn’t show. Didn’t show, I thought. You don’t spend much time around here. But I maintained a measured silence.
    We were not invited to come along for the ride.
    Uncle Manny—big, hearty, unflappable Uncle Manny—came to stay with us while our father flew home to pack and ship his belongings.
    While we waited, we bundled and hauled stacks of sports sections to the front yard. If we had cared to, we could have stacked them high enough to obscure the house from the street, but we only made a series of loose mounds, which happy Boy Scouts dragged away.
    Simon and I moved into a common room in the attic, because my father felt comfortable in the privacy afforded by owning the entire second floor.
    We’d lie in bed at night and wonder aloud about the safety, indeed the purpose, of asking where our mother had been taken, and whether or not visits could be arranged.
    DeeDee said we should be smart for a change, and ask no questions at all. In just a matter of weeks, our new way of life sketched itself out in painful detail, leaving no room for confusion. We decided without prearrangement that DeeDee’s opinions were the most solid of the three, and should be accepted as a tiebreaker, or in any situation in which stress or doubt might cloud our limited, living vision.
    Our father installed a lock on the outside of the attic door to assure we would not stumble downstairs after lights out.
    Night after night we collected auditory data.
    The front door opening and closing long after midnight, too many times a night. Voices, always strange, never overlapping. Three, four, five new voices all at once. Sounds—human, we assumed, though some frighteningly close to the border between human and animal, between pleasure and pain. Laughter. Bed springs. Or couch springs. A gentle trying of our door. Because, you see, our father had installed a real deadbolt, not just a hook on the outside of the door, but a lock that we could not open from the inside, and that no one on the outside could open, except our father with his key.
    “Well, Ella,” Simon said one night, “you said you wanted everything to change.”
    As is so often the case, by the time I realized that my wish had been answered, it was far too late for retraction.

THE EVE OF SETTING OFF

In a dusty corner of a defunct service station, near a wall of treadless tires, I phone Raphael from a phone booth out of sight and