Hope to Die Read Online Free PDF

"Oh? Oh, no. Oh, Michael, that's awful. I'm so sorry. How did it happen? God, I'm so sorry. Here, I'll put your father on."
    She lowered the receiver and held her hand over the mouthpiece. "He wants to talk to you," she said, "but I think he wanted to tell me first, so I could tell you."
    Tell me what? That his marriage was in trouble, that his child was sick- but why was he inNew York? What bad news would have sent him rushing east?
    "It's Anita," she said. That's Mike and Andy's mother, my ex-wife. "She had a heart attack. She's dead."

THREE
    It must have been a very grand house in its day, a country estate of fieldstone and half-timbered stucco built when Syosset was a tiny village surrounded by potato fields. Since then a ton of development houses have been thrown up where they used to grow potatoes, and few of the big old houses are still private residences. Some have been pulled down, while others survive as nursing homes or office suites.
    Or funeral homes, like this one onAlbemarle Road. I drove past it the first time. I hadn't missed it, Michael's directions were good and there was a big sign on the front lawn, but I guess I must have been reluctant to arrive. I circled the block, and, halfway around, I turned left instead of right and found my way to our old house.
    It looked smaller, and the lot larger, than I remembered. It was what they used to call a ranch house, and maybe they still do- three bedrooms, a living room, dining room, and kitchen, all on one floor, all on a quarter-acre suburban lot. Someone had added an enclosed breezeway connecting the house and the garage, and someone else (or the same person, for all I knew) had replaced the casement windows in front with a big picture window. The shrubbery in front had filled in, or died and been replaced, and there was a tree I had planted, then a spindly white oak sapling, that now towered over the house. There was another tree on the front strip that hadn't been there when I lived there, and a clump of white birch that I'd put in was gone. Maybe a subsequent owner hadn't liked the birches, maybe his kids had stripped the bark to make a canoe.
    Or maybe the trees had simply died. Birches, I seemed to remember, were relatively short-lived trees, and it had been thirty years since I'd lived in that house, say thirty-three or thirty-four years since I planted the birches. That doesn't seem like a very long time for a tree, even a short-lived tree, but things don't always last as long as you expect them to.
    Marriages fail, people die. Why should trees be different?
    When I got to the funeral home a second time I pulled into the lot and found a place for my rental car. In a mortician's house are many mansions, and a fellow who looked a little heartier than the circumstances called for was waiting in the entrance hall to steer me in the right direction. He asked for the name of the party I was there for, and without thinking I gave my own. It had been hers for years, and I guess on some level it still was, as far as I was concerned.
    His face, professionally noncommittal, registered first that there was no Scudder funeral on the books, then that he recognized the name; the sons of the deceased bore it, and he would have met them. Before he could say anything I corrected myself. "I'm sorry," I said. "That was her name when I knew her. It's Thiele now."
    I let him point me down a hallway and followed it to a room flooded with afternoon sunlight. I found a seat in the last row. The service had already begun, and a man in a black suit was talking in the unmistakable tones of a clergyman about the frailty of human life and the durability of the human spirit. He didn't say anything I hadn't heard before, or anything to which I could take exception.
    While the words washed over me, I looked around the room. In the front row I saw a man I took for Graham Thiele; I'd never met the fellow, but that could only be him, seated next to two girls who had to be his daughters. He