The Accident Read Online Free PDF

shock and grief. “Who was driving that car? What stupid son of a bitch—”
    “There were three people in the other car. One survived. A young boy in the back seat. His father and brother were the two fatalities.”
    “My God, what kind of man gets behind the wheel drunk with his boys in the car and—”
    “That’s not exactly how it looks, sir,” the cop said.
    I stared at him, trying to figure out what he was getting at. Then it hit me. It wasn’t the father driving. It was one of the sons.
    “One of his boys was driving drunk?”
    “Mr. Garber, please. I need you to calm down for me. I need you to listen. It appears it was your wife who caused the accident.”
    “What?”
    “She’d driven up the ramp the wrong way, then just stopped her vehicle about halfway, parking it across the road, no lights visible. We think she may have fallen asleep.”
    “What the hell are you talking about?”
    “And then,” he said, “when the other car came off the highway, probably doing about sixty, he’d have been almost on your wife’s car before he saw it and could put on the brakes.”
    “But the other driver, he was drunk, right?”
    “You’re not getting me here, Mr. Garber. If you don’t mind my asking, sir, did your wife have a habit of drinking and driving? Usually, by the time someone actually gets into an accident, they’ve been taking chances for quite some—”
    Sheila’s car burst into flames.

TWO
    I’d lost track of just how long, exactly, I’d been standing there, staring into Sheila’s closet. Two minutes? Five? Ten?
    I hadn’t poked my head in here much in the last two weeks. I’d been avoiding it. Right after her death, of course, I’d had to do some rooting around. The funeral home needed an outfit, even though the casket was going to be closed. They’d done the best they could with Sheila. The broken glass had torn into her like buckshot. And the subsequent explosion, even though it did not fully engulf the car’s interior before the firefighters doused the vehicle, had only made the undertaker’s job more challenging. They’d sculpted and molded Sheila into something that bore a remote resemblance to how she’d looked in life.
    But I kept thinking about what it would do to Kelly, to see her mother that way at the service, looking only superficially like the woman she loved. And how everyone would be prompted to say how good she looked, what an amazing job the funeral home had done, which would only serve to remind us of what they’d had to work with.
    We’ll go with a closed casket, I’d said.
    The director said that was what they would do, then, but they still wanted me to provide an outfit.
    And so I selected a dark blue suit jacket and matching skirt, underwear, shoes. Sheila had more than a few pairs, and I picked a medium-height pair of pumps. I’d had a pair with higher heels in my hands at onepoint, then put them back because Sheila had always found that pair uncomfortable.
    When I was building her this walk-in closet by shaving a few feet off the end of our large bedroom, she’d said to me, “And just so we’re clear, this closet will be completely mine. Yours, that tiny, pitiful, phone-booth-sized thing over there, is all you’re ever going to need, and there’ll be no encroachment into my territory whatsoever.”
    “What I’m worried about,” I’d said, “is if I built you an airplane hangar you could fill it, too. Your stuff expands to the space allotted for it. Honest to God, Sheila, how many purses does one person need?”
    “How many power tools does one man need that do the same job?”
    “Just tell me, right now, there’ll be no spillover. That you’ll never, ever, put anything of yours in my closet, even if it is no bigger than a minibar.”
    Instead of answering directly, she’d slipped her arms around me, pushed me up against the wall, and said, “You know what I think this closet is big enough for?”
    “I’m not sure. If you tell me, I