The Last Dance Read Online Free PDF

close to his body hanging there.
    She looks up into his face.
    â€œDad?” she says, disbelievingly, expecting him to stick his tongue out farther, perhaps make a razzing sound, break into a grin, she doesn’t know what, something, anything that will tell her he’s playing a game, the way he used to play games with her when she was a little girl, before he got old … and boring … and
dead
.Dead, yes. He does not move. He is dead. He is really and truly dead and he will never grin at her again. She stares into his wide-open eyes, as green as her own, but flecked with pinpricks of blood, her own eyes squinched almost shut, her face contorted not in pain, she feels no pain, she doesn’t even feel any sense of loss or abandonment, she has not known this man for too long a time now. She feels only horror and shock, and anger, yes, inexplicable
anger,
sudden and fierce, why did he
do
this, why didn’t he
call
somebody, what the fuck is the
matter
with him?
    â€œI
never
use such language,” she tells the five men listening to her, and the room goes silent again.
    The police, she thinks. I have to call the police. A man has hanged himself, my
father
has hanged himself, I have to notify the police. She looks around the room. The phone. Where’s the phone? He should have a phone by the bed, he has a heart problem, a phone should always be within—
    She spots the phone, not alongside the bed but across the room on the dresser, would it have cost him a fortune to install another jack? Her mind is whirling with things she will have to do now, unexpected tasks to perform. She will have to call her husband first, “Bob, honey, my father’s dead,” they will have to make funeral arrangements, buy a casket, notify all his friends, who the hell are his friends? Her mother, too, she’ll have to call her, divorced five years, she’ll say, “Good, I’m glad!” But first the police, she is sure the police have to be notified in a suicide, she has read someplace or seen someplace that you have to call the police when you find your father hanging from a hook with his tongue sticking out. She is suddenly laughing hysterically. She covers her mouth with her hand, and looks over it like a child, and listens wide-eyed, fearful that someone will come in and find her with a dead man.
    She waits several moments, her heart beating wildly in her chest, and then she walks to the telephone and is about to dial 911 when something occurs to her. Something just pops into her mind unbidden. She remembers the key to the safe deposit box in the littleblack leather purse, and she remembers her father telling her that among other things like his silver high school track medal there is an insurance policy in that box. It isn’t much, her father told her, but you and Bob are the beneficiaries, so don’t forget it’s there. She also remembers hearing somewhere, or reading somewhere, or seeing somewhere on television or in the movies—there is so
much
information out there today—but anyway
learning
somewhere that if somebody kills himself the insurance company won’t pay on his life-insurance policy.
    She doesn’t know if this is true or not, but suppose it is? Neither does she know how much he’s insured himself for, it probably isn’t a great deal, he never did have any real money to speak of. But say the policy’s for a hundred thousand dollars, or even fifty or twenty or ten, who cares? Should the insurance company get to keep all those premiums he’s paid over the years simply because something was troubling him so much—what the hell was troubling you, Dad?—that he had to hang himself? She does not think that is fair. She definitely does not think that is fair.
    On the other hand …
    Suppose …
    Just suppose …
    Just suppose he died in his sleep of a heart attack or something? Just suppose whoever it is who has to write a death