The Last Thing He Wanted Read Online Free PDF Page B

hat was the morning, June 15, a Friday, when she should have known it was time to cut and run.
    She knew how to cut and run.
    She had done it often enough.
    Cut and run, cut her losses, just walked away.
    She had just walked away from her mother for example.
    See where it got her.
    She had flown to Laguna as soon as she got the call but there had been no funeral. Her connection into John Wayne was delayed and by the time she arrived in the cold May twilight her mother had already been cremated. You know how Kitty felt about funerals, Ward said repeatedly. Actually I never heard her mention funerals, Elena said finally, thinking only to hear more about what her mother had said or thought, but Ward had looked at her as if wounded. She was welcome, he said, to do what she wanted with the cremains, the remains, the ashes or whatever, the cremains was what they called them, but in case she had nothing specific in mind he had already arranged withthe Neptune Society. You know how Kitty felt about open ocean, he said. Open ocean was something else Elena did not recall her mother mentioning. So if it’s all the same to you, Ward said, visibly relieved by her silence, I’ll go ahead with the arrangements as planned.
    She found herself wondering how short a time she could reasonably stay.
    There would be nothing out of John Wayne but she could get a redeye out of LAX.
    Straight shot up the 405.
    Ward’s daughter Belinda was in the bedroom, packing what she called the belongings. The belongings would go to the hospice thrift shop, Belinda said, but she knew that Kitty would want Elena to take what she wanted. Elena opened a drawer, aware of Belinda watching her.
    Kitty never got tired of mentioning you, Belinda said. I’d be over here dealing with the Medicare forms or some other little detail and she’d find a way to mention you. It might be you’d just called from wherever.
    The drawer seemed to be filled with turbans, snoods, shapeless head coverings of a kind Elena could not associate with her mother.
    Or, Belinda said, it might be that you hadn’t. I got her those for the chemo.
    Elena closed the drawer.
    Moved by the dim wish to preserve something of her mother from consignment to the hospice thrift shop she tried to remember objects in which her mother had set special stock, but in the end took only an ivory bracelet she remembered her mother wearing and a creased snapshot, retrieved from a carton grease-penciled OUT , of her mother and father seatedin folding metal lawn chairs on either side of a portable barbecue outside the house in Las Vegas. Before she left she stood in the kitchen watching Ward demonstrate his ability to microwave one of the several dozen individual casseroles stacked in the freezer. Your mother did those just before she went down, Belinda said, raising her voice over Jeopardy. Kitty would have aced that, Ward said when a contestant on-screen missed a question in the Famous Travelers category. See what he does, Belinda said as if Ward could not hear. He keeps working in Kitty’s name, same way Kitty used to work in yours. Two hours later Elena had been at LAX, trying to get cash from an ATM and unable to remember either her bank code or her mother’s maiden name.
    It might be you’d just called from wherever.
    In the deep nowhere safety of the United lounge she drank two glasses of water and tried to remember her calling card number.
    Or it might be that you hadn’t.
    Thirty-six hours after that she had been on the tarmac at Newark with the agent saying where’s the dog, we don’t have a dog, it’ll take all day to sweep this shit.
    She had cut and run from that too.
    No more schedules, no more confetti, no more balloons floating free.
    She had walked away from that the way she had walked away from the house on the Pacific Coast Highway. She did not think Wynn, she thought the house on the Pacific Coast Highway.
    Tile floors, white walls, tennis lunches on Sunday afternoons.
    Men with even tans