The Orchard Read Online Free PDF Page B

because his father wasn’t feeling well and his mom was out at some meeting at their church.
    “No sweat,” I told him and we agreed to meet at the student union after the English exam; tomorrow being Sunday, he had to stay home, help his mom around the house and do the yard work. I knew he wanted to bitch some about it, but I didn’t give him the chance. I told him Mike had called, and I promised to get back to him if there was any gossip he should know.
    “Good deal,” he said. “Maybe he knows who that joker was who crashed the picnic.”
    “Joker? What joker? Stick, who are you—”
    Then his little sister screamed bloody murder right in my ear and the line went dead, and I knew if I called back, I’d get his father again.
    Mike wasn’t home. His mother said he had gone over to Amy’s just a little while ago and—she laughed—he wasn’t in the best of moods. She called it a lovers’ spat; I watched my language and told her she was probably right.
    Then I took a deep breath, said a few prayers to anyone who was listening, and dialed Mary’s number.
    She answered on the third ring, and she sounded like hell.
    “The funeral’s Monday afternoon,” she said.
    I leaned back and stared at the ceiling, feeling like a shit for not feeling a thing. “You want company?”
    “I don’t know if I can go.” Then she started crying, the dry kind that makes you want to scratch your throat because suddenly it feels like it’s been filled with sand. “I don’t know, Herb, I don’t know. What should I do?”
    “He was our friend,” I told her as gently and truthfully as I could. “He was a buddy. We should.”
    “He wanted me to marry him!”
    Oh, hell, I thought.
    “He said we could wait until after graduation and then get married.” The crying stopped; she had the hiccoughs now. “He said we could have our own careers, you know? He said we didn’t have to have children until later.”
    I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to know it. But I couldn’t stop her because she didn’t know me. So I sat there for nearly an hour while she told me all the plans she and Rich had made, and how her life was ruined because some asshole in some asshole car was too damned drunk to see where he was going.
    “Mary,” I said at last, “calm down, huh? Take it easy.”
    “It just isn’t fair that he’s dead! Damnit, Herb, it just isn’t fair!”
    I didn’t say anything. I let her go on until, finally, she dropped into a silence that had me thinking, after a minute, that she’d hung up.
    Then, softly: “I’m sorry, Herb. I didn’t mean—”
    “It’s all right, okay? It’s all right.”
    “Are you angry?”
    “With you? C’mon, Mary, don’t be a jerk. Unless you want me to be.”
    “What?”
    “I mean, if you really want me to be mad at you, I will.”
    “Herb, please …”
    “No, I mean it sincerely. Of course, you realize I’ll have to come over there and hang you from the ceiling by your thumbs and give you forty lashes with a wet cat.”
    She giggled.
    “You want me to come over? I can pick up a cat on the way.”
    “No,” she said, reluctantly. “I can’t see anyone, I don’t think. I look like hell and i can’t stop crying and Jesus Christ, why the fuck did it have to happen to him?”
    I had no answers, but I think I did a fair job of telling her so in the right way because the hiccoughs soon stopped and she was sort of laughing again.
    “Jesus, Herb, what would I do without you?”
    “Stagger on somehow,” I told her in my best, lousy British accent. “Chins up, eyes forward, pulling yourself together with a paper clip and a hammer.”
    Another laugh, a quiet thanks, and we rang off.
    I sat there forever, staring at the receiver, squinting at the far wall, finally pushing myself to my feet and heading for the back door. I needed to think. I needed to tell myself that it just wasn’t done, what I was thinking, which was to make myself so available to handle her grief that