The Wife's Tale Read Online Free PDF

imagined Irma turning to smile as the other patients did when their
     kin came to call. She imagined herself enfolded by her mother’s cadaverous arms. The whisper of
Mary. Dear Mary.
She wished to be kissed by that gawping mouth, yearned to touch, to
be
touched, longed for a sliver of connection to the Irma who used to be, the mother who, while gently combing Mary’s locks
     one day, had confided, “My mother used to tear at my tangles. Just
tear
at them. She’d hit me with the brush if I so much as breathed. I still remember that. I would never hit you with the brush.”
     Or the Irma who’d remarked casually, “You have the nicest handwriting, dear.”
    Orin had loved Mary in the same somewhat grudging way, but she didn’t blame her parents for her present state nor fault them
     for their stingy affection. They weren’t rich with it, and gave what they could. “You get what you get and you don’t get upset,”
     Orin liked to say when Mary was sulky. When he wanted her to hush up he’d pretend to pass her a tiny key and warn, “Zip it.
     Lock it. Put it in your pocket.”
    Pop would have hated it here, she repeated to herself, wheeling her absent mother past her moribund fellows, grateful that
     St. John’s was so conveniently located across the road from Chatham’s largest funeral home. As she struggled across the walkway
     with her wheezy mother and her chafed thighs, she thought of how Irma had passed in fragments, starting in her fifties, little
     bits of her exiting like players off a field—long-term memory, short-term memory, recognition, reason. At least with Orin,
     Mary reminded herself, she’d had the chance to say goodbye.
See ya tomorrow, Murray.
    Giant Jimmy Gooch and the hunched old men were gathered outside, sharing a tin flask of some homemade concoction that one
     of the relations still brewed in his garage. Gooch waved when he spied his wife pushing the remains of her mother up the ramp,
     and lifted his shoulders, smiling wanly—his way of saying,
Ah, life
. Mary nodded twice and tilted her head, her way of saying,
I know
.
    Ah, life.
She was moved to think how often they’d exchanged those gestures in their years together, then annoyed that Gooch hadn’t
     rushed to take the chair from her swollen hands. Maybe he was too far away to see that she was drenched and breathless, and
     had failed to note, in the way the parent is never the first to notice the child’s growth spurt, how truly incapable she’d
     become.
    Longing to grieve with her mother, while grateful to be relieved of the burden, Mary’d returned the frail creature to St.
     John’s after the funeral parlor portion, before gathering at the cemetery, where Orin and Irma had joint plots in the vicinity
     of the other dead Brodys. Mary had spent many sleepless hours, long before the deaths of Orin or Mr. Barkley, wishing that
     her mother would die, complete a cluster or begin one, but Irma’s pulsing body was a wonder of biology, a life but not
alive
. Perhaps she didn’t count.
    Shortly before he’d passed, Mary’d confided to Orin her sense of feeling stuck and unbound all at once, her failed attempts
     at optimism, her sense that she could only see the glass half empty, to which he’d responded impatiently, “Forget about the
     glass, Murray. Get a drink from the hose and push on.”
    Birdsong scored the graveside service. Hunger pangs tore at Mary’s gut as she reflected on the liberation of her father’s
     spirit by a minister who didn’t know him from a cherry pit. The man was appealing to God to receive Orin Brody’s soul, but
     Mary knew that old Orin would never venture such a distance, even if he did make the cut. She imagined him a vaporous cloud
     sparring with oxygen molecules in the airspace above his own headstone, content to be wherever he was, the way he’d clung
     to Baldoon County all his life. Orin and Irma never saw the point in traveling, and bred a mistrust of wanderlust in their