The Wife's Tale Read Online Free PDF Page B

daughter.
    As to religion, Orin had been raised Catholic, a faith to which he’d never truly held so hadn’t exactly abandoned when he
     married Irma, who’d been raised Christian but had ideas of her own. Irma had told Mary, when she’d inquired, that they didn’t
     go to her church because it gave her bad dreams, and they didn’t go to Catholic church because the priest was a drunk. Mary
     had once, as a child, watched some Christians scrubbing graffiti from the wall at the Kmart, struck by the dripping red words—
Where is God when you need her?
    No, Mary thought, even Orin Brody’s vapor would never leave Leaford, but she threw up a prayer to heaven, just in case. She
     lifted her eyes when several black crows passed overhead, courting the mourners’ revulsion. One of the birds descended, settling
     atop the gleaming casket, strutting from head to foot and stopping to appraise Mary Gooch. She glared back with reciprocal
     loathing, and felt she’d won when the bird flew away.
    Finding Gooch’s eyes wet beneath their fringe of dark lash, Mary yearned to cry along with her husband. She’d felt the same
     way years ago, watching him reach for a tissue as the Canadian hockey player Wayne Gretzky announced that he was leaving the
     Edmonton Oilers for the L.A. Kings. And that Sunday afternoon when tears spilled from his eyes as the final scenes of
How Green Was My Valley
played out on the new TV. And the long-ago day his own father passed away, when he’d drunk a whole bottle of Southern Comfort
     and wept after they’d made love. She’d admired that her husband was man enough to cry, but wondered what that made her.
    She flapped her white shirt, the collar damp around her neck, and focused on her breath, or more accurately her odor,
fromage
—oddly pleasant to herself, but she’d need to swab and talc her valleys and crevasses the minute they got home from the cemetery.
    The food. Hunger. Details of the wake a blessing. Napkins and plastic glasses on the card table. Casseroles on low in the
     oven. Pete and Wendy were out of town but Erika and Dave and Kim and François would be there. The Rowlands, Loyers, Feragamos,
     Whif-fens, Stielers, Nick Todino and his wife, Phil and Judy. Merkels wouldn’t come; they barely left the house. No one from
     the Gooch side.
    Gooch’s father had died after a car accident in their final year at Leaford Collegiate, and a scant year and a half later
     his mother, Eden, and her new husband, Jack Asquith—a chain-smoking American whom Gooch referred to as “Jack
Asswipe
,” moved to California, where Jack owned a pet supply company in a place called Golden Hills. Eden had promised they’d still
     see each other, but she’d stopped visiting at Christmas after the first few years. Mary had asked Gooch not to bother trying
     to contact his tragic older sister, Heather, of no fixed address.
    Gooch’s voice had grown distant. Not just on the drive home from her father’s funeral, but gradually over the days and months
     and years of their marriage. She thought she heard him say, “Scatter my ashes on the golf course, Mare. Eighteenth hole. That’s
     what I want.”
    The early trees had just leafed out, and the April rains had greened all that was gray. Impossible not to feel
someone’s
god in the pastoral landscape. The resurrection of the black earth fields. Glory in the sun’s diving rays. The promise of
     butter-drenched asparagus and field-warm strawberries. Mary watched the dappled light spray her husband’s profile, wondering
     if he was mourning his own long-departed father and his gone-away mother, his athletic scholarship. He must surely think about
     the babies, though their names, like curses, went unspoken.
    Gooch reached above his head to yank open the testy sunroof, which would never close again. He eased his hand off the wheel
     to touch her through the wool casing of Mr. Feragamo’s slacks. When his enormous fingers found the mulch of her thigh, she