He’d had this feeling before, of being both flattered and repelled. The last time was at the bar in the Biloxi Holiday Inn when a thin, pretty woman, posted next to the stainless steel waitress rails, had smiled at him while he waited for his order of Sierra Nevada ale and a small glass. He remembers the extraordinary appeal of her polished teeth glinting between plum colored lips. He had been with a group at a publishers’ convention and had considered speaking to her after dinner until one of the New York reps asked if everyone had seen the prostitute at the bar with the thigh-high boots and the “two-hundred dollar mouth.”

But this evening he is back in Chicago facing a casket containing the body of a man in a pale yellow suit, and it’s not a whore but his brother’s wife who is smiling at him from where she kneels, her head fourteen inches away from the corpse’s silver tie clasp.

Rising from the kneeler, she makes the sign of the cross, turns away from the remains and walks towards Oberle. Big hair, heavy perfume or deodorant – it makes his eyes burn.

“Is Rita here?” she asks.

“This morning she wasn’t sure if she could make it,” he says of his wife.

“You haven’t talked to her since then?” she says.

“No.”

“She doesn’t have a cell phone?”

“I don’t.”

As long as he has known this woman, she has probed for dirt she’ll be able to disclose to the other two sisters-in-law. Cinderella’s fucking stepsisters. All three hate their husbands’ family, extrapolating everything they despise about their spouses onto the rest of the clan, from which they believe they rescued each of them. They see him, Oberle, as a clone of their husbands: cautious, unambitious, provincial, and, worst in their eyes, stubborn; but they hate him the most because he is out of their control.

He has to admire how this one, Lorraine, could smile through the hate.

“Paul is on his way now,” she says. “He’d better be,” she adds, checking her watch. She coughs out a single, laugh-like grunt to soften her threat.

Oberle does not understand how his brother, from the same litter, could acquiesce to this woman’s dictates. He wonders what Lorraine offers that makes Paul’s submission worthwhile.

Of course, he had lied about his wife Rita’s absence. Certainly she could have been here, but they'd had a fight this morning about going to the wake, which somehow pooled into their old fight about his job troubles at Abel Publishing, finally flooding into a new fight about the two of them. He is angry with her, but not angry enough to betray her to this shrew or to anyone else at Larry Wilde’s wake.

Which was supposed to be a “good” wake. The sixty-one-year-old Wilde was one of those distant cousins you only saw at funerals and weddings, and whose own death had what was considered limited impact. He had neither wife nor children, and his passing was not unnatural or violent, since all his life he had suffered from asthma, the major contributor to the heart attack that killed him in the night last Wednesday.

An only child whose parents’ deaths had preceded his by only a decade, he left behind no close kin, no money or property, and apparently only one relative who saw much of him – a cousin who explained to Oberle and to every other person whom he greeted in Klein’s funeral parlor, that for as long as he could remember, he’d seen Larry the first Monday of every month, when they’d both be in line to pick up the free trash can liners offered at the Elmhurst Village Hall.

“Not a big talker,” the cousin said of Wilde, “but a smart guy, no? Put in his twenty years and retired before he was fifty. Tell me that ain’t smart,” he said, looking proudly at the dead man.

There were rumors that Larry had been gay, but there’d be no “outing” now; the nasty jokes by the sisters-in-law would henceforth subside. Maybe not. Death has a way of causing rumors to mutate into historical facts.

Either way, this was to be an easy wake to pop in and out of – more like a reunion which you attend and sign in and compare notes, except that you are covertly comparing lives (clothes, money, addresses, jobs, hair color, wrinkles). Which is another reason Oberle wants his wife on his arm. With a wife, it’s easier to introduce yourselves (“Hello, Aunt Violet, do you remember my wife Rita?”), easier to be a third of a conversation than a half, and, most of all, easier to exit (“Well, honey, you said you needed to get back by nine.”)

Lorraine with the big spray of brown hair, wearing the flea and tick Chanel, is cocking her head at him. Another downside of mourning solo is having to do all instead of half of the listening.

“I’m sorry, Lorraine, I thought someone was motioning to me. What … what were you saying?”

Her voice is grating. The last word or syllable in one of her questions going up in pitch in a mix of snarl and whine, like what a circular saw does at the end of its cut. It must make Paul crazy. There’s something better she must do with that mouth, those thick olive hued lips, thinks Oberle.

“Did Paul tell you the latest about our office building?”

Paul had not.

“Yes, he did,” says Oberle, shaking his head in a can-you-imagine way, and Lorraine nods and looks elsewhere about the room, maybe for someone else whom Paul had not told.

Oberle feels slightly depressed, having had to waste two small but solid lies in succession on this woman. But he knows one of her office building tales would take her twenty minutes to tell, effectively ruining the rest of a potentially good wake that had probably been wrecked anyway because Rita is not here.

Lorraine had harangued his brother Paul about investing their money in bonds, dot-com stocks, Lear Jets, doughnut shops—or in anything else that she thought might lift them from the middle class suburban culvert in which she thought all Oberle spouses were trapped. Paul has a secure job as a heating inspector but had placated Lorraine by investing ten thousand dollars in his boss’s office building venture. Oberle would never have considered such a risk himself—would have given it about as much consideration as he would a telemarketing call during the dinner hour.

But he’s second guessing himself now. Not because the office building was in danger of making Paul and Lorraine rich any time soon, but because of his demotion at Able Publishing. Nothing had ever happened to him like that before. A “decline in creative ideas” was the official reason given. The whole goddam company was in decline, as far as he could tell.

So although he has this new curiosity about the office building he’s not a partner in, about the newest tenant clamoring to get in, he can’t bear getting it from Lorraine who has the narrative technique of the self-absorbed: chronological and pained. No summarizing, and relating everything from meals to bathroom stops in the anecdotes; she tells every mindless detail, minute by fucking excruciating minute.

She turns back to him, as apparently no other target is in the room. An emergency evacuation is in order.

“Excuse me, Lorraine,” he says, taking one step back, even smiling for courtesy. “I’m going to visit the restroom. Came straight from work.”

He pivots and dives away from her, glancing toward the parlor exit, while realizing he has stepped in front of the coffin and is now the curious focus of the seated mourners. So he veers and sinks to the kneeler’s soft green pad, as if this had been his intended destination.

Lorraine must think he’s leaving for good, otherwise why would he have knelt once more in front of Larry? Let her think it. She’s likely already planning to tell the other witches-in-law that something foul is brewing between him and Rita. Fuck her.

Which is probably something you wish that you could do right now, Larry, prays Oberle over the cadaver. Have intercourse with Lorraine, that is, or with anyone else, for that matter. Way too much pancake on that chin and forehead, old boy. Larry is barely recognizable. But then, he was barely recognizable when he was alive. Always the one at a wedding guest table, or just outside the rim of the circle of the men talking in front of the church.

His lips are sealed for good now, but crazy glued or whatever they do to sculpt that almost-smile. With someone alive, you see such a mouth and you look right away to his eyes to confirm that he’s seeing some irony or is on the verge of a punning retort. But these eyes are closed, so you think maybe he’s having a good dream.

Then you think that since he can finally see the other side, the infinitesimal smile is for knowing the joke’s on the rest of us. But Oberle knows better. No jokes, no dreams. Just tissue and bone.

He tries to feel something, but the waxy lips and the semi-smile make him picture the mortician stuffing cotton and some kind of putty in the mouth. Why bother? Why not close the lid?

Behind him, Lorraine’s weapons-grade perfume overpowers the bouquets of flowers. He makes sure to turn immediately left to avoid her as he rises and heads down the aisle toward the john. He sees Roberta, his brother Ben’s wife, leaning over the sign-in rostrum, so he homes in on the restrooms, nearly brushing her backside.

In the men’s room, an old guy in a brown suit is one-handing it at one of the two urinals, his other hand braced on his waist.

“Sorry,” the guy says, and for a millisecond Oberle wants to tell him don’t worry—it’s all right if you can’t pee, old-timer—and then he realizes the man’s jutting elbow has brushed Oberle’s tucked-in arm.

“No problem,” says Oberle. “Kind of close quarters in here.”

“The facilities here should be palatial, with what they’re charging for a funeral,” the man says.

Is this another cousin? Or Larry’s uncle, some kin he’d never met?

“The thief hands over a bill for eight thousand dollars,” he continues. “Eight thousand for one night’s visitation and a limo to the cemetery.”

“That is pretty outrageous,” says Oberle. He has to stop himself from looking at the man’s face—way too close in a men’s room for eye contact.

“Said he had to have a special casket for him because of his ‘unique physique.’ Larry is 5’11” and 160 pounds. Christ, could someone be any more off the rack?”

The man is still fronting the urinal when Oberle has finished, has washed his hands, and at the towel dispenser is far enough away to look at him. He has black glasses and a ski-slope nose, but the face is not as old as the back of the head suggested. Still trying to piss, though.

“Are you a relative of Lawrence's?” says Oberle. With his pants zipped, he now has the conversational advantage.

The brown suit twists a quarter turn to the left, the black eyes in the gray head squinting, his dick suddenly visible in portrait. Purple veined. More like an internal organ that the fellow must have to reach inside in order to get out.

“You could say that,” he says, and he jerks back to the urinal, brings to bear both hands to shake and adjust and re-pack and zip. He passes the sink and smiles up at Oberle.

“Milton Coomer,” he says. “Lawrence and I were roommates.”

He extends his hand, which Oberle hopes is the one that was braced against his hip. Oberle hesitates, then he grasps it probably too fast to counteract the initial appearance of not wanting to touch him.

“Sorry about your loss,” Oberle says.

“You don’t know the half of it,” he says. “Nobody out there has any idea about this man being waked. He was a genius. Lawrence would gag to see some of those people praying over him.”

Both Milton’s hands slide down and rest on his hips, and he turns sideways, peers into the mirror, lowers his head as if searching for some of the hair left on his scalp. He resembles a young Henry Kissenger, thinks Oberle. His teeth are small, even and white; his stomach flat.

“I guess that includes me. What kind of genius?”

Milton finally goes to the sink and runs the water, scoops some up in his hands and douses his eyes. He’s dabbing one of those rough, brown paper towels on his face.

“Ideas. All his life he was coming up with ideas. Bicycle friendly sewer grates – that was a big one. You know Elmhurst was the first town in the state with bicycle friendly sewer grates?”

“That’s amazing. I’m sorry that I never really talked, I mean, really talked to him.”

“That’s life, I guess,” he says, smiling. “We’re all so goddam alone, but it’s our fault. His fault. You don’t realize till it’s too late. When you’re in a goddam box.”

Or maybe in the men’s room, thinks Oberle. He is almost going to add that, as a kind of joke, but Coomer’s face is frozen, staring at his shoes, the way men do when they’re trying not to cry.

Instead, he walks down the hall side by side with Milton until he realizes the latter is headed outside. Oberle stops as one of the death attendants holds open the door for Milton’s exit. Oberle turns the other way, walking deliberately back in.

He wants to stay a little longer. He’s holding out hope for Rita. It’s not a decision, more of a feeling.

Drifting forward, he selects a metal folding chair in an empty row and sits down. He closes his eyes, imagines Rita’s warmth and smell close to him.

He will stay a while, people-watching, avoiding the headachy civility with the sisters-in-law. Or maybe he feels like grieving finally. For “Lawrence.” Or himself. If Rita asked him point blank which one was it, he probably could not say.

For she does do that. Asks up-front questions like that. Aren’t we in love anymore? Do you not really know why you asked me to marry you? Is honesty that painful? Is this what we’ll be the rest of our lives?

It’s what he liked about her a long time ago. She was frank about what she wanted. Told him, for example, she actually got off doing what other Catholic girls closed their eyes and gagged while doing.

But lately her directness always has the same tiresome theme, he thinks. Once at the breakfast table, she was drinking coffee, and he was washing down his dose of Vitamins for Men with tomato juice. Holding her warm cup against her cheek, she remarked how they don’t talk at the breakfast table anymore, and didn’t it seem to him like they were just going through the motions?

“If a someone you knew passed by in a car and didn’t wave,” he replied, “would you automatically assume the person didn’t like you anymore?”

“Come again?” she said.

“Not talking is not always a bad thing,” he said. “If two people are close, they can feel each other’s moods and thoughts without having to fill the space with constant yapping. I happen to like some quiet in the morning, before all the madness. Lots of people like quiet in the morning. So shut the fuck up, already,” this last thrown in for comic relief – for him alone, as it turned out.

Then there was this morning:

“What’s the real reason you want me at this wake?” she had said.

Earlier, Oberle had made the coffee, was on his second cup, and Rita was in the kitchen getting juice, already dressed and in an apparent hurry for work. It was then he asked her to meet him at the wake, and she said she had to put in overtime today, especially now that his job was uncertain, and that protocol, or some other word she used, didn’t demand her presence for this third cousin. Which was when Oberle pulled matrimonial rank: she should be there because she was still his wife.

“I’ll tell you why you want me there,” she said. “I’m part of your uniform. Like your tie or your jacket.”

“Yes, we make a good ensemble.”

“I’m serious,” she said, and she must have been, he thought, as a dollop of orange juice hooked over the rim of her glass and onto the rug.

“You don’t want to talk in the morning. You’re too tired at supper. You barely know I’m there, Frank. And certainly not in bed.”

“Since when?”

“You want exact dates, Frank?” she said.

It’s been a while, he supposed. All that crap at work. But she wasn’t exactly making any moves either. They’d go to bed and she’d be there and he’d lie down next to her, but it just seemed like too much trouble to get to the next step.

“I didn’t think so. And suddenly you feel insecure going to a wake by yourself. Tell me if any of what I’m saying is inaccurate.”

“Yeah, the bullshit about exact dates,” he said.

She spun, resolved, apparently, to end the conversation. She started to go down the hall but stopped, went to the sink for a cloth, and dabbed at the spilled juice spot.

“So you’re all alone?”

He looks up to see Roberta, his youngest brother Ben’s wife. He forces a smile. Big mistake, for she construes it as an invitation.

“Oh, Frank, we haven’t see you guys in such a long time,” she says. She smiles also, as she side steps to the middle of the aisle and sits down next to him.

“You look so handsome in this suit,” she says. She touches the lapel with the flat of her hand, and he can see the upper mounds of her small breasts beneath the loose top of her blue suit. Tan, with a borderline of creamy white where the edge of the blue bra presses against them. Roberta seems less malicious than the other stepsisters, but he figures she is still in training.

“We last saw you at Christmas, didn’t we?” says Oberle.

“No, that’s the thing,” she says, leaning forward, touching him again, this time with just her fingertips but on his knee. “You remember we were in San Juan, which I wish we weren’t over the holidays, but Ben’s boss paid for the whole thing.”

So that’s what’s on her breasts – Puerto Rican sunshine.

“Rita’s not coming?” she says, with an exaggerated frown on her mouth. She’s wearing sunglasses.

“It doesn’t look like it. Maybe.”

“You know, it’s funny how it works with different couples, but when Ben and me fight, we have to get out. I know a wake isn’t exactly going out on the town, but it’s being with other people that seems to help.”

“Who said we were fighting?”

She draws her head back with a shy smile, and before she says anything else her husband is at the end of the aisle.

“I want you to meet someone, Bobbie,” he calls her. “Hey, Frank,” he nods to his brother. “Just say no to whatever Bobbie’s pitching. God knows, I can’t.”

His little brother is taller than Frank by a good four inches, is trim and athletic, wearing one of the endless number of new linen suits – this one dark green – which he wears each day as a Paine Webber investment advisor. Draped in money. Oberle wonders what kind of creative ideas he comes up with.

Although Ben’s hair is dark and thick, he has a tiny bald spot on the back of his head, and Oberle has a mental image of Ben’s head against Roberta’s breast, that dime sized section of bare scalp shining beneath her smile.

Roberta kisses Oberle on the cheek before she gets up, climbs slowly past him, and tucks into Ben’s side as they head rearward.

Oberle should leave, but he wants a free and clear exit to the doors; so he sits a while longer, watches the newcomers zig and zag in an unofficial line leading up to the casket.

He wonders how it would be if it were he up there in the box. How Rita would feel. He doesn’t see her as one of those falling-apart widows. Because she’s level headed, yes. But also, he realizes, because she knows him too well – knows he’s just the kind of man who goes to a wake and thinks on how sad everyone would be if it were him.

So he tries to focus on the others. The trash can liner cousin is presently absent, so no one seems to be up front greeting the mourners. Some faces Oberle recognizes. Aunt Adeline and her husband whose name he has forgotten, who were probably the oldest surviving members connected to the Wilde side. And a priest he has seen at other family functions, a Father Breen or Blaine – not sure which. That’s going to mean group prayer. Maybe he should duck out now before it starts.

But as he glances at another cluster of four people talking to the left of the casket, one of them, a tall man in a light gray suit, hush puppies, and with a black goatee, is gesturing to Oberle. He knows this face – Norm Topel – and Oberle turns as if to ascertain whether Topel was beckoning to someone else, but no such luck. “Born-again” Norm, as the wicked sisters called him, the only child of Adeline and her husband, had cornered Oberle at last summer’s family reunion picnic with his story of rehabilitation, of his journey from the drunk tank to the hospital to the right hand of Jesus. Oberle concluded at the time that one of the twelve steps in his rehab program was that he must tell everyone he met about his failed first life, rather like the Ancient Mariner’s narrative burden.

The bastard had absolutely no shame, was the type you could snub and he’d still follow you out to the parking lot; so Oberle walks forward to get it over with, joining Topel and Lorraine and his brother Paul. What the hell.

“Frank, good to see you.” A two-handed shake is always a red flag, thinks Oberle.

Topel clearly wants to talk, and Oberle sees that Lorraine is dying to hear whatever it was. Paul just nods in greeting, with the narrow eyes and the knowing, weary look between brothers that asks is this the thousandth or the two-thousand time.

“What’s new?” he asks Paul.

“Oh, the usual,” says Paul. “But Norm here has something very interesting in the kettle.”

His brother’s tone is all too familiar – an obsequious sounding lilt that means get ready for a semi-tractor trailer load of horseshit that you must have stupidly ordered up from Topel. Oberle flashes his best fuck-you smile to Paul and turns to Topel.

“Well, I did it, Frank.”

Oberle waits.

“You know, the book that I told you was simmering. Four weeks, it took me. Day and night. It was like someone else was moving my fingers.”

So the sad fucker doesn’t even have a job, thinks Oberle.

“Congratulations, Norm,” says Oberle.

“Ninety thousand words, Frank. Probably could be trimmed a bit. Whatchmacallit, autobiographical, a lot of thinking out loud, but sometimes the Muse takes you where you don’t want to go, you know?”

“Guess what the title is,” this from Lorraine. She doesn’t have the same look as Paul but is enjoying this in her own way.

“The Norm Topel Story?” says Oberle.

“Well, that’s where you come in, Frank,” says Topel. “I get this brainstorm to write, you know, and finish this thing like I’m in a dream, and now what? I have no idea what to do next. Do I send it somewhere? Where to? Do I hire an agent?”

“Depending on what kind of book it is, you have to read up on the market,” says Oberle.

“People who have read it called it ‘spiritual,’ Frank. I call it an inspirational book. Its working title, unless, of course, you think I should change it, is Miracle of Living.”

“Uh, why would I be changing it?”

“For sales, you know? I want to give it to you, Frank. I trust you. Whatever you think we should do with it. I will Fed Ex a copy to you.”

Oberle looks over at Paul and Lorraine, who are giddy in their anticipation of how he will get out of this. Motherfuckers.

“You see, two doctors told me they don’t know how in the world I came back,” says Topel. “That’s the thing. And I’m thinking should I put that in the front of the book, you know, kind of jump into the river in mid-current? That’s where you come in.”

And that’s when Oberle feels Rita.

He turns his shoulders towards the other side of the parlor, the right side, to the line of couples snaking to where it ends with her. She stands alone, her royal family posture unmistakable (her mother, she said, would sneak up and whack them on the backside with the soup ladle if they slumped while doing the dishes). She wears the navy blue velveteen dress that matches the softness of her skin and the polite, prayerful pursed-lip look she usually shows when just arriving somewhere – her first holy communion face.

“What did I know,” says Topel, “about writing a book? They gave me six months to live, and here I am two years later, thank the Lord. The doctors conjecture that I must have manufactured my own immunity drugs. But I conjecture that it was intercession of the BVM.”

“B.V.M.?” says Lorraine.

“Blessed Virgin Mary,” says Topel. “So is that worth a book, Frank?”

“Depends,” says Oberle.

Lorraine is looking just past his shoulder, and he can see a pulsing in her neck above the collarbone. Topel appears flummoxed, apparently fearing the loss of his audience, so Oberle pivots his body around to open up to him, giving him permission to continue.

“You’re right about that,” says Norm. “Absolutely right. There must be any number of factors …”

His brother Paul’s smile has compressed to a studious bunching of the lips, and Oberle winks at him while Topel revises his proposal from “book” to “actually a series of papers.” He checks across the room to see that Roberta and Ben are both leaning towards Rita who has kept her plumb-bob place in line and is looking amused but not surprised, at some hyperbolic gossip Roberta is likely pitching.

Now the wake feels different. Earlier Oberle seemed alone, as if on a seesaw, with this mosh of not totally trustworthy mourners all holding down the other end and suspending him high in the air. But with Rita on the other side of the funeral parlor, he feels some balance. The crazies fly and flitter between them, but he feels grounded.

He lets Topel get into it, to sustain the monologue. How can it hurt? It wouldn’t take Oberle but a page or two of reading it to size the book up, and then he could let him down gently. Or maybe he shouldn’t be so hasty. In fact, while he might think it a load of crap, he knows for a fact that “self-help autobiography” is at the top of every year’s annual market reports.

“… someone to put the commas in the right places …” Topel is saying.

He spots Rita again and thinks how odd that before tonight, he has never watched his wife from afar. Ahead of her in line is a group of old-timers, three women and one man with a walker, the four of them looking sweet and kind and befuddled. And behind her stretching down the aisle are Roberta and Paul, and others like them, all impatient, or bored, or curious to see who else had come, rocking one foot to the other, rubbing their eyes, straightening their neckties, searching for Kleenex and gum in their purses.

And then there is Rita, shoulders square, brown eyes straight ahead – unwavering but with a look of compassion: her mouth closed beneath that perfect nose, like Mona Lisa without the smile, Mona Lisa with aplomb but no grin. Even the flamboyant Roberta, by conventional standards sexier and more shapely than Rita, is Daisy Mae to Rita’s Audrey Hepburn.

He is proud of her. Even for her affected indifference, for her pretending not to see him – he is proud of her for that, too.

She is next in line, and Oberle watches her move up rapidly but smoothly to put a hand under the elbow of the old man with the walker to help him away from the coffin. The old man cranks his neck to see her face and he erupts in a smile. Rita’s reply smile is subdued, embarrassed for his gratitude, and she waits till he is guided to the side by one of the white haired women before she herself kneels down.

“Did you see that girl?” says the old man to his guide, hurling his voice as the hard of hearing are wont to do.

Rita seems not to hear. Her shoulder blades perfectly parallel, her heels touching evenly as she pays her respects. Her gaze appears downcast, but Oberle knows she is inspecting his cousin, drinking in the details of his suit (brand new or out of his closet?), his fingernails (blue underneath from the heart attack?), his torso (re-shaped unnaturally after the autopsy?). Her belief was that the way Americans dolled up their dead was “primitive” and “horrifying,” and she had enrolled herself and Oberle in the Illinois Cremation Society.

And she is probably making some kind of prayer in her head, too. While Oberle is nonreligious, Rita keeps in touch with the edges of her Catholic upbringing. Of course, she is far too bright to pay deference to Father Breen or Blaine’s weekly condescensions to his “flock,” but she still goes to funeral and wedding masses, for she also is too bright not to cover all bets.

Oberle’s foursome is clustered around the coffin-stage-left side that Rita must pass on her way out; so she would really have to be committed to ignoring him if she snubbed him in front of a roomful of strangers and relatives.

Rita makes the sign of the cross and rises from the kneeler. Topel has paused. The old man in a chair in the middle of the first row, his walker parked in front of him, stares at Rita with a lowered, wobbly head. Two of the white haired women stand sentry on each side of the walker. Ben and Roberta, now joined by the third Cinderella sister, Joanie, huddle together on the far side, their three heads inclined toward the center of their conversation, but their eyes maintaining long range surveillance of the anticipated freeze-out. As Rita turns his way, Oberle feels Lorraine inhale behind him.

And then Rita’s eyes meet his. No smile. Nor a frown. Only a barely perceptible arching of her brow, a widening of her deep brown eyes. Something he and no one else there would notice. A signal. A question.

She stops next to him. He hadn’t planned to do this. Later she’d accuse him of doing it for perverse effect, to “show off” or simply to confound the stepsister cabal. But his own recollection would be that she was too close, her gaze too intense, her face too beautiful, her presence too much a miracle.

He puts his arms around her and kisses her. And kisses her. She is compliant. She is his wife – what else can she do?

It is a long kiss. Too long for people their age in public. Too long for people who are married. Too long with the sisters-in law watching. Too long for center stage in a funeral parlor. Too long for kissing within several feet of Larry Wilde with his caked skin and his stopped heart.

Later, alone in his car, Oberle has to ratchet down his speed between the stoplights along Western Avenue. He’s warm, flushed, and he cracks the window, can smell the fresh, salty rain on the cool pavement. A smell like hope.

Following the kiss, Topel concluded his hard sell.

“Thanks for listening, Frank,” Topel had said, not looking him in the eye but offering his hand. Oberle grasped it with both of his.

“Call me,” said Oberle.

Topel nodded, his eyes still averted.

“Monday,” says Oberle. “Call me Monday morning, Norm. I can’t promise anything, but let me take a look, and we might be able to hone the ‘true story miracle’ angle. We’ll get a crack editor, maybe McNair, who can carve something good, maybe even great, out of that ninety-k manuscript.”

Topel raised his eyes, his lips slightly parted, finally speechless.

The others, Lorraine and Paul and Roberta were unforthcoming, obvious in their affectation of distraction, as if they hadn’t seen.

And Rita. She had blushed – she wasn’t one for scenes – and her lips trembled when she said she would meet him at home. She had squeezed his hand before turning to leave.

And Oberle, as he had slalomed his way through the rest of the mourners, had noticed they either paid him no mind or caught themselves gazing at him too late to be undetected. Only the deceased, with his slightly ironic suggestion of a smile, seemed to appreciate the genius of the kiss.

He hears her moving in the basement, hears the washing machine going. He finds her there under the low ceiling, separating clothes, stopping the washer by opening the lid to add an item. At her feet is a huge pile of laundry fallen from the upstairs chute.

“This is your way of unwinding?” he says.

“Right,” she says, the way Lorraine might have uttered the word. “If you must know, I had a kind of laundry emergency.”

She wears a thin, pullover robe with a v-neck. The velveteen dress and slip and whatever else, must be in the washing machine. The contrast of loose, faded robe with her carefully made up face, her earrings, necklace, and finely brushed hair, makes him ache for her. The “emergency,” the dimly lit basement, the long sexual drought – he takes her hand and kisses her again.

Unlike at the funeral chapel, she pulls away, turns her back on him.

“I have to add some detergent,” she says.

He slips the knot in his tie, removes it along with his jacket. She turns back around and he holds her. He can feel his own heart. He did not realize till this moment how starved he is.

“You do this every time,” she says, scolding, eyes shining.

“What?”

“Every time you see Lorraine and the others, I don’t know what it is. Like some kind of vindictive fuck.”

“Roberta did say that you and I should go out more.”

She has been looking up at him, but now she lowers her head. He looks down, sees her bare feet. He kisses her head, smells vanilla in her hair and about her shoulder, sees only two purple painted toes of her right foot, the others buried under the whites.

“It’s more than that, Frank.” She sounds far away, though his head is touching hers, his hands moving, finding the contours beneath her robe.

“I know,” he says.

She lifts her face and he kisses her again, full and deep. They sink to their knees.

“Frank …”

“Please.”