The Best American Mystery Stories 2002

It had been twenty-one days now since the death of the perfidious Prewitt. Last Sunday the Rhoads son and daughter had finally returned to their separate lives in Atlanta, after rushing home to bury their father and console their mother. These two young people, whom Prewitt had named Ronny after Reagan and Julie after Andrews, took after their father, and they thought life was a bowl of cherries too, or at least a bowl of margaritas. They were affable at the funeral, chatting to family friends like Amorette Strumlander about their new jobs and new condo clusters. They liked Amorette (and had Lucy not distinctly recalled giving birth to them, she could have sworn Amorette was their mother, for like her they both were slyly jejune). Ronny and Julie were happy with their lifestyles, which they had mimicked from trendy magazines. These magazines did not explain things like how to behave at a father’s funeral, and perhaps as a result Ronny and Julie had acted during the service and at the reception afterward with that convivial sardonic tolerance for the older generation that they had displayed at all other types of family functions. Amorette later told Lucy she thought “the kids held up wonderfully.”

Lucy was not surprised by her children’s lack of instinct for grief. Their father would have behaved the same way at his funeral had he not been the one in the casket. “The kids and I are day people,” Prewitt had told his wife whenever she mentioned any of life’s little imperfections like wars and earthquakes and pogroms and such. “You’re stuck in the night, Lucy. That’s your problem.” It was true. Maybe she should have grown up in the North, where skies darkened sooner and the earth froze and the landscape turned black and gray, where there wasn’t so much Southern sun and heat and light and daytime. For life, in Lucy’s judgment, was no daytime affair. Life was stuck in the night; daytime was just the intermission, the waiting between the acts of the real show. When she listened to police calls on the radio scanner, the reports of domestic violence, highway carnage, fire, poison, electrocution, suffocation, maniacs loose in the vicinity of Annie Sullivan Mall always struck her as what life was really about. It suddenly occurred to her that there must have been a police dispatch for Prewitt after she’d phoned 911. She’d found him by the opened refrigerator on the kitchen floor lying beside a broken bowl of barbecued chicken wings. The scanner must have said: “Apparent heart attack victim, male, Caucasian, forty-eight.”

Prewitt had died without having much noticed that that’s what he was doing, just as her day children had driven off with whatever possessions of Prewitt’s they wanted (Ronny took his golf clubs and his yellow and pink cashmere V-necks; Julie took his Toyota) without having really noticed that their father was gone for good. If Prewitt had known he’d be dead within hours, presumably he would have destroyed the evidence of his adultery with Amorette Strumlander, since marriage vows and commitment were so important to him. But apparently Prewitt Rhoads had persisted in thinking life a bowl of imperishable plastic cherries to the very last. Apparently he had never seen death coming, the specter leaping up and grinning right in his face, so he had died as surprised as he could be, eyes wide open, baffled, asking Lucy, “What’s the matter with me?”

Amorette Strumlander had been equally unprepared when she’d heard about Prewitt’s sudden demise from their Gardenia Club president, Gloria Peters, the next morning. She had run up the lawn shrieking at Lucy, “I heard it from Gloria Peters at the nail salon!” as if getting the bad news that way had made the news worse. Of course, Lucy hadn’t known then that Prewitt and Amorette had been having their long affair; admittedly that fact must have made the news harder on Amorette. It must have been tough hearing about her lover’s death from Gloria Peters, who had never once invited Amorette to her dinner parties, where apparently Martha Stewart recipes were served by a real maid in a uniform. In fact, that morning after Prewitt’s death when Amorette had come running at her, Lucy had actually apologized for not calling her neighbor sooner. And Amorette had grabbed her and sobbed, “Now we’re both widows!” Lucy naturally thought Amorette was referring to her own dead husband, Charlie Strumlander, but maybe she had meant her lover, Prewitt.

Honk honk honk pause honk honk. Honk honk honk pause honk honk.

Amazingly it was two in the afternoon, and Lucy was still standing in the middle of the kitchen with the yellow coffee mug handle still dangling from her finger. She quickly shoved the photographs she’d found in the bathrobe pocket as Amorette came tapping and whoohooing through the house without waiting to be invited in. She had never waited for Lucy to open the door.