Read News of the Spirit for Free Online

waited while she lit a cigarette. “We lived together for two months,” Lily said, “in his room at the inn, where we could look out and see the water.” We stared at her. None of us had ever lived with anybody, or known anyone who had. Lily looked around at us. “It was wonderful,” she said. “It was heaven. But it wasnot what you might think,” she added enigmatically, “living with a man.”
    I started crying.
    There was a long silence, and the needle on the record started scratching. Donnie got up and cut it off. They were all looking at me.
    “And what about you, Charlene?” Lily said softly. “What happened to you this summer, anyway?”
    It was a moment I had rehearsed again and again in my mind. I would tell them about my affair with Dr. Pierce and how I had gone to New York to find him, and how he had renounced me because his wife was pregnant. I had just added this part. But I was crying too hard to speak. “It was awful,” I said finally, and Dixie came over and hugged me. “What was awful?” she said, but I couldn’t even speak, my mind filled suddenly, surprisingly, with Don Fetterman as he’d looked in high school, presiding over the Glee Club.
    “Come on,” Dixie said, “tell us.”
    The candles were guttering, the moon made a path across the lake. I took a deep breath.
    “Bubba is dead,” I said.
    “Oh, God! Oh, no!” A sort of pandemonium ensued, which I don’t remember much about, although I remember the details of my brother’s death vividly. Bubba drowned in a lake in Canada, attempting to save a friend’s child who had fallen overboard. The child died, too. Bubba was buriedthere, on the wild shore of that northern lake, and his only funeral was what his friends said as they spoke around the grave one by one. His best friend had written to me, describing the whole thing.
    “Charlene, Charlene, why didn’t you tell us sooner?” Donnie asked.
    I just shook my head. “I couldn’t,” I said.
    Later that fall, I finally wrote a good story—about my family, back in McKenney—and then another, and then another. I won a scholarship to graduate school at Columbia University in New York, where I still live, with my husband, on the West Side, freelancing for several magazines and writing fiction.
    It was here, only a few weeks ago, that I last saw Lily, now a prominent feminist scholar. She was in town for the MLA convention. We went to a bistro near my apartment for lunch, lingering over wine far into the late-December afternoon while my husband babysat. Lily was in the middle of a divorce. “You know,” she said at one point, twirling her tulip wineglass, “I have often thought that the one great tragedy of my life was never getting to meet your brother. Somehow I always felt that he and I were just meant for each other.” We sat in the restaurant for a long time, at the window where we could see the passersby hurrying along the sidewalk in the dismal sleet outside, each one so preoccupied, so caught up in his own story. We sat there all afternoon.

B LUE W EDDING

     

    Sarah can’t keep her mind on the spoons. So she starts over, counting right out loud, “One, two, three, four,” pursing her lips in that way she has, fitting each newly polished spoon carefully into its allotted space in the big mahogany silver chest. Thirty-six spoons, all accounted for. Normally this is the kind of job Sarah just loves, but today it’s so hot, hotter than the hinges of hell in here, and she is distracted because Gladiola Rolette, who’s polishing the spoons and handing them over to her one by one, will
not
shut up, not for a single minute. Gladiola beats all! She does not seem to understand that it’s her fault it’s so hot in here, that she should have called a repairman the instant the air conditioner went on the blink. Gladiola doesnot even seem to understand that it’s her fault Sarah has to count the silver in the first place. But Gladiola just let it all go during the last