Read One Last Thing Before I Go for Free Online Page A

he’s missing. Tomorrow morning, with the skies still pink from the inevitability of sunrise, he will drive her back to the catering hall, where her small car will be sitting marooned in the vast empty lot like something lost, waiting to be claimed. The sight of it will sadden both of them in ways they couldn’t begin to explain.

CHAPTER 8
    “W hen was the last time you emptied this fridge?” his mother, Elaine, says, holding a plastic covered tin of what looks like congealed brain at arm’s length.
    “I don’t know, last week maybe?”
    “I don’t think so,” she says, tossing the container into the garbage. Once the fridge is cleaned to her satisfaction, she will fill it with fruits and vegetables that will slowly go bad until her next visit.
    “Please, Mom, you don’t have to do that.”
    “I don’t mind.”
    Elaine disappears into the fridge, leaving his father and him to make small talk.
    “You getting enough gigs?” his father says.
    “Yeah.”
    “That’s good.”
    “How are things at the temple?”
    “The God business is pretty much recession-proof.”
    “If it wasn’t, that would raise some pretty interesting theological questions.”
    “Would it?”
    Someday his father will be gone, and Silver will still be able to have these conversations, word for word, from memory.
    * * *
    His father, Ruben Silver, is the rabbi of Temple B’nai Israel. When Silver was a boy, he and his younger brother, Chuck, would sit up on the stage with their father during the Sabbath services, facing the congregation. Silver would pretend that his father was their king, and he and Chuck their esteemed princes. Ruben would sing along with the cantor—he had a gruff but melodic voice—and he would put his arm around his boys, pointing to random Hebrew words in the
siddur
, which they would dutifully read aloud to him. At some point, as his encroaching maturity bred a certain self-consciousness, Silver stopped sitting up there with them, he can’t remember exactly when. It wasn’t something they ever talked about. It was just one of those things you quietly outgrow and only realize it after the fact.
    * * *
    His father whistles “Penny Lane.”
    “Whistling,” Elaine says unconsciously. He stops. They’ve been married for forty-seven years.
    Ruben knows many other songs, but if he’s whistling, it’s “Penny Lane.” For all Silver knows, he’s been doing it ever since
Magical Mystery Tour
came out. The first time Ruben heard the song, the opening bars wrapped themselves around his cerebral cortex and that was that.
    * * *
    They come by every other Sunday, Elaine and Ruben, because he is their son and they love him, and because they think he’s lonely. These visits kill him, because he loves them too, and because he knows his sad little life hurts them, maybe even more profoundly than it sometimes hurts him, which means these visits probably kill them too. So every other weekend they spend an hour or so together that leaves them all depressed and depleted, but they never miss it, and if that’s not the best definition of family, then he doesn’t know what is.
    “So,” his father says, somewhat awkwardly, while Elaine is out in the hall on her third or fourth trip to the incinerator. Silver generally refrigerates his Chinese leftovers and subsequently forgets about them until they’ve congealed into something beyond the help of his microwave. “Any women worth writing home about?”
    “Have you gotten any letters from me?” Silver says.
    His father shrugs, ignoring his sarcasm. “You should come to temple.”
    “Dad.”
    Ruben raises his hands defensively. “I’m not selling. I’m just saying, plenty of single women.”
    “Are you really pitching temple as a dating service?”
    “Best one there is. Do you really think all those people are coming to pray? I pray. The cantor prays. They mingle. Welcome to organized religion.”
    “And what about God?”
    “God doesn’t want you to be alone any