Read When Madeline Was Young for Free Online Page A

spark between us, but in truth little else that is so small makes me so glad. If I have had a long day listening to my patients' worries and my colleagues' complaints, and if at the end Tessa will reward me, then all is well in my speck of the world. I had missed her more than I'd imagined when she'd left for college in September. I almost never speak about my patients, but I was tempted to tell her about Mrs. Kosiba, a woman suffering from ulcerative colitis. She had been plagued that morning by the difficulty she was going to have juggling her first and second husbands in the hereafter. She'd liked the first mister far better than his replacement, but the second had left her with money. How to express gratitude to Number Two at the pearly gates without implying she wanted to spend time with him in heavenly recreation? I didn't mention to Tessa or Diana that for some persons the problems in the old bye-and-bye might actually be compounded, that it might do to save some energy for the tumult beyond the grave. My women went on to discuss their Christmas shopping, speaking in code, I gathered, about their secrets and surprises.
    THE FOLLOWING SUMMER, on July 24, 2003, Buddy's son was killed in Baghdad. Nearly three months had passed since the war with Iraq had been declared over. We first found out about Sergeant Kyle Eastman from the list of the dead in the New York Times, a feature I always scan. As soon as I read the name out loud at the breakfast table Diana told me I must call my cousin or write a letter. Thirty-eight years had passed since I'd last seen him or spoken to him. His boy, a sergeant for the First Battalion, Thirty-fourth Regiment, had been struck by an improvised explosive device. What sounded like the kind of thing Buddy had tried to make on any number of occasions in his basement through the formative years. Before the idea of the boy's death had sunk in, the phone calls began to come from the Macivers scattere d a round the country, the network of cousins broadcasting the news. When I told Diana later in the day that I wasn't going to write the letter at the moment, thinking that anything I might say would sound fatuous, what did she do but sit herself down and toss off a note to Joelle, a woman she'd never met, expressing all of our condolences. My wife has stacks of thick beige card stock in the desk cubbyhole , DR. AND MRS. TIMOTHY MACIVER embossed in burgundy on the top , stationery that Tessa might say is also the goods of the braggart.
    Shortly after the note incident, Diana began her work to try to get me to go to the funeral, which was being held near Fort Bragg. She started in slowly, saying how sad it was that we'd never taken the time to visit Buddy on our trips down to North Carolina. "Don't you think it's sad, Mac? I just think it's so sad!" I knew exactly what she was up to, my dainty Machiavelli, she whose narrative froth belies a stern taskmaster. One of the conversations on the funeral subject took place midmorning on a muggy Sunday, when our other daughters, Lyddie and Katie, had just shuffled in, their eyes not yet fully open, the two of them unable to move without bumping into the island stools as they toasted their strawberry Pop-Tarts. Next, what did my culinary philistines do but brew their coffee in the French press. Lyddie was wearing a T-shirt with a photograph of a western lowland gorilla on the front, and on the back a Virginia Woolf quote: "Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size." Where exactly did the savage in my daughters end and the sophisticate begin? To tip the scale, there was something glaringly primitive, downright Biblical, about their odor. Whenever they entered a room, the place immediately steamed up, a blast of all the fruits of the Garden: mangoes in their shampoo, kiwis in their shaving cream, peaches in their lip gloss, pineapple in their