Read When We Were the Kennedys for Free Online

them in front of the TV, where Superman will perform a just-in-time feat of life-saving strength. We’re in reruns, and I hope for the episode where Superman, after a rare failure to avert disaster, grabs the earth’s surface, pulls hard, and turns back time. But it’s not that one; it’s the one where he stands there smiling at the bad guys while bullets bounce off him like gumdrops.
    Will Mum sell gumdrops? When we come home from school, will Mum be at Larry’s selling gumdrops? How lonely the kitchen will seem, the bird gibbering idly to no one, the chairs unoccupied, Mum not there until when—suppertime? bedtime? And then comes a larger, more terrifying thought—Mum not there at all. As Superman flies off, triumphant as usual, my welling eyes fix on the screen.
    â€œWhat’s the matter?” asks Margie. “Is it your father?”
    I nod, but it’s not Dad. Not exactly. I don’t know what it is, exactly. I don’t know that life hereafter will be filled with the threat of loss. All I know is that the impossible has happened—my father is gone—which means that God could take my mother too.
    Â 
    After the lights in our house come on, we could easily walk home ourselves—kids walk all over the place in Mexico, unaccompanied, even after dark. But today is different, and here’s Anne, arriving shortly after Superman flies off into the sunset, just as she said she would. She says something to Margie’s parents, then thanks Margie—she always acknowledges children—and probably speaks to Nana, who probably answers in a nod.
    We turn left out the Lavorgnas’ driveway, walk silent past the Venskus block where yesterday Dad fell down dead. As we turn the corner at Miss Caliendo’s, Cathy asks, “Who was there?”
    â€œLots of people. They came to pay their respects to Dad.”
    This turn of phrase is new to me. “Respects to Dad” sounds exactly right.
    â€œLIKE WHO?” Betty always wants to know about the people.
    â€œWell, like the Norkuses.”
    What? Our landlords—who shout
Make stop you jump!
when we kids run up the stairs too fast; our landlords to whom Dad paid rent once a week—they paid something to Dad? We walk in silence for a few more ticks.
    â€œLIKE WHO ELSE?” Betty again.
    Anne is holding Betty’s hand, Betty’s holding Cathy’s hand, Cathy’s holding my hand.
    â€œNorma. And Mr. and Mrs. Hickey.”
    â€œWHO ELSE?”
    â€œThe Gallants.” They live next door, old Mrs. Gallant and her grown daughters and grandkids, whom we play with. A household of women, which is what we are now.
    â€œWHO ELSE?”
    â€œBetty! Quit it!” Cathy. Me.
    â€œIt’s all right. Let’s see. The Gagnons, and the Dohertys, and the Fleurys, and the Witases and the Dons and the Fourniers.”
    Our neighbors. Who paid respects. To Dad. As we pass the Gagnons’, pretty Mrs. Gagnon comes bounding out to murmur her
quel dommage;
we play with her girls and sometimes help her sew shoes in her parlor—piecework she brings home from the area shoe factories. Then it’s turn left at the Dohertys’, and here is Worthley Avenue and our driveway and there are the Norkuses in their lit-up kitchen window, he in an overshined suit jacket, she in her dress coat, a thick dark cloth thing, too heavy for the season, that hangs below her knees. Up we go, up we go, up we go, Anne in her church dress and us in our pedal pushers, and when we get to our door it opens into an altered place.
    Mum is at the table, sitting again, still in her good dress and pearls. We’re wild to see her, but she stares at us for a split second as if she’s forgotten who we are. Then she wakes up, puts out her arms, kisses us one-two-three.
    â€œTime for bed,” she says, still sitting. After the heartwreck of the first day, the sustained shock of the news, the ordeal of the wake,