I am not prepared for this. Ridiculous, I know, since it’s why I’m here. But still, the fact, the hard, cold fact of his death, has stunned me. It’s like being on a roller coaster. You know it’s going down, and you’re going to have that swooping feeling of lost gravity and maybe your breakfast rising, but you’re surprised anyway. You scream. I don’t scream, but I do reach for the wall to support myself as the room spins just a little. Adele and Paul step apart and I see him there: pale, waxy. The hands that once wrote sales contracts by the dozens are now stilled. Even when he was comatose, they had not seemed inert, devoid of life.

I wish, vainly, that I could be properly grief-stricken. And then I find myself weeping, and the grief is real.

Adele sits on the bed, her back to me, one hand on my father’s left hand, which is free now of the web of plastic tubes. The monitor with its incessant beeping is quiet, shoved off to one side. I should have realized the minute I walked into the room that it was quiet and in that silence heard the news that Paul, with his large weeping face, has given me. But I was so noisy with my own news that I couldn’t hear the silence.

Someone, a nurse maybe, or an aide, has tidied him up. Someone else, a doctor maybe, has granted “the family” permission to sit as long as we want to with the deceased. So we sit, as expected, with the fragments. Who will be the first to blink? What next? We don’t speak, pretending to be contemplating the meaning of life. Praying. I should be praying for my father’s soul, but I am praying that Artie stays put.

“They’ll steal his clothes. Make sure that you get everything of his out of the cupboard.” Adele’s first concern is equally practical and offensive. Who is going to want the old man’s underwear? He arrived without shoes. I want to scream at Adele, tell her to leave it all here. It’s useless. Better for to it disappear than have someone take it to Goodwill. But I don’t. I get up and squeeze around Paul to open the cupboard, where a blue bag hangs, containing the pitiful pajama bottoms and socks in which my father left his house for the last time. It smells.

*   *   *

“Can you take Adele home?” An hour has slipped by, a precious hour. If I can get on the road now, I can be back by early evening. There is nothing to be done now. The undertaker will be in soon to take the remains once we vacate the room. Adele is Paul’s mother; let him deal with her. Tomorrow, we will make the arrangements. Today, I can find Mack. They won’t miss me.