Evidence of Life - By Barbara Taylor Sissel Page 0,35

don’t you ask him?”

Abby got to her feet, brushing the knees of her jeans. Jake hadn’t come home once all summer, and now classes had resumed. He and Abby seldom talked. He was wary of her now. Like everyone else, he wished she would get on with her life. Stop asking questions, stop jumping for the phone when it rang, stop deluding herself. Go home. Be normal.

“We argued the last time he called,” Abby said.

“About?”

Money, Abby thought, but it would only worry her mother to hear it. She would ask how Abby was managing, which would then force Abby to admit that rather than go back to work, she’d been raiding her and Nick’s joint savings account to cover her bills. Her mother would then say how unwise it was and ask what Abby intended to do when the savings was gone. Abby didn’t know, and, probably even worse, she didn’t care. And she didn’t need anyone to tell her how dumb that was either.

“Abby?”

“It was nothing, Mama. He needed tires for his car. I took care of it.”

“I know your head is full of questions, sweet. I wonder too, what happened, but given how long it’s been, I mean without any sign....”

“I know, Mama.” How illogical it is to go on hoping.

“I think they’ll have the service whether you agree to it or not.”

Abby looked into thin air. “Nick wants to be cremated.” She couldn’t let herself think what Lindsey might have wanted. “There’s nothing to cremate.”

“I know, sweet.”

“I don’t believe they’re gone, Mama. I just can’t.”

Her mother took Abby’s hand. “I know,” she repeated.

* * *

Abby sat in front of the church between Jake and her mother. Louise sat on Jake’s other side, one jeweled hand clutching his knee, the other pressing a lace-trimmed handkerchief to her nose. She was every inch the proper grieving mother and grandmother. Abby admired her for it. Louise would be rewarded as a result with the elusive closure everyone talked about. Now you can move on, they kept saying. As if Nick and Lindsey were a town or a vegetable stand, a booth at the county fair. Abby was sick of that advice: move on.

A number of people, Joe among them, eulogized. Abby didn’t listen. Any moment Nick and Lindsey would come through the door. She felt the possibility run through her blood, cool and light, like quicksilver. She heard the collective gasp from the mourners who were gathered, heard herself say she had never lost faith. She felt the prick of tears, and, reaching into her purse for a tissue, she encountered the book of matches from Nick’s desk, the one with Sondra written inside it, in Nick’s hand. Sondra with an “o” rather than the more familiar “a.” Or had Nick gotten it wrong?

Was she here? The possibility skittered through Abby’s mind. Suddenly she was convinced that if she were to turn, she would find the woman staring at her.

Abby jumped when her mother touched her arm. “It’s over, sweet.”

“Thank God,” Abby said.

But it wasn’t over. On Abby’s way out of the church, people approached her. They pressed her hands, murmured their condolences. Several of the women bent their perfumed cheeks to Abby’s, and the combined scents were overwhelming and made it hard to breathe. Some were weeping, and they were taken aback, even disapproving to find Abby dry-eyed. It unsettled them, but that was just too bad, she thought. They were wrong to do this, to condemn her family to an eternal rest without proof, without evidence.

She asked to be taken home, but Louise and Nina insisted that Abby, together with her mother and Jake, attend a luncheon at the Metropolitan Lawyers Club in downtown Houston. Abby took one look around the private dining room and thought how Nick would hate it, the tables padded in layers of embossed white linen, the redundancy of silver and china and heavy-bottomed crystal. It would remind him of his childhood, his mother’s daily insistence on formal dining.

Abby picked at the main course, a serving of Chicken Cordon Bleu. Beside her, her mother patted her hand. “I’m going to the ladies. Do you—?”

Abby shook her head. “Can we go home when you come back? Have we stayed long enough?”

“I think so. You can blame me,” her mother said. “You can say I’m tired.”

Louise took the seat Abby’s mother vacated as if she had been waiting for the opportunity. “I’ve opened the beach house,” she said.

“When?”

“Last week. I couldn’t stand being in Dallas another