Truth in Advertising Page 0,43

was doing. She said, “You’re becoming like him.”

It was strange after he left. We never spoke of it, but it hung in the air. His clothes remained in her closet, his coats on the hallway pegs. Until one day my mother gathered them up, with Maura’s help, and drove them to Goodwill.

I thought she’d be happy with him gone. I thought things would get better. But they didn’t. She changed. She spoke less, smiled rarely. I would walk in the back door and find her sitting at the kitchen table, looking out the window, a cigarette between her fingers, a long ash about to fall. As much as she wanted him to leave, something happened to her that day that I never fully understood. I didn’t see what was so terrible. I didn’t miss him. She died a little when he left. She went to church more. Maura and I would go with her on Sundays. But then she started going on weekdays, too, early morning masses. In the evening, after dinner, the occasional Pall Mall and an Irish coffee, she’d retreat into her room, close the door. But after she died, it was different.

My father showed up at the wake. He walked in, knelt at the casket, his face a few feet from his dead ex-wife, her powdered lips sewn shut, the fluids drained out of her, pumped full of formaldehyde, bearing little resemblance to a living, breathing human being. That’s how I saw it, anyway. I simply didn’t believe that it was her, lying there. I wondered then, and sometimes now, what went through his mind during those few moments when everyone in the room at the James Gormley & Sons Funeral Home in Charlestown, Massachusetts, watched him walk in, felt the air leave the room, the hush that came over the place, looked to Eddie, watched him flush, saw the anger in his eyes. We all watched him as he blessed himself again, after maybe a minute, then he stood up and walked over to us. I stopped watching him because I turned to look at Eddie. And what I saw, as my father stood in front of his children, as we looked at him, was Kevin reach for Eddie’s hand, palm open, as if to say, Don’t.

He didn’t speak for a time, and when he did, he spoke to a silent room. The booming, angry voice was gone.

“Your mother was a fine woman. She . . . she loved her children very much.”

He was looking down at a point on the carpet as he spoke.

“I’m terribly . . .”

The pants of his suit were too short. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. The four of us in a line. Eddie, Kevin, Maura, and me. I was looking at Maura and Maura was looking at the ceiling and Eddie was fast-breathing and I wondered if he was going to hit him.

The thing is that there were inconsistencies. That’s what the police said. There was nothing wrong mechanically with her car, an old cream-colored Chevy Nova. No brake-line problem, no steering problem, none of the tires blew. A man from the life insurance company came to our house and asked if she’d been feeling depressed lately. That struck me as an odd question. Her husband walked out on her eighteen months earlier. It’s a myth that time heals wounds. Not all wounds. Chemicals play a role. Then a nothing thing happens. You might look at, say, a Boston Bruins ashtray in the living room that he once used while watching the games. The sound of a lawn mower on a Saturday. The smell of aftershave on the man in front of you at the post office. A husband and wife in the distance laughing about something. The memories of the shouting recede. The early years return. One plans a life, writes a script, an outline at the very least. We will be different. We all think this. We shall deftly avoid the cancers and the premature death, the car accidents and job loss, the miscarriages and affairs. What was it like for her at night, late, alone, in bed?

I’d gotten home early from school. That day. April 14. Our class had taken a field trip to the aquarium. She was on her way out to the car. We were standing outside.

I said, “Where are you going?”

She looked at me for a time and then said, “You’re not supposed to be home.”

“We got back