dinner! Does that sound all right?” No answer. Sarah came into the kitchen, looking anxious. “Bethie, why don’t you give a knock?”
Bethie did not need to be asked twice. She had plans for the night, a first date with Donald Powers, who was a junior, the student council treasurer, and a member of Key Club. Donald was going to pick her up at seven, to take her to see Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. She’d need to shower and use the mirror.
“Daddy?” she called, knocking at the bathroom door and breathing through her mouth, just in case. No answer came. Bethie couldn’t hear anything—no words, no bathroom noises, not even breathing.
Bethie knocked again, even harder. “Dad? Daddy?” Fart once if you can hear us, she thought, and had to bite her lips to stifle her giggles.
“It isn’t funny,” Jo said. Her sister’s brow was furrowed, and she wore the same look of intense concentration that Bethie had seen when she stood at the free-throw line on the basketball court. That expression gave Bethie her first twinge of unease.
Jo went to their bedroom and came back with a wire hanger. She pulled the curved end straight, inserted the tip into the lock, and twisted it as Sarah stood next to Bethie, both of them a few feet behind Jo. They all heard the sound of the lock popping open. “Dad?” Jo called, and pushed the door open. Sarah gasped.
“Don’t look,” Jo said, her voice low, but Bethie did, standing on her tiptoes to peek over her sister’s shoulder. Her father was sitting on the toilet seat, his pants pulled up, his torso slumped against the wall. His face was a terrible purplish-gray color. His eyes were shut, and Bethie knew, before she heard her mother scream, that her father was dead.
* * *
Sarah and the girls didn’t get home from the hospital until ten o’clock. When Jo opened the front door that no one had remembered to lock, Bethie saw that Donald Powers, her forgotten Saturday-night date, had left a note tucked into the door jamb. Guess we got our wires crossed. I’ll give you a ring tomorrow. Bethie stared at the words for a long time. It was as if they had been written in a foreign language, or sent from a different lifetime. She folded the note into her pocket and followed her mother and sister into the kitchen, where Jo filled the kettle, lit one of the gas rings, and pulled out three mugs and three teabags.
Bethie had been the one to call the operator and ask for an ambulance, and Jo had been trying to do CPR that they’d both been taught in gym class when the ambulance finally arrived. The paramedics, two young men in white pants and white shirts, had ordered her out of the room and lifted Ken’s body, but even before they’d gotten him onto the couch, and then into the back of the ambulance, a long, white-painted Cadillac that looked distressingly like a hearse, Bethie had known, from the looks they exchanged, that it was hopeless. They’d followed the ambulance to the hospital and been told to sit in the waiting room. Jo had paced restlessly, prowling the floor in her sneakers and shorts. Bethie had tucked herself into a chair in the corner and made up stories. The woman playing solitaire was there because her daughter was having a baby, the fellow who stood by the vending machine, shifting his weight from side to side, was there because his little boy had slammed his hand in a car door. Sarah sat on one of the molded plastic chairs, with her legs crossed at the ankles and her purse in her lap. She seemed perfectly normal if you didn’t look at her eyes, or at how her knees were trembling. When the young doctor came out and quietly gave her mother the news, Bethie braced for hysterics, for screaming and tears. But Sarah just nodded and got to her feet, gathering up her pocketbook and her daughters and leading them out to the car.
Now Sarah was sitting motionless at the kitchen table, her face blank, her eyes unfocused. Bethie realized that she could hardly ever remember seeing her mother holding still. When Sarah wasn’t on her feet, moving from refrigerator to stove to counters, washing dishes or folding laundry or cooking, she always found something to do with her hands. Bethie must have watched hundreds of television shows, written dozens of