Anna in the Afterlife Read Online Free Page A

phone, it rang. Sammy Mishkin’s daughter was calling, inviting her to Sammy’s funeral, Friday, at noon. So Sammy had beat Anna to it! Was she going to be upstaged by an old boyfriend? She was much put out by this. Ten years older than Sammy, she expected to be around to see him shocked by her disappearance. Now he had died first. This would surely take some of the steam out of her funeral. Sammy’s daughter told Janet her father had died in bed, reading, his eyeglasses on his nose, a novel in his lap—a story about two men and a woman stranded on a fishing yacht. This seemed a death of the sort to be greatly desired. (But did his easy passing make up for his two heart bypass operations, his prostate removal, and his emergency abdominal surgery a month ago to keep an aneurysm from exploding?)
    If you live, you pay for it. That’s all there was to it. Sammy used to visit Anna in the nursing home, but when she could no longer wear her teeth, she refused to see him. Besides, she had grown tired of their conversations. He’d always say, “My doctor checked me out and said I’m good for another 40,000 miles.”
    â€œFor me, even ten miles more is too much,” was Anna’s reply.
    â€œNot me, I’m in denial,” Sammy would reply.
    Anna gave him credit. A man whose parents were burned in Auschwitz had every right to play whatever game kept him going.
    An hour before Anna’s daughters had their appointment with the “grief counselor” to work out the details of Anna’s bodily entry into eternity, they took their seats in the Vale-of-Tears Chapel at the Burning Bush mortuary. Both of Anna’s girls nodded to Sammy Mishkin’s daughters, and also to his first wife, a Holocaust survivor like Sammy, who now took her comforts from plastic surgeons, hairdressers, and health spas. His second wife, a blonde beauty like his first, was dead of liver cancer. In the back row was Sammy’s latest lady friend, a pretty blonde—he had a terrible weakness for blondes—this one was at least thirty years his junior. The truth was, Anna had been a serious contender for the position of Sammy’s second wife. The reason it came to nothing was that Sammy was too cheap for Anna and Anna was too platonic for Sammy.
    His idea of a good time was to drive out to see the desert flowers in bloom with a packed lunch of a couple of hard boiled eggs in a paper bag, whereas Anna would have enjoyed a McDonald’s hamburger, a little carton of French fries, a cold root beer. Music they agreed on: to enjoy it didn’t require money or sex. Sammy used to stop into Anna’s store, Goldman’s Antiques, after Abram died and listen to Anna play Chopin on the upright piano she kept in the shop. She was young then, only fifty-eight, she had the world’s best legs and she knew it. Sammy was a good page turner. He sometimes leaned over her too close and pressed his stomach against her back. Anna understood he was giving a hint about the next stage, waiting for her invitation. Something rose up in her throat when she thought about this possibility, the postures, the movements, the smells, the whole rigmarole leading to what men seemed to want till their last breath. She had done it when she had to, the result being the birth of her two girls, well worth the trouble, but what was the point of it now? Huffing and puffing to blow the house down. She was past it.
    The best thing that had come out of her thirty-year friendship with Sammy (they stayed friends even after he married the second wife) was the car accident they were in together, when, on one of his cheap excursions with her to see the ocean (his wife hated the ocean and was glad to pawn Sammy off on Anna for an afternoon) he turned left from the right lane of the highway and crashed into an oncoming car. Anna was flung forward into the dashboard, her hands out for protection. The impact crushed her left thumb, rendering