Luck Read Online Free Page B

oak desk and its matching chair with the curving arms and spindles and upright back that he found at an auction. When Sophie arrived four years ago, there was space to spare when she sat in the lap of this chair. Now her hips touch each side, she damn near fills it up.
    At the moment she also feels stuck to it, glued in place. “You’ll find things much simpler and quieter here,” Nora said when she and Phil hired Sophie. Simpler, anyway. For the most part.
    It’s perfectly simple to reach for the phone book and look up funeral homes. One small, manageable task at a time. A little too simple are the rules of engagement Nora has set out in such brittle fashion she might still have been talking to theman from the morgue: “No visitation. Closed casket. Day after tomorrow if that’s at all possible. And cremation.”
    In which case, what’s the point?
    “Make sure the funeral home understands about visitation especially. I won’t have these people staring at him.”
    Sophie and Nora are both divided and bound by their local disasters. Common experiences, some known, some not, make them comrades, but adversaries as well. Never mind that Sophie offered to do this, if she’s going to organize funeral arrangements, Nora might have given her a say in what exactly she’s organizing. “Are you sure? Cremation, that’s kind of a big decision.”
    “No, it’s what he would want. Burn whatever doesn’t get used, which I gather is everything—that’s what he’d say. If nothing else, he didn’t like waste.” That’s true. He built a huge wood-and-plastic-framed composter at the very far end of the yard, and got mad if he found eggshells or coffee grounds in the trash. There he is, hollering, “Okay, who threw orange peels in the garbage?” There are his stomping footsteps, there’s the back door slamming behind him as he pounds out with his handful of peelings.
    Here is the silence of that voice not yelling, those footprints failing to flatten the grass.
    Funny to discuss his funeral and yet be startled to remember he’s dead. Not funny-funny, of course; funny-strange.
    “Day after tomorrow, that might be hard.” For the funeral home, Sophie meant, to make whole what was presently being dismembered. Also an unseemly hurry to have Phil disposed of. That kind of hard, too.
    “Maybe. But it’s what I’d prefer.”
    “What about people from out of town? It’s awfully short notice.” Not a mob of mourners, necessarily, but Philwas a gregarious person, with friends and acquaintances here and elsewhere. Here they’d be people he drank with and guys he played poker with every week or went fishing with now and again. Elsewhere he had clients, suppliers, all sorts of people attached to him professionally who grew attached personally.
    “They can change their plans on the fly. Or have a memorial in their own good time, if they want.”
    “But won’t no visitation seem odd?”
    “It’s a little late to worry about what’s considered odd around here, don’t you think? Anyway, I have no intention of standing around for people to gawk at.”
    “Even his friends?”
    “They’re not mine.”
    And whose fault was that, and what did it have to do with Phil?
    Another funny thing: this felt as close as Sophie and Nora have come to an actual quarrel. They were more amiable with the living Phil than the dead one, it seems. But it’s early hours yet. There’s a lot to absorb. Phil is dead. As Nora said: how can this be?
    There is only one funeral home, called Anderson and Sons, in the phone book. Having the local death monopoly must make for brisk business—what if they can’t fit Phil in at short notice? Although Sophie supposes it’s basically a business built on short notice. Has she met Andersons? Might an Anderson, or an Anderson son, be the proper owner of one of those bags of shit left on the doorstep not so long ago; could an Anderson tyke have been among those scrawling rude words on the fence in the dead