The Last Bridge Read Online Free

Willard.” She walked me to him and whispered, “Be nice.”
    I put out my hand. He smiled and nodded as if he didn’t understand the gesture. I looked at Wendy.
    “He’s hard of hearing. You have to speak up.” She raised her voice to demonstrate. “Not circumcised either,” she whispered in my ear. Willard looked like I was about to punish him. He was painfully bald. The kind that makes you wonder if the guy ever had any hair. His glasses were Coke-bottle thick with frames that covered most of his face. His blank expression evoked the name Dullard.
    “Has anyone seen Dad?”
    Wendy’s nonchalance caught me off guard. It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that Dad would be a subject anyone would bring up around me. The mention of his name and the nearness of Jared and Wendy brought it all back. My body’s memory betrayed me first. The muscles in my thighs gave way, causing me to lose my balance. I grabbed the back of a chair.
    “We were focusing on the arrangements for Mom,” Jared said. “Cat identified her and filled out the paperwork. I’m planning the service.”
    “I’d like to know where Dad is.”
    I went to the pantry and found a copy of last year’s Yellow Pages and handed it to her.
    “You don’t even know what hospital he’s in?”
    “No. The only person who knew was Mom, and she blew her head off before we could ask. Besides, there are only two hospitals, Mercy and Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow. Pick one.”
    “Don’t be so dramatic.” She rolled her eyes and passed the directory to Willard and shouted, in what I presumed was his good ear, “Look for hospital … HOS-PEE-TALL … H-O-S … here.” She opened her fake Chanel bag and took out a pen and grabbed the lilac stationery off the table. Jared pulled it out of her hands.
    “What?”
    “That’s Mom’s suicide note,” Jared said.
    “Oh … sorry,” she said, as if we had told her she was stepping on a dog’s tail. “Do you have something else?”
    “Here,” I said. I ripped a loose piece of wallpaper off the wall and handed it to her.
    Wendy and Willard left for the hospital later that afternoon. Wendy had been able to ascertain from the nurse on duty that my father was still in a coma. The nurse said that it didn’t look too promising.
    I was relieved. Although he had been dead to me for years, part of me knew he was still alive and haunting the lives of anyone who cared about him. It was a bitter irony that he survived my mother, especially since no one thought he would live as long as he did. He was a heavyset man with a weakness for drinking and smoking. That combination, along with his lethal temper, made many people think he was living on borrowed time. Not me. I believed he would outlive all of us. Monsters always do.
    Wendy was Dad’s favorite. He called her his princess and showered her with gifts whenever he went to town. She forgave his outbursts and quickly forgot how afraid she was of him when presented with a new dress or pair of shoes. I suppose Wendy understood Dad in a way the rest of us didn’t. Or perhaps it was Dad who understood that giving to Wendy bought her acceptance.
    I wasn’t sure if there was anything Dad could do to turn Wendyaway. Even after he cut off the tip of my mother’s finger, she defended his right to be angry. (I’m guessing the charm bracelet he bought her didn’t hurt either.) The night he did it we lay in bed while she told me I could never understand how hard it had been for someone of Dad’s intelligence to end up on this farm. She said he was like the lion that had the thorn in his paw in the story my mother used to tell us. She said he just needed someone to take it out and he wouldn’t be so angry anymore. I asked her why she didn’t do it. She said it was up to Mom to keep him happy. A lion with a thorn in its paw—he was a lot more than that.
    While Wendy and Willard visited my father, Jared went out to make last-minute preparations for the service. He