The Dearly Departed. Elinor Lipman

you could give him my phone number and he could call and say, ‘I’m sorry I painted a bull’s-eye on your back. Sorry I couldn’t be big enough to recognize that a girl could beat me in golf. Sorry I was the biggest asshole on the team.’”

      After a pause, Regina said, “You sound so bitter. More so now than when you were living through it.”

      “Not more bitter,” said Sunny. “Just more willing to say it out loud.”

      She’d been invited to their wedding, but sent her regrets. Regina didn’t mail Sunny a birth announcement, but after six months wrote a note and enclosed a photo of Robert, bald, drooling, happy. If Sunny sent a baby present, Regina didn’t remember what it was. But here was her son, two years and two months, the only child at the wake, asleep on her shoulder, too heavy for a wait this long. Women in line whispered, “Look at the little angel. Look how big he is. Sound asleep. Good as gold. She was Sunny’s best friend growing up, you know. Regina Tramonte. Regina Pope. Married Fran’s boy.”

      The line inched forward. Warm hands and cold ones clasped Sunny’s. Shapes and voices moved past her, and on to view Margaret. Some hurried by, crossing themselves, but most touched the ebonized wood of her coffin, touched her hands, mouthed good-bye, hurried down the steps of the stage and back up the theater’s center aisle.

      “Sunny?” said the last person in line. “I hope it was okay to come.”

      Then Regina folded her free arm around Sunny’s neck, and the baby was squeezed between them, and even Dickie Saint-Onge felt an unaccustomed lump in his throat.

       CHAPTER 8 Meanwhile, at Boot Lake

      Overheard at the filling station by a jittery teenager buying nacho chips and Dr Pepper: A man had died; a man named Flynn or Fin, who lived alone on Boot Lake.

      The teenager had no money for gas and wasn’t going to pull any more stunts in this lifetime. “Boot Lake?” he asked the cashier. “I used to swim there. How far is it from here?”

      “As the crow flies? Two miles. But you have to get back on 12A again, then west on Old Baptist Road, past the gravel pit.”

      “Right,” said the kid. “Now I remember.”

      FINN glowed white in the dark, stenciled on the black mailbox at the head of a dirt driveway. No lights, no signs of life. He’d hide the truck first thing in the morning. No big deal. He’d switch plates first—he was in New Hampshire now, Live Free or Die—and find an empty garage, a normal place, like it belonged to some old couple who only took it out for church. He nosed the Ford down the narrow road through scrubby bushes. It was a smaller cabin than he expected from the long private driveway, but nicer than you’d think for a dead guy who lived alone. New paint on the trim, light, maybe yellow. The siding at night was dark, stained by weather, wet-cigar brown. He found the spare key under a chunk of pink granite, sitting like a stool pigeon next to the door. You’re not breaking in when you use a key, he told himself. You’re freeloading. Taking shelter. Resting. Like Goldilocks. He wouldn’t steal anything, except maybe eat what was in the refrigerator. The guy was dead. He wouldn’t mind. He could think, borrow some clothes, maybe call Tiff.

      Because he wasn’t breaking and entering, he’d leave things neat. He’d make the bed and wash his dishes. He could say if they found him, “Look—I didn’t take nothin’. There’s your TV, your computer, your VCR, your CD player, your microwave oven. I was just taking shelter. If I was going to steal anything, I’d have done it by now.”

      Shower. Shave. Wipe out the sink after. Hope the guy had disposable razors; too fucking creepy to shave with a dead guy’s blade. Fish after sundown. Deep-six the gun. Watch TV. Hope the guy had cable.

      Find out if anyone had I.D.’d him, and if the cop had died.

       CHAPTER 9 The Flight

      Emily Ann diagnosed Fletcher’s bad mood on the flight as situational depression, richly deserved.

      “Would you like to talk about your dad?” she tried.

      “Absent father, lousy husband,” he snapped.

      Emily Ann didn’t snap back. A man on his way to his father’s funeral deserved some latitude. “Do you think,” she began carefully, “that it’s doubly hard for you because of his deficiencies? Because you held out hope that someday you might become closer—like maybe when you had children of your own—but now that dream is lost, so it’s all the more painful?”