Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral by Kris Radish Read Free Book Online Page B

Tokyo or wherever in the hell she has landed this particular week. It is most likely not her husband or the neighbor who is tending to her dying father. But it could be anyone else. Absolutely anyone. Laura has this feeling, this twinge in the center of her quivering stomach, that tells her in a warm rumble that moves there to the center of her mind to the edge of the hand that she must pick up the phone, that to not answer the phone would be beyond a mistake.
    It is a woman’s voice. One that she has heard at only a distance as an echo behind another voice. One that has paced through her mind constantly for the past three days so that Laura was certain she was about to see or meet or in some way encounter the very woman who owned the voice. One that she would not recognize until she hears the voice say the name “Katherine Givins” and Laura can then recall a long-ago conversation, the mention of this name many times, and that echo of sound.
    “It’s Katherine Givins,” the woman says, then hesitates, and Laura Westma, forty-nine years old, who lives in a tiny bungalow in a suburb just barely north of downtown Chicago with her husband, a cat and all of her wandering and often missing daughter’s possessions, sits down abruptly because she is suddenly lost in a swirl of memories, vivid, wide, and so consuming that they make her lose her balance. Laura who has hair cropped so close to her head she is often mistaken for a short man who likes to wear pressed jeans and turtlenecks well into summer and who refuses to wear makeup and who walks with such determination people who don’t know her think she is perpetually angry. Laura with her eighty-hour workweeks as the director of the women’s center and her fund-raisers and the very old and increasingly heavy weight of the knowledge that there is never going to be enough time, enough money, enough anything to save everyone, including herself and especially her daughter.
    “Annie.”
    She forms the name with her mouth but she does not say it out loud. Instead she begins a conversation that she knows is taking her someplace. She knows that already but she does not know where or how but only the why just this moment. It is because of Annie Freeman. It is because of Annie’s death. It is because of some unique and marvelous connection that she and Katherine Givins shared for years and years.
    “Katherine, how are you?”
    “You remember me?”
    “Annie talked about you all of the time. Once, I think we were just a few minutes from actually meeting each other as you were coming in from the airport in San Francisco and I was leaving,” Laura said.
    “I remember. The boys were young. Annie had a mess of friends and relatives on a very unique schedule so we could all help her that year she was so sick.”
    “So sick. Have you thought about that now?” Laura asks and then keeps on talking, already feeling certain that she may be onto something. “I have wondered if that illness all those years ago wasn’t the beginning of what happened to her when she got sick again. I have wondered if that kick started something inside of her that never left.”
    Laura always talks as if she is in charge. She is used to phone-wrestling and to talking people up and down and to making certain that she is believed and trusted even if her own hand is on fire and she’s lost in an alley. It’s her job and it’s also her inner core.
    “I think about things like that also. All of the time. It’s hard not to.”
    “Are you okay?” Laura asks Katherine. “Can I do something?”
    Katherine cannot help but laugh and the laugh startles Laura back into a standing position.
    “What’s so funny?”
    “Well, you can do something but you might not believe what I am about to ask you to do.”
    The conversation turns a corner into lightness as Katherine reads the letter from Annie. Before the end of the first page Laura is also laughing. She wants to tell Katherine she is laughing because she