Book of the Dead: A Zombie Anthology by Anthony Giangregorio Read Free Book Online Page A

better than any other pregnant woman on earth.
    Coping .
    Maddie Pace, of al people.
    Maddie Pace, who sometimes couldn’t sleep if, after a visit from Reverend Peebles, she spied a dust-bunny under the dining room table—just the thought that Reverend Peebles might have seen that dust-bunny could be enough to keep her awake until two in the morning.
    Maddie Pace, who, as Maddie Sul ivan, used to drive her fiancé Jack crazy when she froze over a menu, debating entrées sometimes for as long as half an hour.
    “Maddie, why don’t you just flip a coin?” he’d asked her once after she had managed to narrow it down to a choice between the braised veal and the lamb chops… and then could get no further. “I’ve had five bottles of this goddam German beer already, and if you don’t make up y’mind pretty damn quick, there’s gonna be a drunk lobsterman under the table before we ever get any food on it!”
    So she had smiled nervously, ordered the braised veal… and then lay awake until wel past midnight, wondering if the chops might not have been better.
    She’d had no trouble coping with Jack’s proposal, however; she accepted it and him quickly, and with tremendous relief. Fol owing the death of her father, Maddie and her mother had lived an aimless, cloudy sort of life on Deer Isle, off the coast of Maine. “If I wasn’t around to tel them women where to squat and lean against the wheel,” George Sul ivan had been fond of saying while in his cups and among his friends at Buster’s Tavern or in the back room of Daggett’s Barber Shop, “I don’t know what the hel they’d do.”
    When he died of a massive coronary, Maddie was nineteen and minding the town library weekday evenings at a salary of $41.50 a week. Her mother was minding the house—or had been, that was, when George reminded her (sometimes with a good, hard shot to the ear) that she had a house that needed minding.
    He was right.
    They didn’t speak of it because it embarrassed them, but he was right and both of them knew it.
    Without George around to tel them where to squat and lean to the wheel, they didn’t know what the hel to do. Money wasn’t the problem; George had believed passionately in insurance, and when he dropped down dead during the tiebreaker frame of the League Bowl-Offs at Big Duke’s Big Ten in Yarmouth, his wife had come into better than a hundred thousand dol ars. And island life was cheap, if you owned your own home and kept your garden weeded and knew how to put up your own vegetables come fal . The problem was having nothing to focus on. The problem was how the center seemed to have dropped out of their lives when George went facedown in his Island Amoco bowling shirt just over the foul line of lane nineteen in Big Duke’s (and goddam if he hadn’t picked up the spare they needed to win, too). With George gone their lives had become an eerie sort of blur.
    It’s like being lost in a heavy fog, Maddie thought sometimes. Only instead of looking for the road, or a house, or the vil age, or just some landmark like that lightning-struck pine in the Altons’ woodlot, I am looking for the wheel. If I can ever find the wheel, maybe I can tel myself to squat and lean my shoulder to it.
    At last she found her wheel; it turned out to be Jack Pace. Women marry their fathers and men their mothers, some say, and while such a broad statement can hardly be true al of the time, it was true in Maddie’s case. Her father had been looked upon by his peers with fear and admiration—“Don’t fool with George Sul ivan, chummy,” they’d say. “He’s one hefty son of a bitch and he’d just as soon knock the nose off your face as fart downwind.”
    It was true at home, too. He’d been domineering and sometimes physical y abusive… but he’d also known things to want and work for, like the Ford pickup, the chain saw, or those two acres that bounded their place on the left. Pop Cook’s land. George Sul ivan had been known to