If You Lived Here by Dana Sachs Read Free Book Online

wrapping paper, and then they’ll spend Saturday night downtown at Marz, where Travis plays drums with a band called Maximum Go-Go and Marcy dances in some cage, like a Saigon call girl.
    “Fine,” I say.
    She bounces from her heels to her toes. “After work, I’ll just run out and get some eggs.” She makes it sound like a statement, but it’s really a request.
    “Just use mine,” I tell her, waving her away. I find Marcy’s manipula-tions kind of endearing. She offers me one of her blithe, grateful smiles and dashes back to the register. I don’t envy Marcy her youth or her beauty, but I would like to remember how it feels to care so much about wrapping paper, or surprises, or cake.
    Shelley grins. “Must be nice,” she whispers, exactly what I’m thinking.

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    Shelley

H
    ere’s one more indication of the arbitrary nature of the adoption business: Carolyn Burns, who could wait only five days for us to accept our referral for Sonya, has now given me a month to decide about
    this child from Vietnam. She calls the sudden change in policy “an understanding of the situation,” but, of course, it’s guilt.
    I appreciate the extra time, though. This referral, for a twenty-month- old boy from somewhere near Hanoi, not only represents a sudden shift in age, gender, nationality, and ethnicity, but also presents a new problem particular to us. Years ago, I tried asking Martin about his experience in Vietnam, but he would only tell me, “I don’t have any interesting stories,” and leave it at that. In the past few weeks, I’ve heard more about that country from Mai Pham at the Asian grocery than I’ve heard from Martin in twenty years. I expect that Martin will say no when I finally approach him with this news, but I’m not certain enough to reject it out of hand. You never know. Maybe he’ll see the child as an opportunity to replace his bad memories of Vietnam with something joyful. But maybe not.
    I’m so reluctant to hear his response that I’ve waited nearly two weeks
    to bring it up. Things haven’t exactly been quiet lately, anyway. In fact, we’ve had to deal with one catastrophe after another. A pipe burst in the funeral home’s upstairs bathroom and caused a hideous leak in the front-hall ceiling. A member of the city council collapsed from a heart attack, prompting a standing-room-only service and three days of nearly constant interaction with the press. A day later, Rita’s sister Helen passed away at hospice. Then Martin’s son Abe broke his arm in a bike wreck and Martin had to race up to Chapel Hill. Everyone’s felt the strain of recent weeks and so, as a sort of bonus for the staff’s hard work, Martin gave them all the day off. When he’s done that in the past, some employees have come to work anyway, banking the time to use later for vacation, but today, with no cases on the schedule and beautiful weather, everybody stayed home.
    I’d like to go to the beach myself. We haven’t been once this spring, not even for a walk. I could go alone, I guess, but I’d feel too guilty leaving Martin at the office. He refuses to take a break. Apparently, when he told me that he would pull himself together, he took himself more seriously than I did. Over the past few weeks, he has shown more commitment to our business than I’ve seen from him in months. In addition to the unusually heavy workload, he dealt with fixing the plumbing, took out a lease on a new Town Car, and visited two church groups to talk about end-of-life issues. Today, with no one in the building, he’s done everything from filling out Rita’s phone logs to changing lightbulbs in the bathrooms. He hasn’t said anything about the way he faltered over the Rivenbark boy, but his behavior serves as a constant reminder: “Look at me. I’m better now!”
    I spend the morning in my office. Around noon, I go downstairs and, following the noise, find him in the main chapel, vacuuming.
    “Mauricio did that