Search Party by Valerie Trueblood Read Free Book Online Page B

recalling that Casey and her brothers hunted deer. “No way, not now,” Casey said, closing herself into a tiny bathroom off the kitchen. “Donna’s catering stuff,” she yelled from inside. One ofthe sisters had her own business; she had done the rolled meats and the trays of vegetables and dips in the dining room, and the laurel leaves on the tablecloth, which were actually sober and pretty, Ann thought, with white candles at either end.
    Around Casey’s desk, and at the copier too, the sagas of her sister Donna’s business could be heard any day: the crushed cake boxes, the tiny refrigerators some people made her manage with, the cucumbers leaching dye from beets.
    At the table sat the not-very-old mother, wearing big tinted glasses. Three of her grown children had lived in this small house with her. Two now. Why didn’t they leave home? “You’re all together, that says so much about your family,” Ann said to Casey through the bathroom wall, hearing the sugary tone in her own voice.
    â€œThere were seven of us.” Casey came out waving her hands behind her and saying, “Don’t go in there just yet.” Her eyes were extraordinarily red; they looked the way Ann’s had long ago, in college, on weekends when she smoked too much weed. It occurred to her that this might be what Casey had been doing in the bathroom. “Rocky and I are the last ones, and who knows when we’ll get kicked out.”
    â€œWatch yourself,” the mother called out from her chair in the dining room, pointing with the cigarette, taking a deep draw, and coughing with her mouth closed.
    Casey grabbed a framed photograph from among the cakes and pies on the shelf of the cut-away window to the kitchen, and held it out to Ann. “This is him. Randy.” The picture was of a very young man with a florid, heavy, smiling face. He had the fireman’s neat mustache.
    Half the city fire department was in the house. They had all driven to and from the cemetery in a caravan with little flags flying from their windows, though Randy had not died in the line of duty but in a freak crash on a secondary road in the eastern part of the state, where he had gone in his truck to pick up a variety of hay the llamas liked to eat.
    The firemen all seemed to belong to the same church theClares did or to be familiar with its terms. “Prayer partner.” Ann heard that one twice as she moved from one spot to another with her wine. She was on her third full cup. “Randy Clare. Casey Clare,” Todd had said. “Shouldn’t they be Catholics?”
    The rambling service, with its speakers standing up for the mike to be passed their way and its sudden calls to prayer, had had an air of unfinality to it, like a wedding where the vows had been written by the bride and groom when they had had a few too many. In the huge, carpeted sanctuary, light poured through skylights onto a botanical garden. The music for the funeral was piped in, but sound equipment hung from the ceiling, along with banners and American flags, and the plants rose in tiers to a bandstand with keyboards and a drum set.
    Years ago, Casey told her, the founder of the church had gone around the state preaching against war. That was in the eighties, when there was no war going on. He was a young man and he was preaching against nuclear war. Being attacked on our own soil had washed all that stuff out the window. This afternoon in the hot, crowded house Anne had heard several restatements of this position, from people steaming, as she was, in their damp clothes. The firemen seemed to scent her politics—whatever her politics actually were.
    She poured herself more wine. There was ample wine. The massed bottles were positively Irish. Ann’s own heritage was Irish. That was why she had to be careful, as Todd would have reminded her if he had been there.
    As far as she could tell, there was no one in the crowd with