Suitable Precautions by Laura Boudreau Read Free Book Online

Donna.
    â€œA Genevieve,” my mother said. “You can always tell a Genevieve. Nate, do you feel like telling Elaine the story?” We knew this was her way of asking us to forgive her, which we did right away. It was just a glass.
    â€œShe had a blood clot in her lung, which is also called a thrombus,” Nate started, and the story went from there.
    The cemetery roadways were narrow and our mother drove slowly in case a car came from the other way, which it almost never did. The grass was neatly mowed. Any fresh mounds of dirt were covered with strips of bright green sod, making it look like the newer graves had more life in them. Some of the headstones, usually the ones with carvings of angels or inset pictures of Jesus, even pictures of the person who died, had lots of flowers around them. There were carnations in sturdy vases and votive candles everywhere. Our mother told us that people paid extra to have the cemetery staff come and leave those things once a month, once a week, if you really wanted to, but she said it didn’t matter how many flowers there were, it was the love you left that was important. “Cemetery workers are paid to care,” she shrugged. “Dead people may be dead, but they can still tell the difference. Not that we’re judging.”
    We parked the car and Nate got the beach towel out of the trunk. The ground was a little soft and our mother’s high heels sunk into the grass, kicking up lopsided cones of dirt as we headed over to our father’s grave. She started walking on the balls of her feet, knees bent. “God,” she said,
“I feel like a praying mantis.” She took off her shoes and hooked one finger into each heel, the toes dangling.
    â€œPraying mantises eat each other when they mate,” Nate said.
    â€œActually, that’s not true.” My mother tapped the toes of her shoes together. “They only do that in laboratories when people are watching.”
    â€œBut we saw them do it in the wild, on TV,” I said.
    â€œWell, somebody had to be holding the camera, don’t you think?”
    I helped Nate spread the beach towel lengthwise over our father’s grave. It was yellow and it showed a hot pink flamingo wearing pineapple-shaped sunglasses. Our mother bought it on sale. She said that most people probably found it a bit loud, even for the beach, but that’s what the graveyard needed, wasn’t it? A little colour. “How would you like to live with only grey furniture?” she asked us, pointing at the gravestones. But it didn’t really matter. All the towel had to do was keep our graveyard clothes clean.
    Our father’s name was carved into a large polished piece of granite, and then below that it said, “Son, Husband, Father, Caregiver.” When Nate was younger, he had asked our mother if our father worked in schools or office buildings.
    â€œThat’s a caretaker, Nate. A janitor. Your father was a doctor.”
    â€œSo why couldn’t he make himself better?”
    â€œWhy can’t pigs fly?”
    â€œThey’re mammals.”
    â€œSo was your dad.”
    When Nate and I were done smoothing out the towel, my mother laid out a framed picture of us as a family, me in my mother’s arms and Nate teetering on one tiny running shoe
with his fists around my father’s fingers. Beside that she stacked some oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. She thought the game worked better if we didn’t have low blood sugar. She brushed the dirt off the bottoms of her bare feet and tied her hair back with an elastic band. “Okay, who wants to go first this time?”
    The game wasn’t the kind that Nate and I played with our friends. The kids we hung out with were mostly into four-square and dodge ball and a kind of football that we made up and called Astronaut. Those games had a winner and rules, teams, but the Dead Dad Game didn’t have any of that. All we did was