The Best Night of Your (Pathetic) Life by Tara Altebrando Read Free Book Online Page B

shoulder and the expression on her face seemed calm, like she’d just been waiting for me.
    “I’m going to have to clean her up a bit,” I said as I grabbed her and the house keys.
    “You’re
incredibly
lucky no one else got to her,” Patrick said, and I knew he was right.
    The way everyone in my family treated that statue—making the sign of the cross whenever they walked past it, even just when driving by the house—had always made me a little bit scared of it, like it held some special power. I’d beenposed in front of it for pictures I was too little to remember taking, like at my baptism and my first communion. And I’d spent hours of my youth tending the weeds around her, or fighting with Grace about which one of us was going to do it. All because Great-Aunt Eleanor had brought the statue home from Italy at the end of World War Two, having purchased it in Sienna on the day victory had been declared in Europe, aka “VE-Day.” We weren’t supposed to worship idols as Catholics, but my family had obviously missed that catechism lesson or thought the VE-Day angle bought them a pass in this one case. Throughout my childhood, I’d occasionally prayed to the statue myself, but I prayed less and less the older I got. Not because I felt my prayers had gone unanswered—though they mostly had—but because my own pleas had become so petty, at least when you put them into words.
    Please, God, can you make him like me?
    Please, God, just one more cup size?
    Please, God, Georgetown!
    Please, God, shut me up!
    Up the porch steps we went and then I fussed with the door and we all went inside, where it smelled strongly of old lady—like dust and cheap shampoo and old sock–drawer potpourri. Despite my family’s best efforts, we still hadn’t entirely emptied the house. Bags and bags of trash and recycling had already been hauled out, but there was just
so much stuff
.
    “Okay,” I said, setting Mary down by the kitchen sink, and pulling out some cleaning products.
    “You really don’t feel bad taking stuff from a dead woman?” Winter asked, and I said, “She won’t know the difference.”
    “I don’t know, Mare,” Winter said, eyeing Eleanor’s doll collection, an army of small porcelain girls wearing clothing meant to represent their home nations, like some kind of bizarro Miss Universe pageant. “I wouldn’t put it past her.”
    “She
was
sort of scary,” Dez said as he started rummaging through kitchen drawers. I’d given everybody assignments in the car the way Dez had done for the Deep.
    “Well, I liked her,” Patrick said, and he took the steps two at a time, heading for the upstairs bedrooms.
    That makes one of us,
I thought, but I didn’t say it, I just set about cleaning up Mary. “Ten minutes and we’re out of here,” I said, and shouts came back from different rooms to say, “Okay!”
    Great-Aunt Eleanor had died that past fall and I hadn’t been that sad about it initially, a fact that had me sort of worried about my character. I wondered whether it was just because she had been very old and very sick and also just not that nice of a person on account of her sharp tongue and rigid ideas. Patrick agreed that it was probably because she was so old but he put a better spin on it, taking it as a sign of some kind of emotional maturity on my part.
    “Well, we’re all going to die,” he’d said. “And when you’re as old as Eleanor, it’s not that tragic so that’s why you’re not upset.”
    I think he was giving me more credit than I deserved but I went with it.
    For a while, anyway.
    But then Eleanor, who’d served in the army as a nurse during World War II, had gone and gotten buried at ArlingtonNational Cemetery. She’d retired with the impressive rank (especially for a woman) of lieutenant colonel and so had been given star treatment as her bodily remains were ushered to their final resting place. A band. A firing guard. A 21-gun salute. Even horses that pulled the