The Postcard by Tony Abbott Read Free Book Online

closer to Bay Pines Cemetery than to Brent’s, so Dad decided at the last minute to follow the hearse in his rental car rather than going in Mr. Chalmers’ black limousine and having to return to the home.
    So there we were: driving the minuscule green Toyota Insect, a black funeral flag suction-cupped to the front fender, behind the thirty-five-foot hearse: a dorky death procession of two.
    Still all puffy, my dad was hunched in the seat like a clown at a circus, craning his neck to see out the tiny windshield at the stoplights. He snorted. “Are they seriously going to stop traffic for us? People will cross right in front of us. Why is the hearse driving so fast? Everyone’s looking. The police will crack up laughing. Jeez, Jason, we should have taken the black car. This is stupid. It’s my mother, after all! Why couldn’t I take the other car? Dumb stupid bozo car!”
    The
thunk
of dirt on the casket gave me the creeps the way it echoed. The box was nearly empty, after all. There was nothing left of Grandma by the time they’d picked her up from the floor or the couch or the bathroom or wherever it was that she had her stroke. I remembered how thin she was in that photo. I had helped my father and Chalmers and two cemetery men carry the coffin from the hearse to the grave site. She must have been as light as a feather, and I felt so heavy and so tired.
    “She’s not here anymore,” Mrs. K had said.
    Hector! Get me out of here!
    When we returned to the car, I took one last look at the grave site. A small backhoe was already pushing dirt into the hole. It seemed harsh and cold and final. It was really over now.
    “Hecky says bye,” I whispered.
    Dad and I drove home saying nothing. I couldn’t find any words. It smelled of rain, but none came. A few gray clouds passed overhead, the bugs got quieter, the clouds vanished, the bugs got loud again. It was Florida. It was sunny. Which reminded me of something that Randy Halbert had told us. One of the old-time newspapers used to be free for each day the sun didn’t come out. They gave away free papers, like, almost never in thirty years.
    St. Petersburg was the Sunshine City. The Sunshine City in the Sunshine State. Get used to it.
    “Hey, Hector,” I said later that night. “It’s my daily ‘I hate Florida’ call.”
    “So how are you feeling about Florida exactly?”
    “I hate it.”
    “Bold statement. The news here is that all those changes I told you about got reversed. There’s nothing happening. It’s totally boring. When you coming home?”
    “Not soon enough.”
    “You mean you don’t like Florida?”
    “I hate it.”
    My father had had a couple of beers and was nearly asleep. I went to sleep, too. On the couch in the Florida room. After I found out that Grandma had had her stroke in my bed.
    CHAPTER THIRTEEN
    The Dumpster delivery truck came early Saturday and woke me up with its incredible thudding and banging and clunking. My dad had to run out in his pajamas and repark the Subaru Termite so the guy could leave the Dumpster in the driveway.
    There was so much junk! The garage was filled with boxes and bags of I don’t even know what and millions of papers and magazines like a library.
Life
magazines and
Time
magazines. When I saw the towering stacks of twined-up newspapers from the last fifteen years, I wondered how many of them Grandma had gotten for free. Dad arranged for a church to pick up some of the big pieces of furniture for a shelter they sponsored, then dragged her old clothes from the closet, searched the pockets, sorted them in piles by type, then folded them (at first, then later just stuffed them) into garbage bags.
    Mrs. Keach told him where the Goodwill truck was. He made three trips in the car while I started tossing stuff in the Dumpster that I knew wasn’t good enough to sell or donate.
    It was afternoon, and Dad was on his last trip when I slumped, exhausted, onto a chair in the living room. The white carton Mrs. K had