Read Online A Permanent Member of the Family by Russell Banks - Free Book Online Page A

unit on the twenty-second floor of a high-rise on Biscayne Bay, away from the hotels and nightlife. If they liked the neighborhood and made some friends, they would become snowbirds. For a year. That was as much as George would agree to.
    Then, barely a month into that first winter, at the end of his fourth tennis lesson at the Flamingo Park public courts, George dropped to his knees as if he’d won the final at Wimbledon and died of a heart attack. On the recommendation of the young intern who certified his death, Isabel called O’Dell’s Funeral Home and Crematorium from Mount Sinai Medical Center, where the ambulance had delivered George’s body. Then she telephoned her best friend, Jane Deane.
    Jane was sitting at her desk in her office at High Peaks Country Day School when the call came. She was the guidance counselor at the school and a part-time psychotherapist in a town where, in the absence of full-time jobs, people more often than not had to rely on two part-time jobs, a reliance in Jane’s case enforced by her husband Frank’s inability to find work of any kind since losing his Adirondack furniture shop six months ago. Her practice was called Peaks & Passes Counseling.
    â€œJane, George is dead,” Isabel announced. “He’s gone. He had a heart attack this morning, playing tennis. George is gone, Jane!”
    â€œOh, my God! Are you okay, honey? Is anyone there with you?” A tall, slender woman with dark, gray-streaked hair cut short, younger than Isabel by a decade, Jane had worked alongside Isabel and George since graduating college, until three years ago when the older couple retired from teaching, Isabel at sixty taking early retirement and George at seventy taking late. Jane liked George, there was nothing about him not to like, but Isabel she loved the way you love an older, wiser sister.
    One of the work-study students, a junior girl in a dark green dirndl and hiking boots, clumped through the open door of Jane’s office, laid a packet of file folders on the desk, and when Jane waved her away without making eye contact, clumped out in a pout.
    â€œNo, I’m alone. Except for the doctor. I don’t really know anyone here yet,” Isabel said and began to cry.
    â€œI’ll come down to Florida, Isabel. I’ll take an emergency leave from school and fly right down to help you get through this.”
    â€œNo, no, you shouldn’t do that! I’ll be okay. I’ll call George’s family, his sister and his brothers. They’ll come down. Don’t you worry about me,” she said and broke off in order to cry again.
    â€œI’ll cancel everything and be there by tomorrow afternoon,” Jane declared.
    Isabel gulped air between sentences. She said, “It’s just so goddam bizarre, you know? For him to die in Florida, when we only just got here! I was hoping he’d love it here. He was having a tennis lesson. How ridiculous is that? What will I do, Jane? I’m all alone here. I feel lost without him!”
    Jane assured her that she wasn’t alone, that she had many close friends, and she had George’s family members from Connecticut and Cooperstown, who would surely be a comfort to her, and she had Jane and Frank, although she didn’t mention that Frank had not been especially fond of George, thought him smug and self-righteous, and while he liked Isabel, he considered her to be Jane’s friend, not his.
    â€œGeorge’s family. Right. They’ll probably blame it on me for talking him into coming here in the first place. And they’d be right,” she said and went back to crying.
    â€œDon’t say that! He would have had a heart attack shoveling snow, for heaven’s sake.”
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    T WO HOURS LATER, having selected a simple mahogany urn for George’s ashes at O’Dell’s Funeral Home and Crematorium on the mainland, Isabel drove their five-year-old Subaru Outback onto