Read Online Anna in the Afterlife by Merrill Joan Gerber - Free Book Online Page A

girls would only have half as much time to spend with her. With Gert on the other side of the parking lot, they’d be killing both old birds with one stone. Anna was reluctant to concede being the main attraction in this zoo of the old.
    Besides, it worried her that the hard work of moving Gert’s belongings and furniture would be a hardship on her girls. Carol’s health was not good, Janet was no teenager herself. Gert should have had three strapping sons if she intended to slit her wrists and require her relatives to move her household on such short notice.
    On moving day, the girls, using their good sense, enlisted the help of Carol’s son David and Janet’s daughter Bonnie. David, the son of the dead hippie father, had the incredible good looks of the poor man, the only decent thing that came from him (and the boy—in Anna’s opinion—the only good thing that came from the marriage). David had the flashing smile, the blue eyes, the muscular build, the outdoorsman look that had seduced Carol from the start. It was only a pity Jewish boys did not come in this model.
    The four of them—Gert’s unwilling servants—entered the apartment like archeologists entering the tomb of Tutankhamen. What eerie artifacts they would find, they didn’t know. The blood had been wiped from the surfaces, but traces of it still darkened the carpet. The mattress was gone, thrown out, but the phone was still there, its buttons cemented by dried blood.
    David made several trips up from the car with cartons he had collected. Anna’s daughters and granddaughter began opening Gert’s drawers and dumping their contents into the boxes.
    Suddenly, on Gert’s dresser Anna saw the most astonishing sight. Her own husband Abram was featured in a silver-framed photo, half naked, his mouth opened wide…and biting Gert’s thigh! The photo had been taken at Coney Island in 1932, when a bunch of boys and girls were at the beach on a blanket. A smaller copy of this snapshot had been in Gert’s photo album. Anna remembered dimly that she had been at the beach when someone thought it would be funny for the gang to entwine all their limbs and take a picture of it. Abram, always up for a joke, pretended to bite the leg closest to his mouth. Anna, however, had thought it beneath her dignity to roll around on the sand with a bunch of hoodlums and removed herself from the blanket. Now here was that moment captured in time, not only captured but blown up to the size of an oil painting! And cropped to show only Gert’s delighted smile, and Abram’s big open mouth poised over her lily-white thigh. There was no end to the treachery of this sister!
    What caught Anna’s eye next was a small photograph, tucked into a corner of Gert’s mirror. In it was a picture of the antique samovar that Gert had promised to Janet.
    What Gert had done with that samovar was an injustice that would burn in Janet’s heart forever. The samovar had belonged to the mother of Gert’s second husband who had brought it with her from Russia. Pure silver, filigreed handles, a place for a teacup on top, a creation fit for royalty (there was a photo of Gert’s father-in-law having tea with Chaim Weizman beside it). Gert had kept it in the place of honor on a table in the corner of her dining room in all the apartments in which she had lived. It was the cherished heirloom, the family’s singular piece of history. And she had promised it, pledged it , for years, to Janet. “This will be yours when I kick off,” was the delicate way she had phrased it.
    Janet was grateful and said so to Gert many times. Maybe Janet had suffered because Anna had never given her anything valuable from the antique shop—she was a stern mother that way. “What will I sell if I give you everything here you like?” she used to tell her daughters. “The children will break it, the cat will knock it over,