Read Online Reunion by Hugh Fox - Free Book Online Page A

night, swim a little, run a little. I mean Fred walks fast … cardio-pulmonary, you know … I suppose you keep busy, huh?” asked Ellen, then directed herself again to Malinche, enunciating very carefully as if to make sure she’d pick it up, “I suppose you keep him busy!”
    â€œMainly we sleep,” said Malinche, “we put on the TV, CNN mainly, and sleep. And when I don’t sleep and actually watch the news I get terribly depressed.”
    â€œI quilt a lot these days,” said Ellen, turning north on the lake now, the lake of Buzz’s youth, grey, endless, dead, frozen a little way out and then open water, white on white on grey, on white again, the lake of his youth, but not up here in Upper Middle Class-ville, south, South Shore, Middle-Middle … Ellen and Fred had edged their way up a few significant rungs on the social ladder, “keeps my joints loose … and it’s so ‘homey,’” then refocusing on Buzz, “When are you going to retire?”
    â€œA couple/few years. I want to build up as much equity as possible in my retirement account. I’ll probably move to New York to be with Sarah and Itzak, Hannah’s in Israel, but she’ll be back—hopefully—in another year. And Mitzi’s in New York with Jeeyoun and Manny, Moe and Jack … ”
    â€œManny, Moe and Jack?!?!” Ellen laughed, swerved the car momentarily over toward the center line, almost head on into a big cement truck with its mixer turning dolefully (where the fuck were they going to pour concrete in this weather?) in the feathery, frozen air, “Oooooop … that was close … we’ll end up having a reunion in heaven. Four are dead already, you know that, huh?”
    â€œThat’s what Fat Franny’s letter said,” remembering The Dead so vividly, little squirrely smiley Randy Foreman and Mr. Big, Moe Belucci (keep upwind from him on a hot day, his flesh always smelling like rancid cheese), Jim O’Halleron, Mr. Clean, and Little Benny O’Callaghan, kind of a little boy-Donald Duck blend.
    â€œI guess Benny was an alcoholic. And Belucci was so huge. Remember how he used to overflow off the seats, and every time he walked he’d squish, squish, squish, squish, squish.… ”
    Requiest in Pace.
    Not that he and Ellen and the rest had that much longer, Buzz very aware of his own tick-tock mortality, feeling invaded, in fact, right now by memories of his mother, not here, but out in California, Happy Valley Retirement Center out in Pomona, 5,400 ancient ones all plopped down in a 40-acre retirement colony, surrounded by a ten-foot-high stone wall, simply waitingto die. His mother invading him now, in fact, sitting there next to them, between him and Ellen.
    Grimore Park, the far North Shore, where his mother had always aspired to live, but had never even come close, no matter how hard she pushed his M.D. father to pull in the cash. Behave yourself now, she was saying, in some hollow funeral parlorish precinct in his mind, behave yourself, don’t tell them you’re Moslem, leave Ms. Urdu at Ellen’s place to ‘rest,’ you never know who might react to you at the reunion, or what you may want to do, almost feeling that he could use the services of an exorcist, get rid of the old grey witch once and for all. She’d haunted his whole life while she was alive, and now the haunting went on even more maddeningly because he couldn’t walk away from it, it rose up from inside, like mists off of swamp waters …
    â€œMaybe we ought to just stay at your place and watch CNN,” said Buzz, kidding around, sure, but if she’d taken him in earnest.
    â€œI’m curious, aren’t you? Like that snot, Jean Korzenowski. I’ve got to find out what she’s been doing in the last fifty years, remember her?”
    â€œMy arch rival!” laughed Buzz.
    Laughed, but Korzenowski had been