Read Online The Dearly Departed by Elinor Lipman - Free Book Online

too warm for the little patchwork madras sports jacket, dry clean only, that completed the outfit. He was Robert, without nicknames, and to his mother, especially in his dress-up clothes, the most beautiful boy in the world.

    Coach Sweet decided to skip the wake and make an appearance at the funeral. Or maybe the reverse. Milling around a coffin, he’d be obliged to speak to Sunny, while at the funeral he’d sign the book, hang back, and still get credit for doing the decent thing. He could call the guys who were still in town, and they could form a kind of honor guard—some goddamn ceremonial thing like that. Nah. It wasn’t Sunny who had died. It was her mother, the ex–legal, ex–medical secretary, who could rattle off her daughter’s rights chapter and verse. Mrs. Equal Opportunity. Mrs. Title Nine.
    He’d send his wife.

    When Dr. Ouimet hired Margaret Batten to fill in for Mrs. Ouimet following her gallbladder surgery, there was a conspicuous change in office routine: Margaret didn’t leave early or come in late; didn’t berate him for spending too much time with a patient; didn’t tie up the phone while refusing to add a second line. Margaret was calm where his wife had been rattled, and forgiving to the cranky and the sick. Insurance companies reimbursed him for services the first time the paperwork went in, and patients surrendered co-payments before they left the office. Dr. Ouimet convinced his unsalaried wife—whose gallbladder had been removed through laparoscopy, and whose recovery was all too quick—that they
should
gut and remodel the kitchen the way she’d been asking for years, and, yes, she could act as general contractor, however long that took.
    He was shocked that Chief Loach didn’t call him personally to break the news. He should not have had to hear about Margaret across the breakfast table, his wife’s mouth forming the words of the
Bulletin
headline as if they were gossip rather than personal tragedy. He cried as he reread the story himself, then dialed Margaret’s home number, praying for a case of mistaken identity. He wept throughout the day to himself, in the bathroom, garage, and car. He couldn’t eat. He blamed himself: Margaret, who rarely took a sick day and never brought her personal medical concerns to work, had complained of a serious headache for the past few weeks.
    â€œAre you taking anything?” he’d asked, not looking up from his paperwork.
    â€œNo,” she said.
    â€œWell, there you go. We have a miracle drug called aspirin that you could try,” he’d said with a distracted smile.
    All he could think to do was run a half-page ad in the
Bulletin
announcing that the offices of Dr. Emil Ouimet would be closed for one week out of respect to his devoted and beloved employee, followed by a stanza by Robert Browning that he copied from
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.
    â€œBeloved,”
said his wife. “A married man doesn’t use that word about another woman, especially a divorcee.”
    â€œA widow. And I was speaking for my patients.”
    She rattled the paper and asked from behind a page as frivolous as Living/Arts, “How long would you close the office if
I
died?”
    â€œDon’t ask foolish questions,” he answered.

    Even though the theater was only two blocks from the motel, Dickie Saint-Onge picked Sunny up in his stretch limousine. He asked her about pallbearers and, because calls had come in, about her mother’s favorite charity.
    â€œI should know,” said Sunny.
    â€œThe ladies like the homeless, and almost all the men support the Shriners.”
    â€œIt should have something to do with the theater—maybe an award at the high school, a memorial scholarship.”
    â€œFor who?”
    â€œI haven’t thought it through. Maybe a graduating senior who wants to study acting.”
    Dickie took out a pocket notebook and made a