Early Warning

She, Debbie, was the girl who had had the perfect mother — kind, indulgent, organized, and capable — and therefore, if you could still feel that spark of resentment toward the perfect mother, then there were no perfect mothers, and best not to try to be one.

Debbie was in the room when it happened. Her father, who was sitting on the bed, had kissed her mother’s hand and gotten up to stretch and walk around. When he did, her mother cried out — just “Oh! Oh!”—and then she lay back, and her eyes were open and her jaw was slack. Debbie took a step toward the bed, and her father was just ahead of her. He said, “Lily Pons? Darling?”

Debbie put her head out the door and called in a low but intense voice, “Tina! Dean!” and went back into the room. Tina was there at once. Lillian said, “What is that noise?” And then Dean appeared, and all three of them approached the bed. Lillian lifted her head, then let it fall back, and her last word was “Darling.”

It didn’t matter whom she was thinking of or talking to, but always afterward, Debbie said that her mother had looked at her father, said “Darling,” and passed away.

—

DEBBIE HAD CALLED maybe seven people, Tina had called four or five, and their father hadn’t called anyone, because after their mother died he seemed to collapse. So Debbie was amazed when she finished dressing herself, and then Carlie and Kevvie, to come out to the living room and discover that it was packed to the doors, that there were people chatting in the hall who stopped talking when they saw her and gave her sympathetic looks, that the front door was wide open and there were cars parked all the way down the driveway and out onto the road, and more people, everyone dressed in somber, formal outfits, walking up to the house. They should have had it at the funeral home or at a church of some sort after all — with no one to consult, she had assumed that maybe thirty friends plus Uncle Henry, Uncle Frank, Aunt Andy, and Janet would show up. When she’d called Uncle Joe, he had started crying as soon as she said, “My mom…” but he didn’t dare come — Lois had some sort of stomach virus, and he had been exposed. Aunt Claire couldn’t come, either, because she had just started at Younkers; she and Debbie had agreed they would do a memorial at the farm, maybe at Thanksgiving or Christmas, and then Claire had burst out crying, too, and said, “Oh, sweetie, your mom was my idol. When I was little, I would get her mixed up in my mind with Maureen O’Hara, except that I thought your mom was more glamorous!” The first thing Debbie did when she saw all the people was to go out to the pool area and check that the gate was chained, and the next thing she did was go into her father’s office and lock the liquor cabinet. The coffin, closed because her father couldn’t stand for it to be open, was in the living room, right out of a nineteenth-century novel, but that hadn’t been her intention — her intention had been to keep her mother for as long as she possibly could, not to let her leave home until the very last minute.

Her father was a mess. He kept running his hand back through his hair and standing it on end, and he could not tolerate the feeling of his tie, so he had pulled that off and draped it around his neck. He was wearing a black suit that looked like it had crumpled itself to conform to his state of mind. Debbie watched him. A man would come up to him, shake his hand, mutter something sympathetic, then put his arm around her father’s shoulders and walk him a little away from the crowd. There would be earnest words, more head shaking, a pat on the back; then that man would walk him back into the group, and another man would do the same. Her father looked pale and distraught, as though he found all of this attention disconcerting, but Debbie didn’t know how to put a stop to it or draw him away.