Excerpt: Death in Blue and White

Chapter One

After Eric died, I was prepared for the grieving and the sadness. It was the boredom that took me by surprise.

I spent ten years living with the love of my life. He was the smartest, handsomest, funniest man in every room I walked into, and I never stopped thinking so. I arranged my life around his life, and I never thought that was a bad bargain I spent my time making sure that he was comfortable and had all the things he needed to do his (very profitable) consulting work from his home office...also known as the third floor of our huge old Victorian pile...with a minimum of fuss and bother.

I was, in short, June Fucking Cleaver minus the pussy, pumps and pearls.

Then he died. Cancer. A weird one, of course, exotic and odd-sounding like Eric Sjowall himself: Paraganglioma. A few hundred cases a year all over the world, and no cure anywhere; the docs wanted to chemo him and chemo him to see what they could learn from his dying, and by the bye maybe extend his life. No thanks, he said. No chance, he said. I will die when Nature is through with me, he said, and not a minute later.

So that's how it was, and that's how he went, right here in this room we shared. A year ago, now. I still wake up at six a.m. – the time he died – every day, like today, thoughts like this rattling around in my head. I relive some of the glory days, one of the trips to his native Sweden with Mick. I relive the first time we met, nervous young interior designer and self-assured client with almost physical heat sparking between us. I relive as much as I can bear to, and I cry, and then it's seven.

The rest of the day yawns in front of me like a ditch with muddy water stagnating at the bottom. I'll slog around the house, reading (mysteries or romances, things that entertain but don't demand) or cooking (who for? Mostly it rots unless Mick is here, which thankfully he is right now) or dusting tchotchkes (why do people assume a former interior designer wants little dust catchers as gifts?) until I can decently hie myself to Zipper's bar and start drinking. You'll never have to work, Eric reassured me while he was busy dying, still taking care of me the best way he knew how. I've left you well provided, he said, and the he took away the only thing that made being provided for worthwhile: Himself. The bastard. How dare he die at fifty-one! I was supposed to have to push his wheelchair around the Old Faggot's Home when he was a hundred and ten and I a mere stripling of thirty, much as I am now. I was looking forward to it.

This morning is different, thank the Goddess, this morning I have breakfast to make for Mick. He graced me with his presence last night after Wednesday night services at his grandmother's church, which he and his mother and stepfather all attend to suck up to the old harpy. I know Mick hates it. He is loud in his denunciations of Religion (you go, kid!) and hypocrisy and his creep of a stepfather, who he calls “Mr. Burns.” If you knew Bannerman, you'd see the kid's got one helluva fine eye for characters. But last night, Mick came roaring up the driveway...my heart still skips a beat when I hear that car, Eric's car, pulling into the drive...and was madder than usual at life, the Universe, and everything. I tried asking him about it, but he grunted something about being sick of assholes, said he was going to bed, and stomped up the back stairs to his room.

Throwing off the sheet that's all the cover I need in the Texas October morning air, I padded naked into my bathroom to start the day, for once feeling useful because I have someone to take care of. I file that observation under “discuss with therapist” to see if I'm hopelessly co-dependent, absurdly romantic, or just me. The hot water is gratifyingly relaxing to muscles I didn't realize I was clenching in my sleep. I lifted my face to the shower head and let the warmth soak into me, rinsing away the morning's traces of futile tears.

Dry off, grab sweatpants, t-shirt, slippers...wood floors get cold even when it's sixty outside...Thursday morning, I reflected, school today and Halloween tomorrow...how did THAT happen, how did an entire year slip by and I didn't so much as...and it hit me as I padded down the back stairs.

Tomorrow is Eric's birthday. Halloween. The second one without him to celebrate it, he'd died the day before my birthday in September last year. That first year, I don't think I knew when it was Halloween, so at least I'm more in sync with the world now, I praised myself.

No wonder Mick's so mad. I was pretty sure he remembered what day it was, and no doubt his mother, grandmother, or stepfather said some innocent thing that set him off like a bottle-rocket. His grief, I guess any teenage boy's grief, can't find any way out except anger. It would be unmanly and uncool to cry, and since Mick's developed militant atheism to rebel against his hypocritical Christian household, he has no one to bargain with after the numbness passes. So here we are, mired in anger. I wish Kubler-Ross had written more of a how-to than a why-for. I'm floundering around myself, wondering what I'm supposed to feel and how I'm supposed to act and living in a few little corners of this huge house like a barnacle on a tanker's hull.

I automatically flicked the switch on the coffee dripper, reveling in the smell of caffeine-bearing deliciousness pouring into my fancy Braun coffee maker's insulated carafe as I whisked past to make toast. English muffins, I decided, Mick's favorites, with the mandarin preserves we both love. Seven-thirty, my automatic eye-flick of the clock told me, Mick needs to...ah, there goes the toilet, he's up. I fork open the second muffin and put it into the other two slice-slots of the toaster. It's ridiculous, I said to myself, how good it feels to use stuff the way it was made to be used...twelve cups of coffee, four slices of toast, breakfast for two. I'm such a loser.

Then the clatter of Mick descending top speed from the third floor bedroom that's been his since we found this house jolted me out of another downward spiral. Coffee mug in hand, I placed myself at the back hall door. Mick clumped down off the last step with his usual two-footed jump, grabbed the mug as he moved past me with a mumbled “Morning Pop. Thanks. Hey, muffins!” He snagged the now filled coffee carafe in the hand holding the mug, swooped onto the toaster, flipped all four muffin-halves onto his plate, and plopped everything down at his place. He was buttering the second slice before I could manage “Good morning. Sleep alright?”

“Yeah.” Crumbs everywhere, I remember teaching him better than this.

“So, it's Thursday. School today?”

He looked at me from under heavy blond bangs that really need trimming. “Unless you know something I don't.” A third muffin half meets its doom. “Fanks f'r thu mangrin...”

“I suspect you're thanking me for putting out the mandarin preserves, you're welcome, but please spare me the rest of the sentence until you've swallowed and before your next bite.”

He rolled his eyes and swallowed ostentatiously. “Yes sir. Thank you, kind sir, for making my favorite breakfast on this fine morning, before I am legally required to appear in the Halls of Hell-School, thence to engage in colloquy with the cicerones paid by your property taxes to drill me in how to take the next set of standardized tests.” A loud slurp of black coffee, and that fourth muffin half vanished in two bites.

I couldn't help grinning. “My, someone's word-a-day calendar is paying off.” I paused to choose my next words carefully. “Glad as I am to see you, kid, I....”

Mick jumped up. “Glad to be seen, Pop, but I gotta get going if I'm gonna pick Danny up on time.” He threw the last of his coffee down his throat while standing up, stretched his sinewy boy's body into a bowlike curve, and hustled by me. He stopped a second, pecked me on the cheek, and said over his shoulder on the way up the stairs, “I'll be home around five. Got some club stuff to do after school. We need to get busy packing stuff to move into Blue&White!”

As I listened to the companionable sounds of another person readying himself to face the day, I realized I had neither eaten nor had my coffee yet, and there really was a lot to do getting ready to move stock into my newly acquired space at the tatty little antique mall facing the Interstate. And the mystery of Mick's presence was solved, as well...he had promised to help me pack and move stuff there for the next few days, since my lease formally began on November 1st. His birthday, and he'd agreed to give it up to me and my new store. I pondered this selflessness suspiciously, knowing Mick. What plans was he thwarting, whose nose was he putting out of joint with this kind gesture? Tilting the coffee mug slowly so I could savor the aroma of Tanzanian peaberry coffee beans roasted just this side of incineration and pulverized fine as mummy dust, then mixed with Celebes Kalossi beans in just the right ratio to make a perfect morning blend, I resolved to be more trusting of my imp of a stepson, and to get cracking on printing out and applying the bar codes to the stock we would be packing that afternoon and evening.

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