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“Henry? I need the name of a caterer willing to come to
Odessa.”
After Mr. Arthur died, I learn a lot about my aunt
Marty, too. She is the woman you want by your side when
the world turns upside down.
When she’s not comforting my mother, Aunt Marty is
on the phone.
“How many lilies can you get?”
“Do they have cushioned white folding chairs?”
When I get home from school, I ask what I can do to
help. She says, “Make sure your mother drinks a lot of
water.”
“Water?”
“Crying dehydrates you.”
While I refill my mother’s bedside water glass, Aunt
Marty hires a caterer to set up a buffet table of smoked
salmon and cream cheese toast points, dumplings with
Asian dipping sauce, mini turkey sandwiches with country
mustard, mushroom caps stuffed with lentil purée, fruit
shish kebabs, coffee cake, tiny lemon tarts, coffee, tea—caf
and decaf.
Aunt Marty rents chairs and has the florist in
Middletown decorate a trellis in white lilies. She finds a
smiling photograph of Mr. Arthur among the few things he
has in his room and takes it to a twenty-four-hour print
shop in Dover so they can blow it up to poster size. She
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