Ask Bob: A Novel by Gethers Peter

Author:Gethers, Peter [Gethers, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2013-08-06T04:00:00+00:00

Dealing with Ted and Hilts wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t my biggest challenge. The person who worried me the most—who had the most potential to rip open the wound I was trying so hard to keep stitched together—was Anna’s mother, Ruby. One of Anna’s brothers, Lawrence—the short one who couldn’t get a football scholarship—wrote me a lovely note, saying that I was lucky to have had Anna as long as I did because she was such a special and wonderful person. He said I should be at peace with the knowledge that I had made her so happy, something her own family had never been able to do. It was touching and perceptive, particularly because that was the only communication I had from her family, the only acknowledgment that Anna had been a part of their lives but was no longer—except for the barrage of calls from Ruby.

“My life is now unbearable,” she told me over the phone in her first call. “No one has any idea how much I loved my oldest daughter.”

“I can’t go on living without Anna,” she said in her second. “You have it easy. She was with you these last few years. She ignored me. I don’t have anything to fall back on.”

During the third call, the last one I took, she said, “You can’t keep me from coming to the funeral. She was my child. I was there when she was born. I have to see her buried.”

“I’m not going to keep you from coming, I’m just asking you not to come. Anna wouldn’t want you there.”

“You’re a hateful, hateful man,” Ruby said to me, two days after my wife had died. “I know she wanted to be with me, only you wouldn’t let her.” Before I could say anything, not that I really had any kind of comeback for that, she reversed field completely. “And Anna was a hateful daughter, if truth be known. She treated me like shit, and I never deserved that. She’s gonna rot in hell for what she did to me.” Then she burst into tears, saying how much she loved Anna, how much she loved me, even though she’d only been allowed to meet me once. She insisted that she was totally misunderstood and then told me that she might kill herself, since she had no reason to live without Anna.

After that, I had my mom deal with her. The two mothers-in-law spoke several times—Ruby called every two hours or so—then my mom told me that although Anna’s mother was obviously mean and deranged, she was coming to the funeral and I was just going to have to deal with it. My mom said she’d shield me as much as possible but that the woman had a right to grieve for her own daughter, no matter what we thought of her. I was in no condition to argue or disagree, but I did feel a little more at ease when Marjorie answered the phone the last time Ruby

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