Other Lives

30 LESLIE JOHNSON OTHER LIVES T he guest book sits on a pedestal in the funeral home lobby. Dean signs it, then flips the pages backward to see who else has come before him. He recognizes no one. He has an urge to scribble out his own name and escape, but an usher in a black suit materializes, handing him a prayer card, thanking him for coming, and directing him toward the viewing room. Dean follows on the spongy carpet, but stops to linger at a photo collage set up on an easel by the doorway. There in the center of the foam display board is an eight-by-ten photograph of Mrs. Zarembinski from her days as a fourth-grade teacher at Dry River Elementary School. Dean recognizes the mottled blue background that the photographer taped up every year on the back wall of the cafeteria for portrait day; briefly Dean thinks of the cheap plastic combs, pea green, given as rewards after the kids bared their teeth and smiled into the blinding flash of white light. Why after? Why didn’t they get the combs first, when they could use them? Dean, now forty-three, stares into Mrs. Zarembinski’s eyes, narrow slits above her fat, fake-smiling cheeks spotted with rouge. The shade of Mrs. Zarembinski’s stiff red curls, Dean decided as a boy, was what you’d get mixing orange and cherry cough syrup in a rusty bucket. When she used to lean over him and say, “Look at me when I’m speaking, Dean,” he could see where the dye soaked into her white scalp. When she used to walk up to the chalkboard, Dean remembers, she’d puff through her nose with each step, her double chin jiggling, and you could hear something squeaking underneath her clothes. Christ, how Dean had hated Mrs. Zarembinski! He stares hard at the photo collage, picking out a few grainy snapshots of the old neighborhood in Dry River. The development was brand new in 1972 when Dean’s stepfather moved them from Chicago to Arizona. The Zarembinskis lived two doors down. Mr. Zarembinski was old and let his yard fill with 31 Johnson brown weeds and spoke in a heavy accent that Dean’s stepdad said was Polack. The Zarembinskis’ only son was George, blubbery like his mother, smelling like powdered sugar and sweat, quick to cry and quit during neighborhood games, then bribing his way back in with his mother’s pastries. Dean’s own mother couldn’t wait to get out of Dry River. She thought the houses were cheap, the whole subdivision beneath her. She set her sights on Scottsdale, and within three years, by the time Dean was eleven, they were gone. He never went back to Dry River, and he hasn’t seen the Zarembinskis or anyone else from the old neighborhood for thirty years. He lives in Chandler now, less than an hour away, but there’s never any reason for him to drive that way. Why is he here, about to look at Mrs. Zarembinski’s dead body? He isn’t sure. Sunday morning, sitting at the kitchen table in his boxers after Karen took Cole to Sunday school, flipping through the Phoenix Gazette, the name Zarembinski jumped out at him from the obits. There was no picture, but Dean squinted and read. Retired teacher. Devoted chairwoman of St. Theresa’s holiday craft fair. Survived by her loving son, George Artur Zarembinski. Georgie the crybaby! He’d never known Mrs. Zarembinski’s first name, and he said it out loud: Paulette . The strange thing was, he had been talking about her only a few days earlier. His son Cole had come home upset about his new “behavior modification” plan at school. Something to do with colored cards on his desk that changed from green, to yellow , to red, to blue, depending on how many times Cole blurted out inappropriate comments or stood on his chair or pestered the kids sitting next to him. A blue card meant he had to stay inside at recess and pound clay instead of going outside to the playground. “You think you have it tough...