by Kris Radish
Balinda was beside herself with more than the good news about what she called “her new world.” Something remarkable had happened to her mother in the assisted living facility. She was not only speaking entire sentences in English, she had three new and very fine women friends and was proclaimed well enough—well, sort of well enough—to move back home if she wanted to. But she didn’t want to.
“My mother wants to stay where she is and she wants to go to Poland before she dies, not after she dies,” Balinda told them. “Will you all still go?”
They did.
This time they extended the Poland trip to lovers, kids, boy-friends and husbands because they had so many free tickets and a place to stay with about five thousand Chalwaski relatives. Fourteen of them flew to Poland and they had so much fun they almost got kicked out of the country. They toured, danced in the streets, drank homemade beer and wine, went hiking, and watched Jencitia Chalwaski’s eyes light up and nearly set the country on fire when she saw friends, relatives and a place that she had held in her heart and memory for a very long time. She could never travel after that but it did not matter to her because she had been home.
Balinda started to date again after she joined a dancing theater troupe, a decision which pretty much came out of nowhere, because she didn’t even know she wanted to dance. At last count, she had tap-danced her way into the hearts of four men and two women, but she had decided to keep her tap shoes, so far anyway, under the beds of only the men. She was also in the midst of a nationwide search for the sexy man of her dreams.
Jill’s life was never and would never be the same following the traveling funeral. She barely had time to sit on the back porch and mope, and feeling sorry for herself was never an idea that entered her mind. Melissa—the waitress from New Mexico—and her family, with the help of maps, gas money and no clear picture of what to expect when they left Bernahillo, came for a visit. Melissa fell in love with the campus the second they pulled into the parking lot at the university and got a job at a swanky local restaurant about twenty minutes after that and traded in her cowboy boots for Birkenstocks.
The quiet house on the edge of town quickly became a thriving center of action and life, the likes of which Jill also saw a lot of on her own side of the house. The classy bartender from New York, Nina, called her and just happened to be a two-time author and a therapist who loved interacting with people as a bartender because they did not have a clue what she did to pay her mortgage. They corresponded. They stayed up all night talking on the phone. They flirted like mad just like they did the night at the bar when they stayed at the hotel in New York and then Nina, without telling Jill, hopped on an airplane and showed up on her very doorstep, just like in the movies, with flowers, champagne and the most unbelievably beautiful smile Jill had ever seen in her life.
Katherine went back home, made sure her daughter’s grades were still good and the flowers were watered, and very quickly downsized her entire life. She told her boyfriend, who really wasn’t that bad, that she needed a break, put the house that she had slaved to buy, remodel and finance on the market, and found a very small, two-bedroom home right in the heart of the city but close enough so that her daughter could finish her last year of high school with the friends and teachers she knew and cared for.
Two months after moving, Katherine literally bumped into a woman in her courtroom who was rushing to file papers for an addition onto her restaurant. The women talked for twenty minutes, Katherine accepted a dinner invitation, confessed over a bottle of fine red wine that she had always wanted to learn how to cook at a “real joint,” and became a part-time apprentice to one of the finest chefs in California. After figuring and refiguring her finances she was able to quit her assistant district attorney position with a small pension and work full-time (and then some) at the restaurant with the hope that her daughter would get some big-ass scholarship to pay her way through college. She loved her new life so much she sometimes cried on the way to work because she was so damn happy.
Marie kept her job as the hospice nurse because she could not imagine her life without the Annies and Willards who depended on her to ease their final days and to do what was right—no matter what the rules said. Her experience with the traveling funeral helped her develop a series of workshops, which she called celebrations, to help people with issues of death and dying and to engage in discussions with family members who were terminally ill and wanted to plan their own funerals before they died.
Her husband surprised her by building her a beautiful cabin on the back side of their property so that she could hold her workshops there and so she could have a place to mentally detox without a ringing phone, the pounding feet of her family or the distractions of a world that she needed to put on pause after her terribly emotional days and nights. He planted a tree outside of the window he was certain she would sit near and made a family rule that no one could go inside the cabin unless they were invited.
Then Marie drove to the Harley dealership, signed up for a class, and started shopping for a used bike that she dreamed would carry her into the wind, past twelve clients’ homes and into a world where she could catch every dream she’d ever had. She also began taking regular days off, was rumored to have actually used one sick day, and is now planning a trip with the entire family to Annie’s family home on Lake Superior.
It took the women a year to finalize plans for the last leg of Annie Freeman’s fabulous traveling funeral. All of the women, except Balinda who had a very large role in a small play, flew to Seattle on a Friday afternoon. They followed Annie’s directions right down to the rental of a red van, picking up the six P.M. ferry to Bainbridge Island, and just waiting at the dock for a nice woman who would have them follow her to a cabin on Little Manzanita Bay.
This cabin was a world away from new loves and old dreams and the ever-quickening pace that they had all fallen into following their return a year ago from the wild days and nights flying from one end of the country to the other with Annie’s ashes. When the five women got off the boat and met the woman on the dock she laughed out loud to see them in their red high-tops and bandanas and said, “This makes total sense” as she whisked them off to the cabin by the sea.
They had two nights and a day to figure it out but it didn’t take that long. Annie’s last note to them had stayed inside of the red tennis shoes for all the months when the box had been tucked away inside of Katherine’s underwear drawer. They had their glasses of wine on the long deck with their feet up, tennies pointed toward the water, when Katherine pulled out the final note and read it.
Just pause and remember. I came here several times just to do that, and to feel that salty air on my face, to be by my water, to just sit down and let the world I live in pass right through me. It was an important lesson. I should have done it more. Just pause, my loves, remember me, and then keep going. Love, Your Annie.
The next evening they each dipped their fingers into the ashes and cupped them in their hands and then they went in five separate directions. They did not plan anything after that, they did not time the release of what was left of Annie, they did not sing or toast or cry, but anyone watching, anyone hovering above the bay would have seen a swirl of ashes, tiny particles of matter, released at the exact same moment by the beautiful fingers of five of the most wonderful women ever created. Annie’s friends, her female family, the women she loved, tossed her ashes into the summer wind, they each caught a sob in the back of their throats, and then each, in her own special way, said goodbye.
Later, Katherine threw her old Bali bra into the fire they made on the beach and they relived every moment of Annie Freeman’s Fabulous Traveling Funeral and her totally fabulous and ever-present life, and they did exactly what Annie would have wanted them to do: they paused and then they kept on going.
About the Author
KRIS RADISH is an author, journalist, and nationally syndicated political and humor columnist. Her Bantam Dell novels, The Elegant Gathering of White
Snows and Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn, were both Book Sense 76 bestsellers and appeared on national bestseller lists. She is also the author of the true-crime book Run, Bambi, Run and a psychology book, Birth Order Plus. Her speaking engagements take her across the country to talk about writing, and women’s and feminist issues. Her Elegant Gatherings and Dancing Naked Workshops have set more than a few women on fire.
She lives with her two tall teenage children and her partner in Wisconsin, where she rides her motorcycle—usually fully clothed—loves to swim, hikes with her writing tablet in her back pocket, and often scares unsuspecting neighbors with her wild laugh. She is working on her fourth novel, The Sunday List of Dreams, and several nonfiction projects.
Also by Kris Radish
THE ELEGANT GATHERING OF WHITE SNOWS
DANCING NAKED AT THE EDGE OF DAWN
And coming soon from Bantam Books
THE SUNDAY LIST OF DREAMS
If you enjoyed Kris Radish’s
ANNIE FREEMAN’S FABULOUS
TRAVELING FUNERAL,
you won’t want to miss any
of her beloved novels.
Look for the bestselling
THE ELEGANT GATHERING
OF WHITE SNOWS
and
DANCING NAKED AT THE
EDGE OF DAWN
at your favorite booksellers.
And you won’t want to miss Kris’s next
heartwarming, inspiring novel,
THE SUNDAY LIST
OF DREAMS,
coming from Bantam Dell in 2007.
Find out why so many readers have fallen
in love with the novels of Kris Radish!
ANNIE FREEMAN’S FABULOUS TRAVELING FUNERAL
A Bantam Book / February 2006
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2006 by Kris Radish
Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Radish, Kris.
Annie Freeman’s fabulous traveling funeral / Kris Radish.
p. cm.
1. Funeral rites and ceremonies—Fiction. 2. Inheritance and succession—Fiction. 3. Female friendship—Fiction. 4. Loss (Psychology)—Fiction. 5. Women travelers—Fiction. 6. Bereavement—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3618.A35 A85 2006
813/.6 22 2005053176
www.bantamdell.com
eISBN: 978-0-553-90232-6
v3.0