Treasure Island!!!

the hard peanut brittle of my anger at Richard, which, now that he was gone, was fast dissolving, lay a pudding-soft layer of sadness.
    “He’s dead. What does it matter that he couldn’t say, ‘Take that, and stand by for trouble’? He’s dead.”
    My mother was clearing the table. “Death does give you a different perspective, doesn’t it? It shows you just how trivial some—” But here she picked up the butter dish, and seeing that someone had cut into the butter with a crumb-laden knife, she frowned, and began to shave away the grubby end with a fork.
    Richard’s death was a convenience for me, but soon I discovered that his death was a convenience for everyone—a bucket to put under the ceiling’s leaky patch. We were upset; he was dead; now we had a respectable reason for being upset. Much easier to speak of the bird with exaggerated affection than to speak of what was going on between Adrianna and Don Tatum (he appeared to be avoiding Ade’s calls), or Don Tatum and my mother (she appeared to be fending off his calls) or my father and Don Tatum (Mr. Tatum’s tires had been slashed in the school parking lot, and although nobody could prove my father’s involvement, a Taurus was rumored to have been seen speeding crazily away from the crime scene). It was definitely easier to speak of the bird than to speak of what was going on between my mother and my father (still living in their separate spheres and not talking, although I did find a Post-it note on the breakfast bar that said
Prunelax
, which showed that however big the rift between my parents had been, it had not grown so wide that my mother was disbarred from buying his dietary supplements). Meanwhile Richard’s body remained untended inside the freezer. I should go, I thought; I should go to Cutwater Pets and demand my refund; and yet I avoided him completely, and drank my drinks warm. A week passed.
    My mother began to complain. “He was important, I know, but I really miss the freezer space.” She left a brochure on my pillow called
Pet Bereavement: When Only the Love Remains
.
    One day I pulled open the door and, past the ice cube trays, stacked up high like a cemetery wall, I saw him there—a little hoary with frost, but visibly Richard, recumbent on three bags of edamame. His eye, that damnable parrot eye, was frozen wide open.
J’accuse!
    My first impulse was to fling the Big Bag onto the snow bank under the kitchen sink window; my second impulse was to lie to my mother about why I had left the window open; my third impulse was to get her off my back and just bury him. But the idea of digging his grave in the frozen earth was unthinkable. I hadn’t been raised for hard labor.
    Should I call Lars? I could impress him with my aloofness—“I thought you deserved to know”—and inquire respectfully if he wanted to take care of Baby’s remains. But he might say no, or he might say something about him and Rena. No, only one person could be drafted for the job and that was the person who did all the chores in the family that nobody else wanted to do, the particularly unpleasant ones, such as unclogging the toilets and putting in the window-unit air conditioners.
    Unfortunately I hadn’t exchanged a word with him since the night I’d ejected him from my room. And my mother wasn’t about to trot out to the garage and put in the request.
    “Dad?” I knocked on the driver’s side window. He had cranked back the seat and had fallen asleep in there, reading the newspaper, which had now, thankfully, settled over most of his face.
    He startled awake and turned the ignition on, just for a moment, so he could depress the window.
    “Do you want to come in?” he asked and began to fuss—clearing papers off the passenger seat, tossing an orange peel onto a dirty plate.
    “That’s okay. I’ll stay out here.”
    As quickly, and as humbly as possibly, I explained to him my request. I guess nobody had told him that Richard was dead, so there was an inefficient, almost embarrassing, bit of backtracking to do, but he listened hard and seriously, and only when I was done did he sigh and drum his fingers on the dashboard. “Can’t anyone else do it?”
    “You’re the strongest, Dad.”
    “What about your mother? She’s no kitten.”
    “She has a lot on her plate right now.”
    He looked at me intently. “Did she
tell
you to ask me?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Does she
want
me to do it? Did she
authorize
me to join the family