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worried about this Raoul. What if he shows up?”
    â€œOf course he’ll show up. We’ll invite him. He was her boyfriend. He loved her.” Kyle sounded a little giddy. “God, Grandma! I always thought she had something else going on!”
    â€œYou think we should? Really? I don’t know what to do,” said Barbara.
    â€œWe’re going to do it just exactly the way she wanted it,” he said. “I’m going to do it myself.” He was all excited now, bouncing around and yipping about his parasail—the one he had built from a kit— what was a parasail? (parasol?) —and now the girl’s voice said, “Kyle, I can’t let you do that. You know how I feel,” and he walked away from her. He was naked in a bedroom in Minneapolis with a girl. Barbara wanted to ask, “Who’s there?” On the other hand she didn’t want to know. A redhead maybe, one of those freckled Irish beauties, howbeit with tiny silver hammers stuck in her nipples. A little trollop who could seduce and ensnare a bright but naïve young man, and lead him off to an itinerant life of miming for spare change on street corners, her smart little boy so good in school, so innocent in the ways of the world, and her eyes filled with tears at the thought of losing him. The boy who achieved Eagle Scout and who put on the white robe every Sunday morning and carried the cross down the church aisle—who had almost not gone to college but his mother made him go, who was on the road to becoming somebody—he was in the clutches of the trollop. Maybe she had interrupted them in the midst of hot sex. She tried to imagine his skinny body intertwined with a girl’s. How weak men are! Educate them all you like, make them read philosophy and history and poetry, but when the waitress leans over the table and her shapely breasts hang like ripe fruit, men go blank, their pants enlarge, intelligence plummets, they are ready to buy whatever is offered and pay any price. Give them the check, they will sign it! Take their shoes, their watch, the loose change jingling in their pocket—they will look at you in awestruck wonder, little girl, and whisper Thank You as you wave good-bye.
    â€œIt’s okay, Mom. Call up the mortuary. Not Lindberg. I don’t think he does cremations. Call one in St. Cloud. Look in the Yellow Pages. I’ll be there tomorrow morning. Do you need me to find Raoul?”
    â€œNo, I’ll find him myself. Soon as I hang up.”
    â€œPromise? You can’t leave Raoul out.” Kyle laughed. Raoul . She had visions of a dance instructor in a storefront studio, Raoul’s House of Samba, a lounge lizard in black slacks and flamenco shirt, his specialty: mature women, unattached. Twenty dollars a dance, no extra charge for the squeeze.

3. OBITUARY
    E velyn Frances Powell. Born March 14, 1923, in her grandma Crandall’s bedroom in Anoka. Fourth child of Frank and Susan. Ruby, Frank Jr., Florence, Evelyn. Her dad farmed 140 acres near Holding-ford. She grew up gardening and feeding chickens and then the farm went under. Her dad bought a tractor to replace his team of horses and the tractor sparked and the barn caught fire and the hay in the loft went up like a torch and the cows perished and that was the end of them. The bank took over and they moved to Lake Wobegon. Uncle Ev owned a machine shop there. Her dad felt “liberated” by the farm failure and pursued his true calling, which was invention. He invented a double-flange rotary valve trombone, a hawser spindle for a capstan whelp, and though his patents found no takers, he was a happy man, a fount of innovation. “Work,” he told Evelyn. “That’s the secret of happiness.” He had a lathe, a drill press, a forge, all he needed. He invented a bifurcated grommet for an oarlock, and a two-way spring-forced sprocket. He invented the two-bit drill chuck, the semi-rigid rear-mounted eyelet, the