Easter, 1991

How many eggs are we supposed to hide now that we’re down one hunter, Karla says. It’s Easter morning, and we’re sitting in the living room staring at a bag of forty-eight plastic eggs in assorted pastel colors. Through the window, the A+P Catholics from the neighborhood are doing twenty over the limit, the limit being twenty- five, rushing to early mass. I think I bought too many fucking eggs, Harrison, she yells. I cannot tell if she wants me to endorse this so I say nothing, so I walk out onto the porch.
Our yard is square and flat, not ideal for an egg hunt, and it never has been. There were four maple trees before the surgeon came to chop down the one last summer. We often hid eggs in that trunk’s hollows; these cavities, we learned later from the surgeon, were indicative of arboreal disease.
I go back inside, and Karla’s in the kitchen, sipping mouthwash at the table like it’s hot tea. Their bus arrives in fifteen, she says. You go, I can’t.
Shane and Lily, our kids, are returning from the southern Catskills after a two-week session at a bereavement camp. If the program’s literature is to be believed, our nine-year-old twins are now on an accelerated track of grieving the suicide of their older brother.
They had been the ones to find him in the yard, a blue and silent wind chime.
I ask Karla can she at least hide the eggs before I get back. Depends how slow you drive, she says. I’d drive real slow if I were you.