There was surely some better word than do,” but Annie couldn't, for the moment, think of it.
“Conduct,” Ian suggested in his bigbrotherly way, though with a touch of tongue-in-cheek. Would that make him a conductor, then, Annie thought, not a minister? And she imagined this man they were about to meet turning up at the funeral with a baton or with one of those strap-on machines with which bus conductors used to issue tickets.
Both ideas strangely pleased her, though she didn’t share them with Ian. Sitting beside him while he drove, she reached out and touched his shoulder, just a light scuffing with her knuckles. Tan almost flinched.
For Annie, one of the effects of losing her father was that she also lost words. They suddenly went missing. Even the words that did present themselves could seem odd and unreliable. Minister,” for example, was an odd word.
Their meeting with the minister was itself about words, since the main purpose of it was to tell the minister things about their father so that the minister, in his address at the funeral, could, in turn, say things about him. This, they both felt, was essentially, as Ian had put it, a scam.” The minister had never known their father, and they now had to prime this man, whom they themselves didn’t know, so that he could speak about their father as if he'd been a bosom pal. So a better word than minister,” Annie thought, might be impostor.” Obviously, it was not a better word. This thing, the funeral of their father, would be a pretense. Yet they had to pretend that it wasnt a pretense. Was there a word for that?
In any case, their meeting with the minister posed a basic difficulty: what to tell him about their father? They were already coping with the greatest of difficulties: their father had died. And this difficulty had confronted them with an equally great difficulty, which they hadn't exactly discussed
Esta historia es de la edición November 21, 2022 de The New Yorker.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor ? Conectar
Esta historia es de la edición November 21, 2022 de The New Yorker.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor? Conectar
BADDIE ISSUES
\"Wicked\" and \"Gladiator II.\"
LET'S MAKE A DEAL
\"Death Becomes Her\" and \"Burnout Paradise.\"
ANTI HEROES
\"The Franchise,\" on HBO.
FELLOW-TRAVELLERS
The surprisingly sunny origins of the Frankfurt School.
NOW YOU SEE ME
John Singer Sargent's strange, slippery portraits of an art dealer's family.
PARIS FRIEND - SHUANG XUETAO
Xiaoguo had a terror of thirst, so he kept a glass of water on the table beside his hospital bed. As soon as it was empty, he asked me to refill it. I wanted to warn him that this was unhealthy - guzzling water all night long puts pressure on the kidneys, and pissing that much couldn't be good for his injury. He was tall, though, so I decided his insides could probably cope.
WILD SIDE
Is Lake Tahoe's bear boom getting out of hand?
GETTING A GRIP
Robots learn to use their hands.
WITHHOLDING SEX FROM MY WIFE
In the wake of [the] election, progressive women, who are outraged over Donald Trump's victory at the ballot box, have taken to social media with public, vengeful vows of chastity. - The Free Press.
DEADLINE EXTENSION
Old age, reborn.