From A Patchwork Memoir:

I drove by Earl’s house a few days after his death, simply to begin to face the fact that he was no longer there. That was as much as I’d felt I could do, but then I saw someone in the window—a man, not Pippa—and thought I should push myself a little further, even though I felt wrung out, and introduce myself to Earl’s family, who had arrived from the east coast. As it turned out, his stepsons, Kevin and Billy, were there, as well as his sister, his niece, and several nephews, all gathered around the dining room table.

As they sipped wine and I drank root beer—noting that this time the mug wasn’t iced—Kevin reminisced that when he was five and first met Earl, he didn’t know which was more exciting—his MG or Earl himself. When he was seven, he said, Earl taught him the parts of a car, knowledge he was inordinately proud of, feeling it was his initiation into manhood. Billy recalled that when they went camping with his parents’ friends, the adults tried to outdo each other, bringing along outrageous things to eat—one time Dick Steinke fit a whole watermelon in his pack, filled with fruit salad marinated in champagne. Marian recounted how when Earl was a boy, their grandmother insisted he learn to play the violin. Instead of rehearsing, he used to sit at the very back of the orchestra, where no one could see what he was up to, his violin at his chin, furtively practicing tying Boy Scout knots underneath it. Needless to say, he never advanced to the chairs in front, she smiled, for the first and second violin.

Later Marian and I had a private conversation, and she showed me pictures of her daughter’s wedding that Earl drove across the country to attend last summer; it was held at White Lake, where there was no plumbing or electricity, so they’d installed two outhouses and decorated them with bridal wreaths.

“I once asked Earl if your parents had loved each other—if they’d had a good marriage,” I told her.

She looked up at me alertly. “What did he say?”

“Yes.”

She nodded in agreement, musing that it was too bad their parents hadn’t been able to set up housekeeping on their own—they would have been happier—but they’d had to live with her father’s parents and her mother’s twin sister, combining paychecks because it was the Depression.

“That’s just what Earl said,” I confessed. “He told me he used to retreat to his bedroom in the attic to draw to escape the tensions in the household.”

She nodded again. “He had the whole third floor to himself.”

At one point she reminisced about their father having four heart attacks in his early fifties, the first one on his way home from work. He’d sat on the steps of the train station, trying to muster his strength, while overhearing the derisive comments of passersby about the drunk on the steps. He’d made it home, but later at the hospital the doctors had said he wouldn’t live through the night. All their family and friends prayed for him, she told me, and the next morning the doctors were astonished to find him recovering.

“Earl said he brought your dad a set of paints while he was in the hospital—and that he always felt good about that. He thought they gave your father something to live for.”

“I think they did,” she agreed. “He was in the midst of finishing a painting of the Adirondacks when he had his fourth heart attack. By that time, though, everyone in the family was praying for God to take him, he’d been through so much.”

She went on to reminisce about their father’s sisters, four maiden aunts who’d had a house on Cape Cod. Alma and Minnie contracted TB as young women and recovered at the Trudeau Sanitarium; then Alma went on to become a pioneer in the field of occupational therapy.

“Earl used to tell me how Gladys would insist everyone go out when a storm was coming because she wanted to be right in the thick of it,” I commented.

I knew how much Earl had admired his aunts, who were all strong women, and how he’d loved the childhood summers he spent with them on the Cape, where they treated him like a little prince.

I found myself lingering for hours, even though I was exhausted, afraid of missing something, some bit of conversation or memory about Earl that I wouldn’t then have to cherish—as though leaving his family that evening meant losing parts of Earl I could never retrieve.

John had been worried that some of the people Earl invited to his New Year’s party would show up at his house New Year’s Day, and, not knowing about his death, would descend on his sister Marian and her kids, who’d flown in from the East to make the funeral arrangements. So it was decided that any stragglers would be sent on to Karen’s house.

I found Karen living in a snug little apartment alongside a creek down near San Pablo Avenue—she’d gained weight since I saw her last, and hobbled. “I hurt my leg last night, doing a jig,” she explained. When we hugged, she didn’t let go for a long time.

I stuffed myself with comfort food—my own Pepperidge Farm cookies—while we reminisced about Earl. She’d been his neighbor at one time and helped host the strawberry-champagne brunches he used to hold at his house for everyone on the block. In the years she’d worked at the Produce Center, she’d invited me too—but because I didn’t really know Earl then, I never went. “He was always there for me,” she choked. “When my car broke down somewhere, he’d come to the rescue, tinker with it, and get it going. When I’d complain to him I was down in the dumps”—she couldn’t help half-smiling—“he’d suggest I streak across campus—or the Golden Gate Bridge.”

She told me the story of their community bath almost thirty years ago, how she’d come home from work one night and found Earl in her bathtub with a glass of wine—her sister and Setsko (Earl’s Japanese girlfriend) scrubbing his back. “Be careful with the stemware!” she’d shouted, thinking he was going to drop the glass in the tub and cut himself up. Then they’d all taken turns lathering each other up.

Later, when John showed up with cheese and champagne, we drank toasts to Earl and our friendships with him. Ed and Kay, also Earl’s neighbors, arrived next and joined the carousing. Kay said when Earl used to drive by their house in his MG, he’d throw up both hands exuberantly, his scarf flying in the breeze—which reminded me that Earl always claimed he was hounded by the police whenever he was out in the MG, his theory being that they just couldn’t stand to see someone having such a good time.

John said when he tried to hug Earl, he would stiffen up, which surprised me. Maybe Earl was just uncomfortable embracing men, I thought, because he and I always gave each other big bear hugs at greeting and parting. I often took his arm when we walked. And once in a while, he’d reached out his hand and we’d strolled hand-in-hand. “Pippa thought we were lovers,” Earl had told me one morning over breakfast at Fat Apple’s. “That doesn’t surprise me,” I’d said. “I suppose on some plane we are,” he’d mused.

John went on to say he knew Earl really loved Moira, his first wife, and he wanted to try to find her on the web—that he’d always wanted to meet her. The talk turned to how private a man Earl was, how he didn’t share his feelings—and John wondered aloud why their marriage failed. I realized I was the only one who knew at least some of the details. I told them the part I felt free to—about Moira abandoning painting and trying to get her Ph.D. in English at Cal, flunking her Ph.D. orals because she was so nervous, and becoming depressed. The rest I kept to myself.

Later Karen’s son and daughter arrived with their respective girlfriend and boyfriend. They’d gotten a reservation at the Long Life vegetarian restaurant for anyone who wanted to come, they said. The party broke up, and, as we were all leaving, Karen’s son remembered how, when he was little, he used to go knocking on Earl’s door at 8:00 in the morning, wanting to play with his pinball machine—and how Earl had never chided him or sent him away.

“Earl was one of the finest human beings I’ve ever met,” Kay said, but she was only expressing what every one of us felt.