Excerpt from Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The phrase friable earth voices itself in Viney’s mind suddenly. Where has she heard that expression? What does it mean? She goes to look it up.

In 1966, Viney replaced the family Bible on the lectern with a massive Webster’s International Collegiate Dictionary. She makes a point of learning a new word every day and then using it in conversation. Staying mentally agile is crucial as one ages. There is no reason why a person should stop learning. Yesterday’s word was sangfroid.

And then she remembers: One of her granddaughters—the one who’s having so much trouble getting pregnant—told her recently that she was diagnosed as having a friable uterus. Viney was a registered nurse for over thirty years and maintains a keen interest in the medical field; nevertheless this expression was unfamiliar. She didn’t have the heart to ask what it meant at the time, and a good thing, too:

Friable, she reads. Brittle. Readily crumbled. Pulverable.

How in the world does a uterus crumble?

Viney looks up. Llewellyn has backed out of the garage and is loading his clubs into the trunk of his Marquis. He’s going then, without a word. His expression—normally so benign and handsome—bears a sour residue, the result, she supposes, of their recent spat.

The sex in the beginning was very good, probably because it felt illicit, even though their adultery was completely sanctioned—more than that, encouraged—by Llewellyn’s wife, Hope.

Viney and Welly still have sex, at least once a month, after lunch. Welly is an improviser, a person who bends, goes with the flow. They have their routines, of course, but overall their life together has been one of freedom, quiet adventure, and discovery—both in and out of the bedroom. Viney has kept them on a semivegetarian lacto-ovo diet since 1980—relying heavily on Fresh Vegetable and Fruit Juices: What’s Missing from Your Body? and The Vegetarian Guide to Diet and Salad by N. W. Walker. She credits this with their physical health, mental acuity, and active love life. Viney pictures the two of them engaged in stimulating conversation over glasses of beet juice until they are well into their hundreds.

Dr. Walker himself lived to be 110. No one has yet found any reason whatsoever why the human body should die.

All those years ago, when she charged through the front door of McKeever’s Funeral Home, and, ignoring staff urgings to be reasonable (“State law my ass!” she proclaimed), stormed down to the basement prep room to see Waldo’s pre-embalmed remains—such a strange word in that context, remains, because at that point Wally was still all there— she noticed a protrusion, something like a tent pole, midway down the sheet.

“What’s that?” she’d asked, even though she had a pretty good idea. She was thinking about the fact that it was her fifteenth wedding anniversary, her husband was dead, and never once had they had sex with her on top.

Malwyn McKeever repositioned himself so that she no longer had a view of Waldo’s nether regions. “It’s a reflex,” Mal said, clearly embarrassed by the question. “A common postmortem reflex.”

“That figures,” Viney muttered. She had stopped crying and was starting to feel the undertow of a fierce, angry grief. She was young and foolish enough back then to believe that the worst thing in the world had just happened to her. She didn’t know anything.

She was curious to hear about how embalmers deal with postmortem stiffies—imagining this almost made her laugh—but Mal’s face was as pink as a medium-rare steak. So she picked out a coffin, signed the papers, and (vowing to never put herself through the experience of laying eyes on him again) bid farewell to her beautiful dead husband’s erect remains.

Excerpted from Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos. Copyright © 2009 by Stephanie Kallos. Excerpted by permission of Grove Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.