22. Grave Matters
22
Grave Matters
STOP THINKING!
I chastised myself, slapping my cheeks to wake myself up.
Snap out of it.
He was dead, I was alive. There were
tragedies
written with this premise. There were no happily ever afters between an undertaker’s daughter and her ghost.
He knew that. I knew that. I wasn’t going to misread his intentions. He wanted to help me so that he could move on. Ghosts never stayed. It was one goodbye I was accustomed to. Why would he
want
to stay? Where only I could see him? He wouldn’t. He was being nice.
That was all.
With the flowers still impossible to obtain and Elvis booked for the funeral, it was high time to get the receipt from Dad’s will and visit Unlimited Party. Karen was the head counsel at the local law firm in town, next to the bookstore. I purposefully averted my eyes as I passed the store’s window display and dipped into the brick building at the street corner. Luckily, I caught Karen between
clients, so I quickly borrowed the receipt from the files and slipped back out again.
Unlimited Party was a good fifteen minutes away, in a larger strip mall, but at least the Uber driver was quiet. He was listening to a murder mystery podcast—it made me think of Rose. It was one she was obsessed with. She’d seen the ladies live at Comic-Con more than once. I missed her.
What’re you up to? New York still there without me?
I texted.
Work must’ve been slow because Rose responded immediately.
Somehow. The apartment is SO creepy there alone tho. I miss you.
I’ll be home by the end of the week,
I replied quickly.
Take your time! How’s everything back home?
Oh, I guess I hadn’t updated her. So I did. About how finding one thousand wildflowers was somehow a lot harder than it appeared. About how I somehow booked Elvis to sing at my father’s funeral and needed to write Dad’s obituary. About the mysterious letter Dad left for his funeral. And now how I was heading toward Unlimited Party because—well—Dad had beat us to the kazoos and streamers, apparently.
I read down the receipt with a growing despondency. Half of the things were smudged out because sometime between 2001 and today, it had gotten wet. Did he think we were going to throw a frat party instead of a funeral?
Probably, in all honesty.
Your Dad always sounded rad
, Rose texted. Then there were dots; she was writing. Then nothing. Then dots again. Finally—
Are you doing okay? You know with . . . everything.
Everything. I wished I could tell her about Ben. I wanted to. About the strange, muddled feelings in my chest. I was mourning, but I was blushing. I was so
fucking
sad, and yet there were
moments when the tide would go back out and I wasn’t drowning anymore in it—and they were all moments, I realized, with Ben.
Because of Ben.
He took my mind away from my sadness, when all I wanted to do was burrow myself in that sadness, make a nest of it, live there clinging to what was left of my dad.
Even though Dad would’ve rather me fall in love than fall into a depression.
I’m fine
, I texted back, and thanked my driver for the ride as I got out of his Honda.
The cashier at Unlimited Party looked bored as he played a game of solitaire on his phone. I came up to him and handed him the receipt, and gave him a tight smile. “Um, I’d like to pick this up, please.”
My phone vibrated. Rose again? I ignored it.
He asked, dumbfounded, looking at what he had pulled up on his screen. “Uh, are you—are you sure?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Well, because it says here—”
My phone vibrated again. That usually wasn’t Rose’s MO. “Excuse me for a moment?” I asked, and turned around to read the text.
It was from my sister.
COME TO THE FREEZERBOX NOW!!!!
Then, a minute later:
PLEASE!!!
When Alice used
please
, it was an emergency.
“Okay, new plan. Yes to whatever you were going to ask”—I mean, Dad had already bought the stuff, so whatever he had
bought I couldn’t exactly say no to—“and deliver it to the Days Gone Funeral Home?”
“Uh . . . we can deliver the items on Thursday?” the poor cashier suggested.
“Perfect! Thank you!” I waved as I left the store and hailed another Uber. The same guy in the same Honda pulled up to the curb, and I got in. “Oh, this is a great episode,” I said, and he nodded in agreement. The drive back to town was another fifteen minutes, and by then it had started to rain.
The front path was slippery, and I almost bit it hard as I hurried up to the front porch. Carver cracked the front door open as I righted myself again. “That step’s slippery,” he warned.
I stuck out my tongue. “A bit late, bro.”
“You’re in a better mood.”
Was I?
Carver opened the door wider to let me in. “Alice is in the freezer freaking out.”
“About what?” I asked, taking off my shoes in the foyer so I didn’t track mud through the halls. He gave me a long-suffering look. Freezer, Alice being down there—“Ah. Dad.”
“Yeah.”
“And you couldn’t do anything?”
“You know I hate the basement.”
“You weren’t locked in there overnight,” I muttered, but I supposed that was the responsibility of being a big sister.
I shrugged out of my coat as I came in, and realized that Seaburn’s and Karen’s coats were hanging on the rack too—and Mom’s white faux mink jacket. I frowned. “Is there a meeting or something?”
Carver hesitated. “Just some stuff—about the estate and the will.”
“And everyone was here for it but me?” I inferred.
“It’s nothing, Florence.”
“Nothing—like when everyone met at the Waffle House early before I was told to be there?”
He closed the door, and breathed out through his nose. “Florence, it’s nothing personal. You haven’t really been a part of the family business in a few years. And you haven’t come home in a decade. We . . . didn’t think you wanted to be a part of it.”
“Of course I do, Carver.”
“Well, we thought you didn’t want to. I mean, you knew about it, right? You didn’t ask.”
“That’s kind of a shitty way of turning the blame back on me, bro.”
He rolled his eyes. “Sorry.”
“Whatever,” I sighed. The funeral home was quiet as I shuffled down the hallway to the very last door that led to the mortuary. It smelled like it always did, of flowers and disinfectant. Mom was in the kitchen making tea, it sounded like. There were already a few bouquets delivered for tomorrow’s wake. Then Thursday we’d say goodbye.
Time was both passing too fast and not fast enough.
The basement door had a latch on the outside, but it was unlocked. When I’d been trapped down there for a night, I hadn’t been afraid of the corpses in the freezers. They were like shells, and when the person was done with them, the shell cracked and broke.
I didn’t start hating corpses until much later. I didn’t like their stillness, or how blue always—
always
—crept through the heavy foundation, or how they smelled after being, you know, embalmed
.
Alice was downstairs, a black-and-white-striped cloth headband in her short hair. She looked like a black smudge in an otherwise soft gray room. Even her latex gloves were black. On the steel table in front of her was—
I fortified myself. It was fine. This was fine.
Alice glanced over her shoulder, and threw up her hands. “
Finally!
What took you so long?”
“I was at Unlimited Party,” I replied as I reached the bottom of the stairs, and one foot at a time, one step closer and closer, I came toward the corpse on the table.
No, that was unfair. I couldn’t say it was a corpse because it wasn’t just
any
shell.
It was Dad.
And Alice had done such a wonderful job, he looked like he was simply sleeping. She already had him dressed in his favorite tux—the tacky red one with the long tails and the golden lapels. He had on his favorite cuff links, gold skulls he bought from some boutique in London several decades ago, and they matched his earrings, and his favorite skull and crossbones and sword rings.
He used to spin those rings when he was anxious—especially the one on his thumb. My eyesight began to blur.
Alice shifted, tapping her foot on the ground. “
Well?
”
“Well what?”
“Does he look okay?” she burst out. It was only then I noticed the makeup kit on a rolling tray on the other side of her, concealer and eyeshadow and lipstick scattered across it. “Does he look like himself? I got his color right? It’s not too much?”
“He looks—” My voice caught in my throat, cracked at the edges. “Fine.”
Dad looked like I remembered, a too-still snapshot from my memories, and I curled my fingers into tight fists to keep myself from grabbing his shoulders, shaking him—asking him to wake up. It was the kind of prank he’d pull. Pretend to be dead. Then he’d sit up in the casket at his funeral with a “Surprise! I’m
retiring!” but . . . that was the kind of happily ever after in my head. The kind that didn’t exist.
Because the longer I looked, the stiller he seemed. Frozen. Unmoving.
Dead.
Alice went on. “He had a lot of bruises from the hospital, but at least the tux jacket covers most of that, and his cheeks are a little sunken but—the wake’s tomorrow and I think he doesn’t look like himself at all so I keep checking the pictures. Is my memory of him already going or—”
“Alice,” I repeated. “He looks like Dad.”
She hesitated.
“Why would I lie to you? If he didn’t look like him, I’d tell you.”
“He doesn’t look too . . . Tony Soprano?”
“He loved
Six Feet Under
—”
“Florence!” Then, after a beat, “Those aren’t even the same shows!”
I rolled my eyes. “Dad looks great. Trust me, you’re good at what you do. Better than Dad, even.”
That, at least, made her a little calmer. “I can never be better than Dad,” she said and crossed her arms tightly over her chest again. She shifted her weight between one foot and the other, staring down at our father. I never could have done what she did. I couldn’t even look at Dad for very long before I burst into tears, so I decided to leave
that
spectacle for tomorrow.
I’d already cried more times than I could count this week—if I kept this up, I’d die of dehydration myself.
Instead, I bumped my shoulder with Alice’s. “C’mon,” I prodded gently, “you’re done. Dad looks great. Pop him back in the fridge and go watch some anime or something.”
She bit the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling. “Dad used to say that. ‘Oh, just let me pop ’em back in the fridge! I’ll meet you up top’—god, Florence, I miss him.”
“I do, too.”
I waited for her to return Dad to one of the freezers before we climbed the steps together. Alice locked the basement behind us, and somehow I managed to convince Carver to take her to dinner. They invited me, but I wasn’t really hungry.
I made an excuse. “I’ve got work, sorry.” And it was only a half lie. “The obit won’t write itself.”
“It’s not supposed to be a book, Florence,” Alice said.
I gave her a polite smile. “It’s hard to find words sometimes.”
“If you need help . . .”
“No, I’m fine.”
And suddenly, the comradery we had in the basement melted and she rolled her eyes. “Whatever, just don’t be late on it,” she said, and went to go fetch Karen, Seaburn, and Mom from the kitchen. They decided—loudly—to go to Olive Garden. My family was a lot of weird things, but sometimes they were just predictable. And that was nice.
Carver put on his coat and began to button it up slowly. “You two okay? You and Al?”
“She didn’t snap my head off this time,” I replied. “Well, at least not until the end there.”
“Maybe after all of this, you two should have a talk.”
“Carver . . .”
He gave me a look. “Listen to your middlest brother for once.”
And the voice of reason. Somehow. The longer I stayed in Mairmont, the deeper the town burrowed into my skin. It was too small and too comfortable and too steeped in everything I loved about Dad. And my family. And why I left. It hurt just being here.
I said, “I will.”
He held up his hand, pinkie out. “Promise?”
“Promise,” I replied, hooking his pinkie, and he left with Alice and Karen and Seaburn out the door.
Mom lingered for a moment, slipping into her ancient faux mink coat. With it on she reminded me of Morticia Addams and Cruella de Vil and soft winter evenings in the funeral home, closing the curtains and turning out the lights. “Are you sure you don’t want to come eat, Florence?”
“The endless salad and breadsticks
are
tempting,” I replied. “How did the last two funerals go?”
“Without a hitch. Now all we have is the big one, and I think we’ll close for the rest of the week after that. Give us some time.”
The Days Gone Funeral Home never closed before. Not for snowstorms, or hurricanes, or floods.
It was fitting it took Dad’s death to shutter the doors for a few days.
“I think that’s a good idea,” I replied. “And thanks, but I sort of want to stay here for a while. I just want to . . . sit. In the quiet.”
Mom nodded and pulled me into a tight hug, and kissed my cheek. “I can’t see things like you can,” she said, “but I know he’s here.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that he wasn’t. That his ghost didn’t roam the creaky halls and sit in his favorite parlor chair and that the whiff of cigar smoke, strong and sweet, was just her memories playing tricks.
“I’ll order you some chicken Alfredo to go and keep it at the house if you want it later,” she went on, and with one last lingering look at the foyer and the oaken staircase and the parlors, she left and closed the door quietly in her wake.
And I was alone.
The funeral home felt so empty, and big, and old. I sat down in the red parlor—Dad’s favorite—in his favorite high-back velvet chair, and sank into the silence. The evening was so quiet, I could hear the wind creak through the old house.
The dead singing.
I wondered if the wind was Dad. I wondered if he was in this gust, or the next one. I wondered if I would ever recognize the sounds through the floorboards, the wind swirling between old oak wood, making sounds that, perhaps, could have been voices.
It all finally became real. This week. This funeral. This world—spinning, spinning, spinning without my father in it.
And the wind rattled on.