31. Bring Out Your Dead
31
Bring Out Your Dead
ACCORDING TO MOM’S text, we were all going to meet at the funeral home before walking over to the cemetery. And I, in true Florence Day fashion, was miserably late. My siblings were already outside, about to leave for the cemetery.
“Sorry, sorry!” I cried, hurrying up the stone path to the porch. “I lost track of time.”
“We figured,” Carver replied. “The flowers are already at the gravesite. A few guys came by to take them there this morning.”
“And Elvis has the program list,” Alice added. “We gave him the list of songs you left last night. Almost couldn’t read them because of your chicken-scratch handwriting, but Dad’s handwriting was just as bad.”
List of songs . . . ? I put the question away for later. “Thank you, guys. And the crows?” I asked Carver hopefully.
He sighed and hefted up the empty cherrywood birdcage. “Yeah, didn’t catch a single fucker.”
“I told you to use your Rolex.”
He gasped, stricken. “Never!”
Though I figured the murder didn’t leave the rooftop of the inn last night, since Ben hadn’t left, either. That was . . . just slightly my fault. Not that I’d admit it. Alice cocked her head and looked up into the old willow tree. Beneath it, Ben was standing with his hands in his pockets. He looked up, too. She nudged her head toward the murder of crows perched in the tree. “Do you mean those bastards?”
“Imagine that,” Mom said. “You know, your father used to say they only showed up when—”
“Ben’s under the tree,” I supplied.
“Well that’s our lucky break,” Carver said. “Do you think we have to catch them?”
“Nah, they’ll follow,” I replied, and gave Ben a wink. He rolled his eyes. I told my family to go ahead without me, that I’d catch up in a moment. I still had to put on my makeup, and I wanted to do one last round through the house. I waited until they were down the street before I climbed the steps to the funeral home, and peeked inside.
I took a deep breath. “Dad?”
My voice echoed through the building. I waited patiently, but there wasn’t a reply.
“I know you’re here. I didn’t leave Alice any song list.” I paused. “But you did.”
The house creaked in reply.
“Everything dies, buttercup,” he once said as we sat on the front porch, watching a storm roll in. Carver was toddling in his play pool, and Alice was gurgling on his knee. “That’s a fact. But you wanna know a secret?”
And I had leaned in, so sure it was a cure for death, a way to bat it away—
“Everything that dies never really goes. In little ways, it all stays.”
Not in the horrific way Lee wrote it. Not with moaning ghosts and terrifying poltergeists and living dead, but in the way the sun came back around again, the way flowers browned and became dirt and new seeds bloomed the next spring. Everything died, but pieces of it remained. Dad was in the wind because he breathed the same air that I breathed. Dad was a mark in history because he existed. He was part of my future because I still carried on.
I carried him with me. This house carried him.
This town.
“Florence?” Ben asked timidly. “Are you okay?”
I squeezed my eyes shut, willing the tears to stay back. I was going to cry enough today. I didn’t want to start early. “Yeah. We should probably bring the crows over.”
“At least I’m useful for something.”
“That’s why I keep you around,” I teased—and he suddenly pitched forward. “Ben!” I cried.
He caught himself on the doorframe. Shook his head. “Sorry—I—dizzy,” he muttered. His hands were shaking, and his skin had dropped to that pale, sickly tone from last night.
A knot formed in my throat. “You’re not okay.”
“No,” he replied truthfully, “I don’t think I am.”
The doorbell rang.
Ben and I exchanged a look.
It rang again.
My heart fluttered. The last time I answered the doorbell, it was Ben. Perhaps this time . . . maybe this time . . . I hurried to the front door, almost crashed against it, and flung it open—
“Rose?”
My best friend stood on the doormat to the Days Gone Funeral
Home, a duffel bag in tow. She flipped down her Ray-Bans in awe. “Holy
shit
, bitch! You didn’t tell me you lived in the Addams Family house!”
“
Rose!
” I threw my arms around her and hugged her tightly. “I didn’t know you were coming!”
“Of
course
I was. I know you can handle it alone, but—you don’t have to.” She took me by the face and pressed our foreheads together. “You’re my little spoon.”
“You never cease to make it weird.”
“
Never
. Now where’s your bathroom? I have to piss like a racehorse and have to change into my Louboutins.”
“It’s an outside funeral, Rose.”
She gave me a blank look.
“Never mind, c’mon.” I let her into the house. She dumped her duffel bag into my arms and sprinted to the half bath under the stairs. I put her luggage in the office, where it’d be safe while we were at the funeral, and went to check on Ben in the hall. He was sitting on the bottom steps, his head in his hands.
“Hey,” I said quietly, giving a knock on the doorframe. “Is everything okay?”
“Mmn, no. A little? I’m . . . not sure. I keep hearing things,” he said. “It was quiet at first—but now it’s so loud.”
“What kinds of things?”
“Talking. Voices. Sounds—”
The toilet flushed and Rose stepped out of the bathroom in her red-soled high heels, the same ones that I wore years ago to that horrible
Dante’s Motorbike
book launch, and grabbed me under the arm. “Are you ready to say goodbye to the old man?”
I hesitated with a look at Ben, but he smiled at me to give me some comfort and promised, “I’ll see you there.”
She jostled my arm. “Florence?”
I squeezed her hand tightly. “Yes. Let’s.”
Rose was my copilot. My rock. My impulsive, wonderful best friend.
And I was so, so glad that she was here.