7. Days Gone
7
Days Gone
DAYS GONE FUNERAL Home sat at the perfect junction between Corley and Cobblemire Roads. It sat there so patiently, like an ancient ward on the corner, looming over the rest of the small town of Mairmont, South Carolina, like a benevolent grim reaper. It stood at exactly the right height in exactly the center of the plot of land, and it looked the way it always had: old and stoic and sure.
The funeral home had been a staple in Mairmont for the last century, passed from Day to Day to Day with love and care. Everyone in Mairmont knew the Days. They knew Xavier and Isabella Day, my parents, and knew that they loved their job, and us children—Florence, Carver, and Alice Day—who didn’t love the funeral home as
much
as our parents, but we loved it enough. We Days dealt in death like accountants dealt in money and lawyers dealt in fees. And because of this, we Days weren’t like the other people of Mairmont. Everyone said that when a Day was born, they were already wearing funeral clothes. We treated death with the kind of celebration most people only ever reserved for life.
No one understood my family. Not really.
Not even me, to be honest.
But when it was time, everyone in Mairmont agreed that they’d rather be buried by a Day than anyone else on earth.
I never thought I would come back to Mairmont. Not like this, with a small carry-on suitcase and a backpack with my laptop and an extra toothbrush in tow. My hometown sat in the liminal space between Greenville and Asheville, so close to the state line you could walk up to the Ridge, spit off it, and hit North Carolina. It was the epitome of nowhere, and I used to love it.
But that was a very, very long time ago.
Somehow, I had managed to snag an Uber who’d drive me from Charlotte to Mairmont, and when the Prius pulled down Main Street, it looked just like it did in my memories. South Carolina was warmer than New York; the Bradford pears that lined the roads already unfurling their green leaves, speckled with white flowers. The sun had set, but it still bled reds and oranges into the horizon like a watercolor painting, and my dad was dead.
It was weird how the thought just appeared like that.
My flight was almost empty, and they gave us pretzels, and my dad was dead.
The Uber driver’s car smelled like lavender incense to cover up the weed, and my dad was dead.
I had already been standing in front of the steps to the Days Gone Funeral Home for ten minutes, watching the figures inside the glowing windows walk in and out of the parlors less and less, because the reading of the will had already started, and Dad was dead.
The funeral home was a renovated Victorian mansion, repainted white every summer so it looked fresh and ghostly for whatever happy haunts decided to arrive. The shingles were a deep obsidian
that, when the sun hit the roof just right, sparkled like black sand. The patterns in the foundation’s brickwork were faded reds and oranges, and the wrought iron railings curved sweet deathly designs across the upper windows and dormers. On Valentine’s it was festooned in paper-cutout hearts and pink and red balloons, on the Fourth of July we set off purple fireworks, and at Christmas it was outlined in lights of red and green, like the grumpy old grandfather who didn’t want to admit he was enjoying the holidays but very much was.
It looked just as it had the day I last left for college a decade ago. I still remembered the way Mom kissed my forehead and left a bloodred stain in the shape of her lips, and the way Dad hugged me so tightly, like he didn’t want to say goodbye.
I couldn’t wait for him to hug me again—and then I remembered, like a stone dropping into my stomach—that he wouldn’t. Ever again.
It knocked the breath out of me.
I should’ve come back sooner. I should’ve taken weekend trips like Carver suggested. I should’ve gone fishing with Alice in the summer, I should’ve helped Dad re-stain the front porch, and I should’ve gone with Mom to those ballroom dancing classes.
I should’ve, should’ve,
should’ve
. . .
But I never did.
The funeral home looked the same as when I last saw it, the stained glass windows and the dormers and the turrets, but there was something inherently wrong as I stood there on the porch, mustering up the courage to step inside.
Dad was gone, and there were crows sitting in the branches of the dead tree beside the house, crowing, prodding me to go inside. I didn’t think much about the crows.
Maybe I should have.
It’s just—the world felt all wrong. Dad should’ve been answering the door. He should’ve been outstretching his arms and bringing me into a rib-crushing hug and telling me what a
treat
it was to have me back home.
But instead when I rang the doorbell, a large and long
gong
that reverberated through the house’s old bones, my little sister answered the door. She’d cut her black hair short since the last time I’d seen her, and her gauges were a little larger than last time, though she didn’t have on her dark gothic eyeliner. But that might’ve been because she’d cried it all off.
“Oh, it’s you,” Alice greeted, opening the door wider for me to come in with my suitcase, and retreated into the foyer.
“Hello to you, too.” I stepped inside. I took off my coat—I didn’t need it in Mairmont at all, it turned out—and hung it on the coatrack. There were about ten other coats hanging there—so I could only guess who was waiting in the parlor. People I didn’t want to see.
Which was, like,
everyone.
Alice waited in the foyer for me to hang up my coat and made a
hurry up
motion with her hand. She was dressed in black, from the oversized sweater she pulled over her hands to her black jeans to her black Doc Martens, and for a moment I could trick myself into thinking this was just another day, another family meeting, because Alice always wore black. She had the most Dad in her. Alice wearing black was like a blue sky—it was just right.
I hated the color. For a multitude of reasons. Turns out when you were known for being like that kid in
The Sixth Sense
, everyone expected you to dress in all black and quote Edgar Allan Poe.
Dad loved Edgar Allan Poe.
Don’t. Don’t think.
I took a deep breath, smoothing out th
e front of my wrinkled light blue blouse, and followed my younger sister toward the largest parlor in the funeral home.
The inside was finished with stately oak floors and dated red floral wallpaper. There was a staircase past the foyer that led to the second—and third—floor of the funeral home, but those parts were reserved mostly for my family. We lived here until I was twelve, as weird as it sounded. The stairs up to the other levels of the house looked tempting in that supernatural-murder sort of way. My bedroom was the second one on the left, the third on the left my brother’s, the two doors on the opposite side my parents’ room, a bathroom with a claw-foot tub, and a small study, and then on the third floor Alice had the loft all to herself. The rooms were all vacant now, filled with decorations and spare furniture, dust-covered and forgotten. I knew every creaky floorboard, every rusted hinge. Electric lamps hung on the walls, giving off a subtle yellow glow. On the first floor—the funeral home part of the house—there were three parlor rooms, the biggest to the left, where I reckoned everyone was waiting for me, and a smaller one to the right, beside the stairs to the second floor, and then one just beyond that. Past the third parlor room was a kitchen with a gas stove and old tiled flooring, and across from the kitchen was the door to the basement. Dad used to joke about having skeletons in our closets because we basically did. The basement was where Dad, undertaker and funeral director, prepared the bodies, and I’d been down there a few times, but not enough to really think much about it. I wasn’t the cadaver type, not like Alice, who always loved to watch Dad work.
I wondered, absently, if Alice was going to prepare Dad, too.
“I’m surprised you came back,” Alice said, her voice guarded, and motioned toward the largest parlor room—the red one. “We’re almost done.”
“Sorry, my flight was delayed.”
“Sure.” Then she turned away from me and returned to stand beside Mom, and I let out a long breath. Alice and I weren’t always this unfriendly. She used to follow me around everywhere when we were kids, but we weren’t kids anymore.
And Dad was dead.
Mrs. Williams, a Black woman with short natural hair, was already reading the will when I came into the parlor and stopped in the doorway, her neon-yellow glasses low on the bridge of her nose. Karen Williams had been Mairmont’s sole lawyer for as long as I could remember. I went to high school with her daughter, who ended up marrying a friend of mine, Seaburn Garrett, the caretaker of Mairmont’s cemetery. Beside Seaburn, sitting in a wingback chair, was Carver and his boyfriend, Nicki. Mom’s parents were in a retirement home in Florida, so I doubted they would be making the trip, and Dad’s parents had passed when I was really little. So this was it.
My family.
My heart floundered. It swelled and deflated and felt strange. And I felt so wrong to be here, gathered in this parlor room that smelled like roses and the softest, barest hint of formaldehyde, without Dad.
Mom looked up from her lap when I came into the parlor, and quickly jumped to her feet. “Darling!” she called, opening her arms, and rushed over to me. She drew me into a hug, so tight it was rib cracking, and I buried my face into her warm orange sweater. She smelled like apples and rose perfume, the smell of my childhood—skinned knees and pancakes in the breakfast nook and Sundays at the library, sitting in the stacks reading romance novels. She hugged me so tightly, it felt like every memory was a bone in my body that she needed to hold on to, to make sure they were still here. Still real.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” she said softly, and finally let me go.
She tucked my hair behind my ears, and her eyes were a little wet. “You’re still skin and bones, though! What do they feed you in New York—lettuce and depression?”
“About,” I replied, unable to hide a laugh. She squeezed my hands tightly, and I squeezed them back. “I’m sorry I’m late.”
“Nonsense! We were just getting to the good part, weren’t we?” Mom finally let go of my hands, and turned to Karen to ask her to start from where she left off again. Leave it to Mom to find a
good part
in reading Dad’s will.
Seaburn bumped his shoulder against mine and gave me a nod. “Nice to see you home.”
“Thanks.”
Karen gave me a sad smile and said to us, “It
seems
like Xavier left some instructions for his funeral.” She took out a list from the manila envelope on her lap, and showed it to us.
Carver gave a groan from his seat in the high-back velvet chair.
“Chores?”
Alice massaged the bridge of her nose. “Even from beyond the grave, he’s making us work for free.”
“
Alice
,” Mom chided. “He’s not even in the grave yet.”
“Bless his soul,” Karen lamented, and pulled her glasses down a little to read from the list. I was surprised she could read his handwriting at all—it was revoltingly bad. “One. For my funeral, I would like one thousand wildflowers. Bouquets are to be organized by color.”
A murmur of confusion crossed the room.
A thousand? Why would—
oh
. Wildflowers, like the ones he picked every Saturday for Mom. I glanced over at her, and she hid a smile as she looked down into her lap. Alice and Carver were blanching at the request—they hadn’t realized its significance.
Why a
thousand
, though, I didn’t know.
“Two. I want Elvis to perform at my funeral.”
Seaburn murmured to his wife, “Isn’t he dead . . . ?”
“Very,” she replied.
Dad would’ve tsked at that and said, “Only mostly dead,” in that cryptic way of his. Because music was a heartbeat, too, in its own way, and death wasn’t a send-off without some good tunes.
I was beginning to get the worst sort of feeling.
“Three. I want Unlimited Party to supply decorations. I put in the order on January 23, 2001. You can find a receipt in the envelope with this will.” And then Karen Williams took the yellowed receipt out of the envelope.
I remembered Dad once saying, “When I go out, there’ll be streamers and balloons, buttercup. There won’t be any tears.”
My throat tightened. I curled my hands into fists.
Karen put the receipt back, and kept reading, “Four. I want a murder of twelve to fly during the ceremony.”
“A murder?” Alice asked.
“Of crows. Twelve crows,” I translated. The same murder that kept stealing our Halloween decorations, and gave Dad shiny things when he fed them spare corn on the cob, and sat on the old dead oak tree outside of the funeral home whenever a ghost appeared—how were we supposed to catch those birds?
They
hated
me.
Karen went on. “Five, my final request. Buttercup”—I felt my heart skip at my nickname, and even though Karen was reading, I could hear Dad in the words, the soft love there, the lopsided grin—“I have left a letter to be read aloud at the funeral. Not a moment before—”
The doorbell rang.
Seaburn asked the group, “We’re not expecting anyone else, are we?”
I checked my watch. It was 9:00
P.M
. A little late for visitors.
“Could be flowers,” Carver pointed out.
“Or someone canvassing for mayor,” Karen added.
“Our mayor’s a dog. Who would want to run against a
dog
?”
Mom said, “Florence, you’re closest.”
“Sure,” I replied, and made my way to the front door to answer it.
A
letter
? What kind of letter did Dad want me to read for his funeral? I didn’t like the sound of that. For all I knew, it could’ve been mortifying stories from my childhood he’d been keeping as blackmail—like the time I got a marble stuck up my nostril and then shoved a marble in the other one because I was afraid my nose wouldn’t look even. Or the time Carver was playing in a coffin and it closed on him. Or the time Alice thought she was a witch and gathered all the stray cats in the neighborhood as her familiars and they ate the neighbor’s canary. He was that kind of person. And he
definitely
was the kind of person to include a PowerPoint presentation in the letter, too.
And that just made me miss him more. He couldn’t be gone, could he? He—he could still be here. As a ghost. Lingering. He had unfinished business, didn’t he? He hadn’t said goodbye. He couldn’t be
gone.
I hadn’t talked with him enough, laughed with him enough, soaked in the stories he had and the cryptic wisdom he espoused and—and—
When I opened the door, I didn’t see anyone at first. Just the porch and the moths that fluttered around the porch lights, and the rocky cobblestones that led to the sidewalk, and the soft streetlights and the wind that rushed through the oak trees.
Then a crow cawed in the oak tree out front, and my eyes focused, and barely—
barely
—I began to make out an outline. Of a shadow. A body—
A man.
A ghost.
My heart leapt into my throat—
Dad
?
No—it wasn’t. The man was . . . too tall, too broad. Slowly, like adjusting the focus on a pair of binoculars, the shape took form, until I could see most of him, and my eyes traveled up to the face of the towering stranger, framed by dark hair and a chiseled jaw. It only took a moment to recognize who he was—
Well, who he had
once been
.
I paused. “Benji . . . Andor?”
And he was most definitely dead.