Stranger (8 page)

He sighed. “Great.”

I laughed and reached forward to push the hair out of his face. “And don’t go on dates where you’re likely to run into psycho barsluts.”

“Well, that limits me.”

We laughed together. I looked into my car but didn’t slide behind the wheel. He moved toward me, one arm sliding around my waist to hold me against his body.

“Is this what you’re talking about?”

Against his dark brows, his eyes looked very blue. Not a hint of green anywhere. His hair had stayed off his face this time.

“Yes.”

He inched me closer. “So…are we saying good-night?”

“Yes, Jack.” I tempered it with a smile.

He didn’t let me go. His fingers splayed on my hip. “Is it because of the way things went tonight?”

I shook my head and answered honestly. “No.”

“The cigarettes?”

“Oh. No.” I meant that, too.

Jack paused, his eyes searching my face but finding what, I didn’t know. “Do you think you might call me again?”

“Sure.” I might. Or might not.

“Great!”

Then he let me go and stepped back to let me get in the car. The world shook a little and my body with it, because he gave me that smile again, that bright and shiny brilliant smile that made me want to dip him in butter and gobble him up.

He sauntered away and I watched him go, and I realized something. That smile had almost made me forget Sam the stranger.

I would definitely be calling Jack again.

I
didn’t have time to think of smiles or strangers for a few days. I had services to oversee and families to soothe. I know many people think what I do is morbid. Maybe even creepy. Few understand the purpose of a funeral director is not to take care of the dead, though that’s a part of it. My job is to care for those whose lives stutter in the face of their grief. To make the horrible task of saying goodbye as easy as it can never be.

I appreciated Jared more than ever as the week began with three funerals on the same day.

My dad and uncle had always had assistants, but when I took over, the business had initially dipped and I’d had to let them go. I’d turned it around quickly enough, largely in part by doing most everything by myself. Running the home wasn’t impossible to do on my own, but it was pretty damn difficult. Having Jared there to help me organize and arrange services was a luxury I hadn’t wanted to get used to.

When a person dies in a hospital or nursing home, there are staff and gurneys available to make the transferal easy, but when a body needs to be picked up at a private residence, I never go alone. Most people don’t die conveniently by the nearest exit, and it can be too difficult to lift or transport a corpse down flights of stairs by myself.

We got a death call early Tuesday morning. The woman, in her early thirties, had died at home but had been taken to the hospital. Her husband would be coming in to make the arrangements with me while Jared went to pick up the body.

It’s easier with some than others. When the deceased passes after a long illness, or at an advanced age, for example. When it’s not a surprise.

“It was such a shock.” The man in the chair in front of me cradled an infant against his chest. He wasn’t weeping, but he looked as if he had been. A little girl played quietly at his feet with the set of blocks I kept for kids. “Nobody knew this was coming.”

“I’m sorry,” I told him, and waited.

I’ve heard horror stories about families being pressured into buying the best caskets and vaults, or being forced to make decisions hastily. Some other funeral homes operated like revolving doors, shuffling people in and out as fast as possible. Mr. Davis deserved my time, though, and he could have as much of it as he needed.

“She hated that van,” he said. The baby against him peeped and he shifted it. A boy. I could tell by the baseball bat on his outfit. “Why would she want to die in it?”

It wasn’t a question that needed an answer, but he looked at me like he thought I should have one. I tried hard not to gaze at the little girl on the floor, or the baby in his arms. I tried hard to just look at his face. “I don’t know, Mr. Davis.”

Mr. Davis glanced down at his children, then back up to me. “I don’t know, either.”

Together we planned a simple service. He gave me the clothes he wanted her to wear, and her favorite colors of lipstick and eye shadow. His son fussed and he pulled a bottle from a small cooler bag to feed him while we talked. I had Shelly take the little girl to give her some cookies and juice.

It was only routine to me, but for him it was the end of life as he’d known it. I did the best I could for him, but Mr. Davis left with the same blank gaze he’d had when he came in. When he’d gone, I went down to the embalming room to see if Jared had returned with Mrs. Davis. He had. Since he wasn’t yet licensed, he wasn’t able to actually do anything until I was there to supervise, but he’d set up the table and our supplies, and turned on some music.

He was quiet, though, when we uncovered her. Usually Jared’s full of humor and jokes.

Nothing disrespectful toward the people we’re taking care of or anything. Just a generalized goofiness. Today he wasn’t joking, or even smiling.

He stared at her. “She’s so young.”

I looked at Mrs. Davis. Her eyes closed, her face serene, skin pale and no longer flushed with the rosy glow of carbon-monoxide poisoning she’d have had when they found her. “Yes.

She’s my sister’s age.”

Jared looked startled. “Shit. That means she’s my sister’s age, too.”

He turned to the sink, where he washed his hands vigorously. His shoulders hunched for too long. I’d forgotten Jared hadn’t yet had to deal with anyone like Mrs. Davis. He’d been with me for six months, and though we’d had our share of deaths from disease and old age, and a few accidents, we hadn’t had any suicides. We hadn’t, in fact, had anyone younger than forty-five.

When he turned back to me, though, he looked under control. “Ready?”

“Are you?” I hadn’t done anything to get started. We weren’t in a hurry.

“Sure.” He nodded. “Yes.”

“Why don’t you tell me what we need to do first.” I offered this to remind him this was a job, no matter how disturbing it might be sometimes.

Jared did, rattling off the steps of the procedures we needed to follow. But his eyes lingered too long on Mrs. Davis’s face, and he had to turn away a few too many times as we worked. I put a hand on his arm, finally.

“Do you need to take a break?”

Jared let out a long, slow breath, and nodded. “Yes. Want a soda?”

“Sure.” I didn’t need a break, but I took one anyway.

We both had cans of soda from the ancient machine I kept stocked in the lounge just down the hall. With its battered furniture and scarred flooring, it wasn’t the lounge we used for clients.

Just a place for staff to eat lunch or kick back for a bit.

Jared cracked open his can and stretched out on the worn sofa while I plopped onto a floral-print armchair with mismatched cushions. We drank in silence. From above I heard the faint pitter-pat of Shelly’s heels on the uncarpeted floor.

“I guess we need some new insulation.” I looked up at the drop ceiling, then at Jared.

He nodded, staring at his can. “Yeah.”

“It’s really bothering you, isn’t it.” I watched him study his can as if it was going to tell him something secret.

He looked at me. “Yeah. Damn. Grace, I know it shouldn’t—”

“It’s okay if it does, Jared. A big part of our job is compassion.”

“It doesn’t bother you,” he said. “I mean…does it?”

“Her being so young, you mean?” The cold bubbles tickled my throat and made me cough.

Coffee would’ve been better, but that was all the way upstairs.

“Yeah. And…the kids. I saw the little girl when she was with Shelly and you were still talking to the husband. I came upstairs after I brought Mrs. Davis in and she was there. She was what, maybe three?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“It doesn’t bother you,” Jared repeated.

“It’s part of the job, Jared. My job is to make this as easy as possible for her husband and family, and to make sure she’s taken care of.”

He rubbed at his eyes and tossed back some soda. “Yeah. I know. You’re right. It’s just hard, sometimes. Isn’t it?”

I thought of the conversation I’d had so recently with Dan Stewart. “It’s sad, sure.”

Jared shook his head. “Not just sad.”

“Do you want me to finish her by myself?” I asked, generously, I thought.

“No. I need the hours and it’s not like I won’t ever have to face this again.” He looked up at me. “But…how do you do it, Grace? How do you not let it bother you so much you can’t do it, but keep that compassion?”

“I find a way to put it away at the end of the day,” I told him.

“Like…?”

“Like it’s a job,” I said. “Which it is. You have to find a way to be able to put it away at the end of the day.”

“Even if you get a death call two hours after the end of the day?” Jared grinned.

“Even then.” I finished my soda and tossed the can into the recycling bin.

“So, what do you do?” he asked on the way back to the embalming room.

What did I do? I went out and paid men to fulfill my fantasies. “I read a lot.”

Jared snorted under his breath. “Maybe I should take up knitting.”

“You could do that.” We worked together for a bit longer. He didn’t need a lot of instruction. “You’re going to make a really good funeral director, Jared. Did I tell you that?”

He looked up from what he was doing. “Thanks.”

We finished without any more philosophical discussion, but when he left that night, I thought more about what I’d said. My tumultuous relationship with Ben had ended with spectacular horrendousness. He wanted to get married. I didn’t, and not because I didn’t love him. Ben had been very easy to love. In fact, I’d assumed, as he had, that someday we’d get married and have some kids. Do the family thing.

I believed in love. Believed marriages worked. My parents were still happily married after forty-three years, and in my work I saw many families bound together by the strength of their devotion to one another.

I’d been around the dead my entire life, but it had never hit so close to home until I started my internship with my dad. I arranged memorials and talked with priests, ministers and rabbis in order to help the grieving families who came to us send off their loved ones in whatever way they deemed fit. Funerals weren’t for the dead, but the living, after all. I overheard arguments between warring family members who wanted different levels of religion in the service, and assisted with preparations for nondenominational services, too. I listened to the prayers of hundreds of mourners, and though the method in which they prayed might differ, or the specific deity they implored to care for the deceased, one thing was the same. People wanted to believe their loved one was heading off to someplace beyond this one.

But they were wrong. The dirt fell on the coffins the same way, every time, no matter if it was a plain pine box or a casket costing thousands of dollars. The body inside eventually became dust and even the memories of the person to whom it had belonged faded and became dust, too.

I’d overseen hundreds of funerals and never once seen angels taking a soul to heaven, nor devils dragging it to hell.

You died, they put you in a box in the ground or burned you to bits to hasten the process, and that was it. Done. Fini. There was nothing after that.

No ever after, happily or otherwise.

Ben blamed me for breaking us up, but I pointed the finger at the summer I worked for my dad full-time for the first time. I blamed the women who came to us shattered by the loss of their spouses, women who’d spent their lives so enmeshed with their husbands they had no idea where their men left off and they began. I blamed the wives so battered by grief they couldn’t function, and the children who cried over losing their parents.

With Ben I’d been so tied up in the beginning of things, I hadn’t thought so much about the end. Dead was dead, there was nothing else. I wouldn’t know I was dead, so why be afraid of it? Everyone died. Everyone went.

I wasn’t afraid of going.

I was afraid of being left behind.

There was no question that the dates helped me put away my job. I could have a cop, a firefighter, a teacher. I could play naughty nurse, or secretary, or anything else I wanted, limited only by imagination and my budget.

I told Jack to meet me at the hotel I’d been using for months, a recently renovated strip motel on Harrisburg’s city limits. It had cheap rates and clean sheets, and was a good forty minutes’ drive from my home, which pretty much guaranteed I’d never accidentally bump into someone from town. Or someone’s aunt or uncle or brother, or someone I went to high school with who was home for a holiday, or someone whose brother or sister I’d gone to school with.

I never worried about bumping into someone for whom I’d done a funeral. Not just because most families I serviced were also from the local area, and in my town the local area meant a radius of no more than ten miles. It was simpler even than that. People who met me for the first time at a service didn’t see me. They saw a funeral director, if they saw anyone at all through their own haze of emotions. Out of the very limited element in which they’d met me, I was unrecognizable.

I’d been to that motel close to a dozen times in the past year, but the clerk behind the desk didn’t recognize me, either. It was the sort of place where the staff was paid to recognize anonymity.

I secured the room and left the small office with the key dangling from my hand.

Renovations aside, the Dukum Inn hadn’t switched over to key cards. I liked the weight of the heavy black plastic key ring with the room number inscribed on it in faded white. I liked the way the key fit into the lock and turned. It was tactile in a way sliding a card into a slot wasn’t.

Jack, looking scrumptious in a battered black leather jacket, met me at the door as I opened it. Inside, the room was nothing spectacular. I couldn’t have said whether or not I’d ever been in that particular one, as a matter of fact, though after the visits I’d made you’d think I might have bothered to remember.