By Invitation Only

by Dorothea Benton Frank

  “What? It’s easier to watch your loved one suffer and waste away? That’s nonsense.”

  “I agree. And either way you’re still going to grieve.”

  “Amen,” she said and sighed hard, expelling her heartbreak in a long whoosh. “Suddenly I’m very tired.”

  “Would you like to get a little shut-eye? This is probably the last peace and quiet you’ll get for a while.”

  “Wake me in an hour. I just need to calm myself down.”

  “I can ask BJ if she’s got something to help you relax. Lord knows, her medicine cabinet is a pharmacy.” I hoped that zinger at BJ’s expense would lighten the pall that was creeping in through the walls.

  “Absolutely not.” She gave me a stern look. “What were you doing in her medicine cabinet?”

  “I was just kidding, Mom. I couldn’t care less about what she takes or doesn’t take.” I got up and went to the door. “I’ll tickle your foot in an hour.”

  In fact, it was sort of remarkable that BJ was still around.

  The kitchen was clean. Floyd was there alone, sitting at the table drinking a beer, surrounded by endless casserole dishes and pie plates, all wrapped like mummies in plastic wrap or encased in aluminum foil.

  “The fridge is full,” he said flatly.

  “You okay?” I gave him a pat and a little squeeze on his shoulder.

  “I guess I’m okay. How’s Mom?”

  “Trying to snooze. I think she’s in shock.”

  “Yeah, that’s going around. I called Fred and told him. He and Shelby are getting on a plane as soon as they can.”

  “Thanks for doing that. I knew he’d prefer to get that kind of news from you. How’d he take it?”

  “Matter-of-factly. There’ll be plenty of time to get upset.”

  I opened the refrigerator door and scrutinized the inside. I started pulling out unopened cans and bottles and putting them on the table.

  “Well, for one thing, we don’t have to chill all this beer at one time. It’s not Super Bowl Sunday. And we can throw out the iced tea. It takes five minutes to make more. We don’t need all these Diet Cokes to be in here either.”

  “Show ’em who’s boss, Lady Di.”

  “Do we really need three bottles of ketchup? Hand me the casseroles, wise guy.”

  Getting all the food into the refrigerator was important because I didn’t want the holiday meal to go to waste. And small task that it was, busywork was good. It was the beginning of many decisions that would have to be made rather quickly. I sliced all the meat from the turkey, wrapped it up, and put the carcass in the freezer. There was a good chance we wouldn’t be making soup anytime soon. Then I consolidated condiments and stacked casseroles until the table was empty and the refrigerator was full.

  “Hey, Floyd? Would you go wake up Mom? She wanted to get up now.”

  “Sure.”

  My phone rang. It was my friend Kathy. “I don’t want to sound like Nosy Nellie, but I heard there was an ambulance at your house a couple of hours ago. Is everything all right?”

  “No, Kathy. No, everything’s not okay.” I told her what happened.

  “Oh, I am so sorry,” she said. “What can I do?”

  “I think we’re okay for the moment. But thanks.”

  “If you need bedrooms, you know I’ve got six extra ones.”

  “Thanks. I might take you up on that.”

  Kathy had inherited her parents’ home, a rambling but imposing old plantation with a farmhouse the same age as ours. With columns across the front, hers was much more impressive.

  “It’s not a problem, not even one little bit. How are you doing? And Miss Virnell?”

  “It hasn’t sunk in yet.”

  “I understand. Let me know if . . .”

  But there was really nothing anyone could do besides say they were sorry for our loss. Bringing us food would’ve been pointless. It was Thanksgiving and every home in the country was overstocked. Besides, we had no appetite.

  I made a pot of coffee. When Mom came into the kitchen I poured her a cup. Floyd followed and I poured him a mug as well. I put the creamer on the table.

  “We should probably have a bit of a discussion. Do we know where Dad’s will might be?”

  “Yes,” she said. “There’s a shoebox labeled ‘important papers.’ We keep things in one spot in case we have to run from a hurricane. It’s on the top shelf in his chifforobe.”

  Our house was so old, it didn’t have closets. Every bedroom had at least one armoire and a chest of drawers or it had a chifforobe with hanging space in addition to drawers, or both.

  “I’ll get it.”

  I hurried to her bedroom, found the box, and returned to the kitchen. Mom opened it and flipped through the papers.

  “It’s not here,” she said. “I told him to leave it in the shoebox where it belonged.”

  “Pop didn’t take direction well,” Floyd said. “Maybe I’ll have some pie after all.”

  He cut himself a wedge of pumpkin pie and put it on a plate.

  “We have a lot of decisions to make,” I said. “Do we know if he wanted to be cremated or buried?”

  “Cremated,” Mom said. “And he wanted his ashes spread here on this land in the peach grove.”

  “Okay, so I can tell the funeral home that,” I said.

  “I thought Pop wanted to be buried, not cremated, near the edges of the peach grove,” Floyd said.

  “When did he tell you that?” Mom said.

  “Not too terribly long ago,” Floyd said. “Maybe last year or the year before. He said cemetery plots were too expensive. By the way, the pie’s good. Y’all want a slice?”

  “No thanks. Even if he didn’t say that, it’s still true,” Mom said. “Plots cost a small fortune. I’m pretty sure he wanted to be cremated.”

  “That’s a pretty big decision to make without being a hundred percent sure.” Floyd said.

  “No pie for me, thanks,” I said. “Well, without a will, we’d be winging it. I think we should make an effort to find the will.”

  “Fine. Let’s look around, but I’m positive he wanted to be cremated,” Mom said. “Of course, I would honor his wishes to go in the ground, but the last thing I need to see is my husband embalmed, lying there in a casket as dead as Kelsey’s cow, while everyone mumbles about how good he looks. No thank you.”

  “You’re certain?” Floyd asked.

  “One hundred percent,” Mom said.

  “All right then,” Floyd said.

  Mom’s waffling on Dad’s final wishes was unsettling, but I was truly relieved that Dad wanted to be cremated. Wakes with open caskets were so horribly real and surreal at the same time. A corpse was as dead a thing as can be, and there was no confusing it with the spirit that once resided within. It was your loved one. It was not your loved one. And depending on the cause of death and how prolonged the illness was, you could be facing something rather haunting and grotesque that might be hard to forget. Or not. In any and all cases, I was not even remotely curious about dead bodies. Apparently, my mother felt the same way. Hallelujah.

  The to-do list was growing. An obituary had to be written, calls had to be made. Would there be a religious service with a eulogy? Readings? Pop wasn’t so religious. He was more than an Easter and Christmas kind of churchgoer, but not a regular one, unless Mom asked.

  Still, so many questions had to be answered. What music would Pop have wanted at a service, if there was to be one? Probably “Amazing Grace” and “How Great Thou Art,” we decided. Who would put together a printed program? Maybe the church? Would we like to display photographs? Which ones? Did we know which prayer we’d like on his remembrance card? So many details. Something was bound to be overlooked. Someone was bound to be forgotten.

  By Saturday, the obituary ran in the Post and Courier, Pop was cremated, and we had a plan in place. The service would take place at our church, Hibben United Methodist Church on Monday evening at six. This was more practical for fr
iends who worked during the day and because there was to be no burial. Floyd’s daughter Sophie had flown in from Seattle with someone who appeared to be her very serious other, Michael Lawrence Runey III, who stated assertively that he wouldn’t let Sophie go through this funeral alone because they were so close. Ann, who arrived straight from Morristown, New Jersey, whispered to me that she had suspicions about those kinds of dramatic proclamations. I thought, Well, maybe he’s just a fawner who feels the need to announce himself like a visiting dignitary. Even Stephanie came from her commune in Vermont, about which I was anxious for details, as living on a commune was the raciest thing anyone in our family had ever done. Well, to my knowledge, anyway. Of course, Fred was there, having flown in on Friday morning. Shelby was arriving later in the day.

  So, as family funerals tend to become reunions, all the Thanksgiving food was warmed up and devoured, and my father was toasted long into the night. The tone was naturally somber, but the warmth and delight we all felt at being together under one roof could not be suppressed.

  “Pop would be so happy to see us all together,” Mom said. “I’m so happy all y’all came.”

  “All y’all?” Shelby said with a barely suppressed snicker.

  Everyone ignored her, and rightfully so.

  “We speak southern here,” Fred said with a quiet smile, forgiving her rudeness.

  “He was a great man,” my mother said, oblivious to Shelby’s remark. “Loved by so many.”

  “Yes, he sure was,” Fred said.

  “I’m sorry I never knew him,” Michael Lawrence Runey III said.

  “You would’ve loved him. Everyone did,” Sophie said.

  By that time, we had pushed back from the crowded table and we were wrapping up dessert.

  “The phone rang off the hook all day,” I said. “I hope the church is big enough.”

  “We have enough casseroles to feed half of Mount Pleasant,” Ann said.

  “Now our refrigerator is jammed too,” BJ said.

  “And about ten bricks of meat loaf,” Stephanie said. “Too bad I don’t eat red meat.”

  “Who brings meat loaf as a condolence?” Sophie said. “That’s super weird.”

  Everyone nodded, as meat loaf did seem a bit odd. Ham? Fine. Pound cake? Fine. Meat loaf? Publix must’ve had a fire sale on chopped meat.

  “What? Steph! No more hamburgers? You used to be the hamburger queen!” Ann said, teasing her little sister. “The next thing I know you’ll say you can’t live without quinoa and kale.”

  “Keen-what?” Floyd said.

  Stephanie gave a sly look to everyone around the table as if quinoa and kale were the keys to living forever. “Only if it’s organic,” she said.

  “Kale’s nasty,” Fred said. “Tastes metallic.”

  “Gimme a mess of collards any day of the week,” Floyd said. “And a bottle of Texas Pete.”

  “Collards are good eating,” I said. “Kale is tolerable if it’s cooked with fatback. But I want to hear about living on a commune. What’s it like?”

  “It’s like a kibbutz, I guess,” Stephanie said. “We share the work, the living space, and whatever we earn.”

  “Just like we do,” I said.

  “Yeah. It’s okay, I guess. But it’s getting old. You know, what appeals to you at one age doesn’t hold the same appeal as you get older.”

  “Good grief! You’re talking like you’re as old as Methuselah,” Mom said.

  “You’re a mere twenty-three,” Fred said.

  “No love life, huh?” BJ said.

  “Right,” Stephanie said and sighed.

  “So, Dad?” Ann asked. “Is BJ a mind reader?”

  “Only if the mind is organic,” BJ said.

  “So what’s your next move?” I asked Stephanie.

  “I don’t know. I mean, I love making goat cheese and I even love the silly goats. So I don’t know. I’m just thinking about it.”

  “You love goats?” Shelby said, incredulously. And she laughed. Alone. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No, not really,” Stephanie answered and bit her lip, embarrassed.

  If I could’ve read Stephanie’s mind I would’ve said she was thinking Shelby was a materialistic little pain in the neck. I was thinking Miss Shelby had a few lessons to learn. Like, you never laugh in the face of your own family members. It’s not nice.

  “Awesome,” Fred said to save the moment.

  “Well, you can always come home,” Floyd said. “But you won’t find any keen-wah on the table.”

  By the time we got to Monday, we would be exhausted from all the attention and from just the sheer energy it took to have such a full house of people. It was especially wonderful to see Floyd with his daughters and for Fred to be with them too. Shelby had taken a real shine to Sophie, probably because she understood the relevance of Starbucks, which was a very cool brand to their generation. And I think Sophie’s personality was more in line with Shelby’s. I heard Sophie promise Fred and Shelby that she’d come to their wedding. Of course Ann and Stephanie said they planned to be there too.

  “We need things to celebrate,” Ann said and we all agreed.

  With Pop gone, and my mother probably close to the trapdoor, I was soon to be the eldest. Now Floyd would be the old man. And we would be the last generation of South Carolina farmers in our family. We really should consider selling the land, after our mother went to heaven, of course. Not the house and the farm stand, but the peach groves and the other acres. Floyd had always talked about putting up a house near the creek. But maybe that piece of land was worth more than we thought because of its access to water. Neither one of us was getting any younger,.

  Maybe Stephanie? I wondered if she had the farming gene. Had she not run away to Vermont to do nearly exactly what we did here? But she was already tired of it. Certainly Fred and Shelby had no intentions of living here.

  Sophie? She worked for Starbucks, but what she did was so complicated I couldn’t get a handle on it. I knew she traveled around the world for research and development, eating croissants in France and waffles in Belgium, but how did that impact a coffee shop business? Well, she seemed happy with her strange boyfriend and she was well dressed, so she wasn’t going broke.

  “I’m so proud of you,” I said to her on the way to the funeral home that afternoon.

  “Oh, thanks, Aunt Diane,” she said.

  “So, are you going to marry Michael Lawrence Runey III?”

  “Probably not,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, Aunt Diane, he works for me.”

  I searched her face and then I realized what she meant.

  “Then why did he come?”

  “He always wanted to see Charleston. Isn’t Charleston like the number-one tourist destination in the world?”

  “I suppose it is!”

  But what did that say about Sophie? Given the current climate of charges of sexual misconduct, I hoped there was nothing going on between them that Sophie instigated. Not that it was any of my business, I told myself, and mentally took a vow not to ask her about it.

  We met with the funeral director at the funeral home to have a moment to contemplate Pop’s ashes and to have a brief private service. The plan was that they would drive us to the church in their limos. We would have the service. Afterward, there would be a reception in the library with light refreshments.

  As we gathered in the viewing room to say a few prayers with Pastor Walters from church, the strangest thing happened. Ann and Stephanie threw their arms around Mom and then Floyd. Sophie hugged Mom and then me. Pretty soon everyone was hugging someone and the overdue tears began to flow. Fred and Shelby hugged each other, and for the first time since he was a little boy, Fred wept. Seeing this, Floyd went to Fred and put his arms around him.

  Everyone except Shelby, BJ, and Michael Lawrence Runey III had something to say about how wonderful it was to be home and with one another, how they had nearly forgotten what it felt like to
be so loved, and how much they would miss Pop. And when Mom said that they should visit more often, everyone promised they’d do a better job of staying in touch.

  “Oh, I know you all have big lives, far away from here,” Mom said, “but it’s important to know where you still belong.”

  “I think what Mom means is that you are still loved and missed by us every day that you’re not here,” I said, passing a box of tissues around.

  “That’s right,” Floyd said. “The door may not be at the Ritz, but it’s always open.”

  Somehow Pastor Walters led us through the Lord’s Prayer and offered a reading from the Book of Psalms. When our private service was ended, we left the room and made our way to the waiting cars. The funeral director would deliver Pop’s ashes to the church in another car and place them on a special table at the end of the center aisle in the sanctuary.

  The service was lovely. My father would have been thrilled to know that so many of his customers and old friends took the time to come. The music was beautiful too. When it was all over we made our way to the library for coffee and cookies. The room was crowded and humid. Mom looked flushed.

  “Do you want to sit down?” I said.

  “Yes, here, take my purse,” she said. “Isn’t it too warm in here? Can we open a window?”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Floyd said, and adjusted the thermostat.

  I looked up into the face of Alden. He was coming over to offer his sympathies. He was with a woman. A very pretty woman who was a few years younger than I was, dressed very fashionably, with a good haircut.

  “Hello, Diane,” he said. “I’m so sorry about Pop. Miss Virnell? I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  I just stared at him. Maybe I mumbled thank you for coming. I can’t recall.

  “Thank you, Alden,” Mom said. “And who’s your friend?”

  “Oh, sorry!” Alden said. “Of course. This is my friend Betsy Beyer. We met at my niece’s wedding.”

  “And the rest is history!” Betsy said, smiling and then becoming serious. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  I wanted to slap her face.

  They made more small talk and then walked away. I knew I was going to hear about it from Mom.

  “So what?” I said to Mom.