by Katie Ashley
Catcher fucking Mains—the man with ocean-blue, bedroom eyes, a body to die for, and a drop-dead sexy smile.
Craning my neck, I glared at him over my shoulder. If I managed to get out of this situation alive, I wasn’t sure if I was going to kill him or screw him. It was a toss-up.
After the minister spoke the final words of Mr. Garett Brown’s eulogy, I made my way down the carpeted aisle. As the soft organ music piped in via the overhead speakers reached an emotional crescendo, I turned to face the mourners packed into the padded chapel pews. Appearing like a cross between a Miss America and an air traffic controller, I slowly lifted my arms to guide the crowd to rise from their seats. Once everyone was on their feet, I motioned for the family to begin exiting their pew.
As crazy as it might sound, there was a true art to presiding over a funeral. It was just one of the many things I had learned over the years from observing my late father and grandfather. As my grandfather had once said, “Run a funeral like a side show, and you’ll be out of business.” People were inevitably drawn to pomp and pageantry. Even though their loved one might have been a pauper, they wanted the same gallantry afforded to the funeral as a king or president’s.
My grandfather had opened Sullivan’s Funeral Home in 1955, and it had been a family operation ever since. Since I came from a large, extended family, everyone from aunts, uncles, and cousins pitched in from time to time. Growing up in a funeral home wasn’t all death and sadness. I had a lot of happy, lively memories under this roof. I used to play hide and seek with my younger brother, Allen, where one of us would always end up wedged behind a casket to hide out. I’d spent hours laid out on the chapel’s padded benches reading the newest Babysitters Club or Sweet Valley High books. My house had always been filled with people. I had learned at an early age to work a crowd, and my father had me helping out with viewings and services by the time I turned thirteen. “Livvie has the gift,” he would say with pride sparkling in his brown eyes.
The memory of my father sent an ache through my chest. He had died five years ago after a very short battle with pancreatic cancer. Although I had experienced personal loss with grandparents and other family members, it was my father’s death that had brought true understanding and empathy for what other families were experiencing. It wasn’t often that you got to meet your real life hero, but I had been blessed to have him for a father.
When the last of the “reserved” benches had emptied, I followed the crowd out the chapel door into the sunshine. After supervising the loading of the casket into the hearse, I turned to the deceased’s wife. I forced a sympathetic smile to my face. While friends and family had wept unabashedly, Felicia Brown had remained an ice queen. Moreover, her grief had been pretty much extinct over the last few days, and in its place, she’d been one of the most demanding bitches I’d had to deal with in a long time. She wanted the VIP treatment despite having pulled all the cheapskate punches like wanting a low-end casket while she stood draped in diamonds.
“It’s time for you to get into the car.” I motioned to the black Lincoln sedan that we provided to escort the next of kin. Regardless of what had happened over the last few days, I afforded her the same warmth and kindness as I would to an actually bereaved family member. After all, in times like these a kind word was worth a million, even to an asshole. Of course, silently I was saying, “Bye, Felicia.” in my head.
Felicia nodded in agreement and turned to the crowd behind her. “Jerry, why don’t you ride with me?” she asked the tall, Silver Fox of a man who was standing next to her.
I motioned for Todd, one of our attendants, to open the back door of the car. The sound of a growl behind me caused me to jump out of my skin. Since I knew Motown, the neighborhood stray Pit Bull I’d adopted and often brought to work with me, was upstairs in the family quarters, I had to wonder what wild animal had come out of the woods. When I whirled around, I saw Felicia’s oldest son, Gregg, wearing a venomous look. “Oh, that’s just rich. It isn’t enough you were fucking Jerry while my father was on life support, but now you want him to ride in the car with you on the way to bury him!”
As an incredulous hush fell over the mourners, I drew my shoulders back preparing myself for the potential verbal assault to come. After all, this wasn’t my first time at the rodeo, so to speak. I was pretty much a pro at handling scenes like this. There were many times I’d witnessed the old adage that death brings out the worst in people. It brings out the claws that’s for sure.
After she cast a glance over the crowd, Felicia fidgeted nervously with the collar of her designer suit. “Why, Gregg, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Gregg rolled his eyes. “Like hell you don’t. I don’t guess you remember the other times either,” he spat.
The impeccable reserve slowly slid from Felicia’s face and was replaced by thinly veiled anger. “Don’t you dare make a scene at your father’s funeral!” she hissed back at Gregg. When she realized what she had done, she quickly recovered to give a weak smile to the other mourners.
“Me make a scene? You’re the one acting like the grief-stricken wife when all you’ve ever done is be unfaithful,” Gregg countered.
Sensing this was about to get even uglier, I tried stepping between them to diffuse the situation. “Why don’t we proceed on to the cemetery?” I suggested. My gaze landed on the face of Felicia’s younger son standing begrudgingly beside his brother. “Mark, why don’t you ride with your mother?”
Gregg snorted contemptuously. “Sure, pick Mark. He was always Dad’s favorite. Hell, he’s everyone’s favorite.” A hateful gleam burned in his green eyes. “Well, I’m setting the record straight now. Mark’s not even my father’s son!”
Gasps of astonishment rippled through the crowd while Felicia’s face turned pasty white. Raising her eyes to the shocked faces around her, she said, “I’m sorry everyone. Gregg’s just so grief-stricken he doesn’t know what he’s saying.”
“So upset my ass. I’m not too upset to know that Jim, our very own UPS man, is Mark’s father,” he countered.
The crowd turned with astonished eyes to the back of the crowd where Jim the UPS man stood. When he lowered his eyes to the pavement in defeat, it was all the confirmation anyone needed. The crowd turned their gaze back to Felicia and Gregg.
Suddenly Mark lunged at Gregg. “You bastard! How dare you?” He swung a fist into Gregg’s face and then in his abdomen. Gregg collapsed onto the pavement, his nose pouring with blood.
Mark stood over him. “It’s not enough that you had to screw my ex-wife to make me jealous, but now you have to embarrass me in front of all of these people.”
I had just opened my mouth to once again plead with them to stop when Mr. Brown’s best friend stepped forward. “You boys stop this right now. I can’t believe you’d do this at your own father’s funeral.”
Mark reluctantly helped Gregg to his feet as they both stood to face their accuser. “Like you have any room to be talking, Ed,” Gregg grumbled, as he held his head back to stop his bleeding nose.
Ed’s face paled slightly as his hands went to fiddle with his tie. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Mark shook his head. “You honestly have the gall to come here when everyone knows that you were sleeping with my father,” he countered.
At the accusation that not only was the deceased man’s wife a notorious adulterer, his youngest son was not biologically his, but he was a bisexual, one woman in the crowd fainted and the rest were left in hushed astonishment.
All the color drained from Ed’s face. “How did you know?”.
Gregg looked at Mark before he spoke. “We knew something was up when you and dad went on all those fishing trips. Alone.”
Ed straightened his shoulders as he looked around at the wide-eyed, open-mouthed faces. “Fine. It’s true. I loved Paul Brown for forty years, and he loved me. He certainly deserved better than his wife and sons making a scene at his funeral.”
&nbs
p; “Oh shut up, Ed,” Gregg said.
Mr. Brown’s middle son, Wes, stepped into the fray. “It’s true. You two assholes should be ashamed of yourselves. But why am I surprised? I mean, it’s always been about you two. You practically sucked the life out of Dad. Gregg—the washed-up football god turned lush, and Mark—the sex and gambling addict.”
Mark rolled his eyes. “Oh get bent, drama queen.”
Given what happened next, I guess Wes had been Jan Brady’d one too many times in his life because he just snapped. He jerked a pistol out from inside his suit pocket. At the sight of the gun, pandemonium broke out. People began screaming and scrambling away. Immediately, I dug my phone out of my suit pocket and dialed 911.
“What the hell are you doing, Wes?” Gregg demanded.
“If you two aren’t going to quit making a scene voluntarily, I’m going to make you.”
“Like waving a gun around isn’t making a scene, dumbass,” Mark replied.
“It’s probably not even loaded,” Gregg mused.
Wes narrowed his eyes at Gregg before firing off a shot at his feet. The screams and shouting rose up again as Gregg began moonwalking like he was in a Michael Jackson video. “Jesus Christ, are you crazy?”
“I couldn’t get you to listen to me,” Wes replied, his tone eerily calm.
When I tried to step forward, Wes swung his arm around to train the pistol on me. I skidded to a stop and quickly threw up my hands, sending my phone clattering to the pavement. “Wes, I understand that you’re hurt and angry with your brothers, but surely, we can resolve this without violence,” I suggested.
Wes cocked his head at me. “You’ve seen my family. What do you think?”
At that moment, Earl, one of our other attendants, appeared in the doorway with two stands of floral arrangements. From his horrified expression, I’m sure he had anticipated the flower van to be waiting on him, not a hostage situation.
The sight of the flowers put an idea in my head, and I didn’t stop to question it. “Don’t drop the casket!” I screeched.
With Wes and his brothers now distracted, I lunged over at Earl and snatched the tallest of the floral wreaths out of his hand. Using all the strength I had, I lobbed Wes in the back of the head with my floral weaponry. “What the—” he started to demand, but I whacked him in the face. As Wes sputtered and choked on a mouthful of football mums, I went for his crotch, making sure to bring the wire part of the arrangement against his dick.
As he screamed in agony, the gun fell from his hands. I dropped the wreath, grabbed the gun, and pointed it at Wes as he writhed back and forth in pain.
“What a pussy,” Mark muttered.
“Shut. Up,” Wes huffed through his clenched teeth.
“Way to go, Liv,” Todd mused.
With a wink, I replied, “All in a day’s work.”
Outwardly, I put on a façade of fake bravado while inwardly, I was wondering if I didn’t need a clean pair of panties because I might’ve pissed myself from fear.
After the police came to arrest the Brown brothers for several misdemeanors, the small crowd that was left got in their cars for the procession to the cemetery. Amidst all the craziness, we still had to bury poor Mr. Brown. Thankfully, it went off without any more gun wielding drama.
By the time I arrived back at the funeral home from supervising the burial, I was emotionally and physically drained. When I entered my office, I found Allen sitting behind my desk with his feet propped up. He cradled the phone receiver between his shoulder and neck as he read from the folder in front of him. From the sound of it, he was calling in a claim on a life insurance policy.
I shot him a pissed look before flopping down on the leather loveseat across from my desk. I moaned in ecstasy as I slid my heels off. Allen was not only my co-worker. He was also co-owner in the funeral home. It had been willed to the both of us upon our father’s death. At the time, Allen was only twenty, and the last thing he wanted was to have anything to do with the death business. But over the years, he had slowly come to embrace it. Since he hadn’t been to mortuary school, he used his finance degree to manage the financial side of the business. He also helped out with funeral planning as well as in the transportation department aka picking up the bodies.
Although Allen had yet to marry, his single status didn’t seem to grieve our mother quite as much as mine did. Maybe it was because as a woman I was supposed to marry young while my brother was allowed to be a swinging bachelor sowing his wild oats before settling down. Quite a few ladies had tried to get their hooks in Allen, but so far, he had managed to evade them. While he would never admit it, I knew his heart belonged to Maggie, the local florist. Although it wasn’t part of his job description, he was forever volunteering to go do floral pickups.
“Yeah, thanks, Bernie. Talk to you later.” When Allen hung up, he rose out of my chair.
“Our newest customer is waiting for you in the prep room.”
I stilled rubbing my feet. “Ugh, fabulous.” Considering the afternoon I’d had, I wanted nothing more than a glass of wine and a warm bath, but it didn’t look like I was going to get either of them.
An amused look twinkled in Allen’s dark eyes. “So I hear you had a little scuffle while I was gone.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’d hardly call it a ‘scuffle’. Just one guy got punched. Well, two if you consider me hitting that fool with the floral arrangement.”
Allen grinned. “First rule of Funeral Home Fight Club: No one talks about Funeral Home Fight Club.”
“Har-fucking-har,” I muttered, as I rose to my feet.
After walking over to my desk, I held out my hand, and Allen passed me the tan folder with the deceased’s information. I glanced down at the folder. “Oh, no, it’s Mr. Peterson.” At Allen’s blank look, I said, “Don’t you remember trick-or-treating at his house back in the day? His wife always made cookies and candy for us.”
Allen slowly nodded his head. “Damn, he got old.”
“He was old back then. He’s pretty much ancient now.” I grimaced. “Well, he was ancient.”
That was one of the hardest aspects of being a mortician in the town you grew up in. You pretty much knew ninety percent of everyone who was laid out on the mortuary table. Sometimes it was easier aspirating organs and draining blood from people you didn’t know. It had been excruciating, but I had forced myself to prepare my father. I felt I had owed him that much for all the love and support he’d given me over the years, not to mention teaching me all I knew.
I tucked the folder under my arm before heading out the door. My footsteps echoed through the silence as I made my way down the familiar hallway lined with family portraits. Allen and I had been the third generation of Sullivan’s to live in the house. My grandparents had bought the sprawling Victorian monstrosity when my dad was just a baby. Because of my grandfather’s gift at body preparation, the other funeral home in town quickly went out of business.
It wasn’t too long before people from surrounding counties started bringing their deceased to him. Business boomed as did my grandparent’s family. After trying to corral five children in the upstairs area during visitation and funerals, my grandmother insisted on a home of their own. Since my grandfather did everything she asked out of both love and fear, they bought the house next door to live in, leaving the family quarters abandoned for almost twenty years.
As the oldest son and heir to the Sullivan Funeral Home empire, my dad was offered the living quarters when he married my mom, and they had happily accepted. Well, my mom had been less than thrilled at first, but she knew when she married my dad that the death business was part of his life. He had sweetened the pot by having the upstairs gutted and remodeled to make a separate living room and kitchen along with three bedrooms and two baths. He also had the back staircase redone, so that she could get upstairs to our house without having to go through the funeral home.
After pouring myself a cup of coffee in the community kitchen, I walked back do
wn the hall to the door labeled Employees Only. I typed in the code on the keypad before stepping into the preparation room where Mr. Peterson awaited me. Turning on the switch to my right sent the florescent lights above my head humming to life.
I’m sure most people would imagine a body preparation room that resembled something out of Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. Sadly, that wasn’t the case. You had one wall of cabinets filled with everything from cosmetics to replacement eyeballs. In the center of the room was a stainless steel mortuary table that sat over a drain. Beside the table were the machines for embalming.
Before I went over to the table, I flicked on the stereo system. Whenever I worked on a body, I made sure I had music. Being a mortician was kind of lonely work. It wasn’t like you could carry on meaningful conversations with the deceased. So having music not only helped to pass the time, but it helped to fill the silence. Since my father had been a huge lover of the oldies, I tended to lean towards Motown. Out of respect for the dead, I didn’t play anything that could be perceived as offensive.
As the upbeat tempo of The Temptations Ain’t Too Proud to Beg pumped through the speakers, I got down to business working on Mr. Peterson. Considering he was a ninety-year-old stroke victim, the prep was fairly easy. You did your standard wash down with antiseptic soap. It wasn’t just about giving the deceased that final shower or bath before the beyond—it was also meant to kill any bacteria. The death process wreaked some nasty shit on a body.
Once that was finished, it was time to drain the body of blood. In my father and grandfather’s day, they liked to go through the femoral artery in the thigh up to the heart. For me, that was too much guess work, and the last thing I wanted to do was flood the chest cavity with blood.
