by Tony Abbott
He frowned, as if not understanding me. “We sometimes have help, you know. Writing obituaries. If we are overloaded.”
“Who?” I asked.
“With the deceased, of course,” he said, continuing his look. “This is St. Petersburg. They call it —”
“No, I mean, who helped you with my grandmother’s obituary?”
Now he seemed offended. He drew back. “Honestly, son, I don’t remember. Now, if you’ll take your seat, please. The guests are beginning to arrive. We must hurry along.”
Hurry? Why?
CHAPTER TEN
It was about five of eleven when I heard rumbling and pop-popping outside, like cars backfiring. Or maybe it was a holdup. When the outer doors creaked, there was a rustle of coat hangers — who wears coats on a day like this? — and Chalmers began to earn his keep, welcoming an assortment of people into the room.
None of them looked under a hundred fifty years old. The ones who didn’t actually roll into the room in wheelchairs staggered to their seats like toys when their batteries run out. The second or third person into the room was a stick figure of a man with a thin white line of mustache, practically no hair, and wearing a slouchy black beret. He slid through the door and took a seat in the back. He looked around so slowly, it seemed if he were filming a movie with cameras in his eyes. He never took off his beret, and his lips moved all the time. It figures that he would be talking to himself. Crazy man. I didn’t make eye contact.
At eleven sharp Chalmers eased his way back to the podium, pausing only to open the lid of the casket, which gave me a shudder. Even sitting, I could see the sharp white profile of my grandmother’s hollow face above the side of the box. I felt as if someone were sticking icy needles up and down my back.
I turned away to see about ten people in the room now, when the funeral director finally cleared his throat to begin the service. As I turned back, I couldn’t help glancing past him to the casket, and I saw more of my grandmother’s face than before. Had she moved? Was she trying to get up? Was she trying to . . . fly?
No. I’d just shifted up in my chair.
“Thank you all for com —,” Chalmers began. He stopped. His eyes were following something moving slowly across the back of the room.
What now?
Turning yet again, I saw a man in a black suit standing behind the back row. Except that he wasn’t standing behind the back row, he was sitting down in it! I discovered this when he realized that everyone was looking at him, and he actually stood up from his seat. He must have been over six and a half feet tall! His suit, as black and as shiny as oil, was only a bit shorter than a theater curtain. But he was as narrow as a pole, with a little white face on top. He bowed at all the eyes looking at him, then eased backwards out of the room, murmuring: “Excuse please. Sorry. Excuse please.”
I almost laughed out loud when I thought of what Hector would think and imagined the look on his face as he said, “Well, he’s tall.”
But no sooner had the tall man left than a very curvy lady in a low-cut purple suit came in. I mean, what exactly was all this? She had a lacy purple veil draped down from her purple hat. It completely hid the lower half of her face, letting only her dark eyes peer through. She sat in the seat left empty by the tall man.
Finally, a round guy about the size of a fourth grader, with reddish skin and a long gray beard streaked with red, sat at the far end of the row that Mr. Beret was in. They shared a cold stare, and the round man murmured, “Zo . . . zo . . . zo . . .”
“Dad, who the heck are these —,” I started, but he shushed me as Chalmers cleared his throat once more and finally began to speak.
“Dearly beloved friends of Agnes Monroe Huff . . .”
He went on for a while. It was mostly general talk about souls and spirits and the path of life taking strange turns. Loves and friendships. Health and sickness. Ups and downs. When he said “ups and downs,” I remembered what my mom had said about Dad. I wondered what people really meant by it and whether ups and downs were hereditary. What was I having right then? An up or a down?
When I glanced at Mrs. K, she was listening intently, her white face wrinkled up in a white smile.
I wanted to turn and look at the purple lady again, but it would have seemed too noticeable, so I didn’t and sat still. I must have zoned out for a little because when I perked up and listened again, Chalmers was going on about the loving soul of someone named Marnie who had merely “flown” through our lives and who still possessed a child’s spirit, or possessed a child’s spirit again, or was possessed by the spirit of a child or something.
Marnie?
Who was Marnie? This morning’s other dead person?
“Oh, dear,” Mrs. K whispered, holding my arm. “No, no. That’s not right.”
I’ll say. The others around us took forever to wake up. When they did, I’ll bet they were wondering if they were at the wrong funeral, and then, considering the refreshments (which we could hear being prepared on the other side of the wall), if there was any way that they might actually have known this Marnie person.
I turned. “Dad. We should tell him. . . .”
But even as I said that, my father got up from his seat. He went past the podium, ignoring Chalmers, and knelt by the coffin, sobbing into his hands and trembling silently the whole time. I felt embarrassed for a second, then scared. Was this what he had kept to himself all these years? Was he really that broken up about her?
He did this for a long time, while Mrs. K held my hand tightly.
Nobody moved. The place was so quiet, except for the whispering of Chalmers and Dad’s whimpering. Finally the crash of silverware for the reception came from behind the wall, and (besides being glad that Dad had arranged for food), I was relieved when everything seemed to reset to normal.
Chalmers rustled a page on the podium and called Grandma “our dear Agnes,” and the weirdness with the names was over. My father, however, didn’t stop crying.
I glanced around then and saw the lawn mower girl, Dia, sitting by herself a few rows back. I wanted to catch her eye. I was ready with a little smile, but she didn’t look away from Dad. She seemed sad, her eyes watery. I realized then that she probably knew my grandmother better than I did. I didn’t know her because we didn’t talk about her much at home. But was that any excuse? I felt suddenly cold all over, a bad grandson.
“Your father loved his mother so,” Mrs. Keese whispered to me.
I was so dense. I hadn’t gotten it before. It wasn’t a crazy, flying, alligator-battling old lady who was lying dead here. It was his mother. It didn’t matter now that she had always been sick. She had died. She’d left him. Left her house. Left the world. And he was sad. His heart was broken. He missed her. He had no father but a made-up one, and he missed his mother.
Bending lower to the casket, he kissed the folded white hands inside it as if he wanted to fall in there after her.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Thirty incredibly long minutes later, it was over. The reception I had heard being set up was not for us. In fact, I learned from Chalmers that there was no reception.
“Cold cuts? In a funeral home?” he said, looking puzzled.
“Well, I just thought —”
“Slices of salami, ham, provolone — here?” He waved his hands around. “Olives? Oh, no, no, son.”
The jangling forks and spoons I had heard earlier were undertaker instruments, he told me, which freaked me out more than nearly everything that had happened. I imagined sliced legs on silver trays.
I couldn’t get outside fast enough. In the sunshine blazing across the white sidewalk, my dazed father and I shook hands with people for about five minutes.
Dia was in line with the others, and I shook her hand. “Listen,” I said. “I . . .” I seized up. My fingers gestured in the air as if I was trying to talk with them.
“I’m sorry about your grandmother,” she said.
I nodded and was halfway into a swallow when my a
ttention was suddenly taken by a man with a small waist and a large chest, and she walked away. The man hobbled over on bowed legs, saying he was “shorry” for our “losh.” As soon as he left, the purple lady with the veil was there, just nodding, answering nothing, saying nothing. She held out a purple glove and shook my father’s hand, then mine. Her hand was enormous and her grip weirdly strong. Next to her was the man with the beret and the mustache, who had tiny eyes, one of which rolled slightly outward. He looked at my father, then rolled his eyes to look at me for what I thought was way too long. I tried to smile.
He cleared his throat. “You must be Jason,” he said.
“Did you know my grandmother?” I asked in a variation of my conversation starter.
“Coincidentally, yes,” he said softly. “Otherwise, it would be odd for me to be here, don’t you think?”
That confused me and made me feel a little dumb.
But he went on in a whisper. “Good luck, kid.”
“Excuse me —”
“Zat vuz nice, yunk man!” interrupted the barrel-shaped red-and-gray-bearded guy, nudging his way roughly past Mr. Beret. His eyes twinkled as he spoke. I didn’t know whether he was talking about what Chalmers had said, the flowers, the casket, or something else. He bowed very low to both me and my father. He clicked his heels, or tried to. When he put his feet together, he wobbled sharply, and the man with the beret grabbed him to keep him from falling. They exchanged frosty looks again and quickly ungrabbed each other. Mr. Beret left in a snit, then the German man nodded with a bright, “Goot day!” He walked the other way down the sidewalk.
My head was aching. Who let the clowns in? Who were these people? Friends of Grandma’s? Suddenly, the whole flying thing didn’t sound so strange. Could I please just be alone for a while?
I wondered if it was wrong to phone Hector from the funeral home. I needed to laugh.
The whole thing ended with the sound of popping from the parking lot again, which I decided actually was a car backfiring. Soon my father, Mrs. K, and I were on the sidewalk alone with the director, who alternately looked at his watch and squinted down the street.
“Perhaps we should . . . ,” he said, motioning to the door.
“Of course,” my dad answered, and the two of them went inside to finalize the bill. You have to pay a lot for people to die.
For ancient folks on the tail end of life, everyone who came to the funeral seemed to have somewhere else to be and had to be there right then. I was a little shocked by the way they had all zipped away so quickly, and I told this to Mrs. Keefe.
“Oh, no. It’s past eleven-thirty, dear,” Mrs. Keese said, her teeth beginning to slip. “Early bird lunch has been going nearly an hour.” She made a nod to the end of the street. I squinted into the white air across the white street to a white building with a set of white revolving doors. It was blurry in the haze from the street, but I just made out the last of the funeral guests entering a place called The Driftwood Cafeteria.
Not moving her eyes from the distant doors, she flicked the hinged shades down onto her glasses. “Which reminds me,” she said. “I’m getting a little hungry myself. I wonder what today’s soup is. . . .”
“But what about the cemetery?” I asked. “Aren’t you coming with us? To say good-bye to Grandma?”
She pressed my hand tightly. “Jason, she’s not here anymore.”
A moment later, she was staggering across the street herself. “Don’t wait for me, honey. I’ll find a ride home!”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Grandma’s house was closer to Bay Pines Cemetery than to Brent’s, so Dad decided at the last minute to follow the hearse in his rental car rather than going in Mr. Chalmers’ black limousine and having to return to the home.
So there we were: driving the minuscule green Toyota Insect, a black funeral flag suction-cupped to the front fender, behind the thirty-five-foot hearse: a dorky death procession of two.
Still all puffy, my dad was hunched in the seat like a clown at a circus, craning his neck to see out the tiny windshield at the stoplights. He snorted. “Are they seriously going to stop traffic for us? People will cross right in front of us. Why is the hearse driving so fast? Everyone’s looking. The police will crack up laughing. Jeez, Jason, we should have taken the black car. This is stupid. It’s my mother, after all! Why couldn’t I take the other car? Dumb stupid bozo car!”
The thunk of dirt on the casket gave me the creeps the way it echoed. The box was nearly empty, after all. There was nothing left of Grandma by the time they’d picked her up from the floor or the couch or the bathroom or wherever it was that she had her stroke. I remembered how thin she was in that photo. I had helped my father and Chalmers and two cemetery men carry the coffin from the hearse to the grave site. She must have been as light as a feather, and I felt so heavy and so tired.
“She’s not here anymore,” Mrs. K had said.
Hector! Get me out of here!
When we returned to the car, I took one last look at the grave site. A small backhoe was already pushing dirt into the hole. It seemed harsh and cold and final. It was really over now.
“Hecky says bye,” I whispered.
Dad and I drove home saying nothing. I couldn’t find any words. It smelled of rain, but none came. A few gray clouds passed overhead, the bugs got quieter, the clouds vanished, the bugs got loud again. It was Florida. It was sunny. Which reminded me of something that Randy Halbert had told us. One of the old-time newspapers used to be free for each day the sun didn’t come out. They gave away free papers, like, almost never in thirty years.
St. Petersburg was the Sunshine City. The Sunshine City in the Sunshine State. Get used to it.
“Hey, Hector,” I said later that night. “It’s my daily ‘I hate Florida’ call.”
“So how are you feeling about Florida exactly?”
“I hate it.”
“Bold statement. The news here is that all those changes I told you about got reversed. There’s nothing happening. It’s totally boring. When you coming home?”
“Not soon enough.”
“You mean you don’t like Florida?”
“I hate it.”
My father had had a couple of beers and was nearly asleep. I went to sleep, too. On the couch in the Florida room. After I found out that Grandma had had her stroke in my bed.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Dumpster delivery truck came early Saturday and woke me up with its incredible thudding and banging and clunking. My dad had to run out in his pajamas and repark the Subaru Termite so the guy could leave the Dumpster in the driveway.
There was so much junk! The garage was filled with boxes and bags of I don’t even know what and millions of papers and magazines like a library. Life magazines and Time magazines. When I saw the towering stacks of twined-up newspapers from the last fifteen years, I wondered how many of them Grandma had gotten for free. Dad arranged for a church to pick up some of the big pieces of furniture for a shelter they sponsored, then dragged her old clothes from the closet, searched the pockets, sorted them in piles by type, then folded them (at first, then later just stuffed them) into garbage bags.
Mrs. Keach told him where the Goodwill truck was. He made three trips in the car while I started tossing stuff in the Dumpster that I knew wasn’t good enough to sell or donate.
It was afternoon, and Dad was on his last trip when I slumped, exhausted, onto a chair in the living room. The white carton Mrs. K had taken from Grandma’s closet sat next to me on the floor. Taped on it was her note in black marker: Very Important Papers!!! I wondered what she — or Grandma — would consider very important, so I opened the carton flaps and lifted out a stack of yellow folders filled with old papers. My dad had already gotten the will and the deed to the house from a safe deposit box at the bank, but this was other stuff. Old tax records, home insurance policies, store credits, bills, receipts, manuals for appliances, bank statements, all kinds of records you probably didn’t need but
couldn’t just throw out.
Grandma had signed some of them. On the old ones from the 1960s and ’70s, her signature was thin and neat. Later ones were signed more raggedly. On the very recent ones her writing was no more than a scribble. On one, from fewer than ten years ago, there was a scrawl followed by initials ending in K. Mrs. Keesh, maybe? I couldn’t tell.
I was just about to leave the carton for Dad to go through when I found something that didn’t belong. In a folder marked EB was a copy of an old magazine. But it wasn’t like Time or Life or National Geographic.
The magazine was called Bizarre Mysteries and was dated October 1944. On the cover under the big yellow title was a dark, crazy picture. A man in a suit and tie was crouching, holding a machine gun and firing it. His eyes were staring in terror at something outside the frame of the picture. His jaw was set hard. His suit was ripped, and there was a streak of bright red blood on his arm. It matched the color of his tie. A beautiful woman in a red dress (the same color as the blood and the tie) seemed to be leaping down next to him from a height. Her eyes were filled with fear like his, but a pistol in her hand was blazing with orange flame as she fired at someone or something in the same direction as he was.
But that wasn’t the most amazing thing. Behind them a giant alligator lay on its back, its massive jaws hanging open loosely.
Even that wasn’t the most startling thing. Behind the alligator were three ghoulish-looking creatures, hardly human, holding long, curved daggers. They wore billowy black capes that shimmered in wild colors like an oily rainbow. They looked like demented clowns, their skull-like heads silhouetted against the dull glow of the background. They were ready to pounce on the man and the woman, who obviously didn’t know they were there. To make matters worse, the couple seemed to be in a dismal swamp somewhere, with thick vines and wispy moss hanging down from above. And they were up to their ankles in bubbling black water.
