by Molly Harper
Frankie put her phone aside with a groan. She shoved her burger into her mouth and chewed glumly. “I know. My parents are just worried and I can’t tell them where I am, because if I did, you’d have three McCreadys in here freakin’ out instead of just me.”
“You lie to your parents? I’m oddly disappointed by that. You seem so close.”
“We are close. We are. I just need to protect them from certain information because otherwise they get sent into this weird panic spiral where they smother me with their love and I end up filled with frustrated rage-slash-guilt.”
“Have you ever tried telling them to back off?”
“Yes, in many ways, and they always have some very reasonable excuse as to why it’s okay to stomp all over my life because they worry so much.”
“So you stay frustrated and guilty because it’s easier?”
“Says the guy who knows exactly jack squat about my life.”
He waved in the general direction of her head with his fork. “I’m just sayin’ that most parents would be a little put off by the rainbow hair and the clothes and the mortician thing, but yours? I’m thinking if I went into your parents’ house right now, they would have some sort of sculpture made out of your eyelashes.”
She pulled a horrified face, almost revealing a mouthful of onion ring. She clapped a hand over her lips and swallowed. “First of all, having your child work with dead bodies isn’t all that shocking in a family that runs a funeral home. In fact, it’s sort of a chosen-one-in-every-generation thing, if you want that funeral home to continue running.”
“Is there a ‘second’? How do you explain your parents’ bizarre devotion?” he asked.
“You gotta understand, my mom and dad planned on having a house full, but it just didn’t work out for them. I was my parents’ miracle baby after years of trying, so they were already prone to thinking I was the greatest thing ever. And when you have what you consider to be a miracle baby, and then that baby gets sick and ends up hospitalized for most of her childhood, it’s pretty easy to find the bright side to every day she’s breathing.”
“You were sick?”
She nodded. “You could say that I was very closely supervised when I was a kid. They had a tendency to freak out when I got the tiniest little fever, and I didn’t like upsetting them, so when I started feeling tired all the time and getting bruises in weird places, I didn’t say anything. I was only eight and I didn’t understand those were early warning signs for leukemia.”
“What?”
“Yeah, a really nasty rare form of it. I had this cold that wouldn’t go away. It just lingered on for weeks. When I finally got sick enough that I couldn’t hide it and Mama took me to the doctor, well, he got a little pissy with them for not noticing earlier. I don’t think either parent ever really recovered from that. They spent years driving me back and forth to St. Jude, sitting with me through chemo, making little hats to cover my bald head. There were days they said good-bye to me and weren’t sure if they’d come back to find me breathing.”
“You were bald?”
“As an egg,” she said, nodding. “The chemo did a number on me. Took years for my hair to grow back, and when it did, I swore the first thing I would do when it was long enough was dye it purple, bright, bright purple. So everybody would know that I had hair again.”
“Reasonable.”
“I thought so. And I never really stopped,” she said, waving at her hair with its purple and blue highlights. “Whenever I get too wound up, my mama blames it on my ‘triple dose’ of McCready—Uncle Stan was able to donate bone marrow when I was strong enough, and then Duffy a while later. But Mama always forgives me, no matter what I do. It’s possible that the rainbow hair and the weird clothes may have sprung from a pathological need to see how far I could push my parents before they got angry with me. The answer was ‘pretty dang far.’ And then it was more about me being a grown-ass woman in a small town. And if I want purple and blue hair, I should have purple and blue hair, no matter what anyone else thinks. That’s more of that triple dose of McCready stubbornness; try not to be terrified.”
“Too late,” he muttered around his last bite of sandwich. “But you’re okay now?”
“Sure, my doctors say I’m healthy as a horse. Very little chance of recurrence,” she said, avoiding eye contact. He didn’t need to know that she was a self-obsessed hypochondriac who saw cancer in every twinge. She slid her onion rings closer to the bars, within his reach. “But it led to my current career, so it wasn’t all bad.”
“This time you’re going to have to explain the connection to me,” he said. She smiled as he took an onion ring and bit into it.
She sipped a long draw from her milkshake. “Well, I spent a good chunk of my childhood knowing that I could die at any time. That my cancer could get worse. That a cold could take me out. I came dangerously close to becoming an agoraphobic tween. I decided that I had to stop being scared of death, because otherwise I was going to spend my life too scared to live it. I forced myself to go into the mortuary and spent time with Uncle Junior. At first, it was scary and gross and I had nightmares like you wouldn’t believe. Mostly about my own funeral. But eventually, it wasn’t so scary. It was just science. And I’d always been really good with science. Uncle Junior taught me everything I know about takin’ care of the bodies while givin’ them dignity. He taught me all of the tricks to make them look like themselves, so their loved ones have something to comfort them before the burial. He helped me see the beauty in death alongside the inescapable finality. Also, he taught me that when somethin’ scares you, you pull your bootstraps up and give it the finger, so it knows who it’s messin’ with.”
“You were a child when he taught you this?” he asked, balling up their food wrappers and tossing them in Ike’s paper bag.
Frankie explained, “He was trying to help me. I am blessed with multiple father figures, but Junior probably had the biggest impact on me. Please don’t ever tell my daddy that.” She frowned, her bottom lip trembling a little. “His was the only funeral preparation I’ve ever bowed out on. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I had to call in a pathologist friend in Atlanta.”
“That’s . . . pretty normal, I would say. I could barely bring myself to go to my dad’s funeral, and I didn’t have to touch the body.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize your dad had passed.”
“Just a few years ago. He was a cop.”
“Really?” Frankie’s brows rose. “Wow, that’s a big can of psychological implications poppin’ open.”
“I know, I’m a cliché,” he said. “My whole family was. Mom couldn’t take the stress of wonderin’ whether he would come home at night, so she left. I was eleven or so. I didn’t want to leave my friends or my school and she said fine. She kept in touch, called every week. She’s livin’ in Florida now, married to a nice accountant. We just . . . don’t talk much. Dad worked his ass off, got his twenty years in, stayed smart and safe. Never had so much as a scratch, which made Mom’s leavin’ seem that much more pointless. And then he had a heart attack about a year into his retirement, dropped dead face-first into his tomato plants.”
“I’m sorry.”
“He would have preferred it to a lot of other ways to go out. But it was just me plannin’ the funeral, and I barely got through it. I wish I’d had someone like E.J.J. helpin’ me, because by the time I was done makin’ decisions, I didn’t even want to come to the service.”
“What, you didn’t have any aunts and uncles? Cousins?”
He shook his head.
“What’s that like?” she marveled. “What do you do over holidays? Or Sundays? Or breakfast? Or beers?”
“I usually picked up the holiday shifts so the guys with families could take the day off. The shift captain’s wife would bring in a spread for us, which was always nice.”
“So you were eating reheated turkey off of a paper plate in a station house? That’s the saddest thing I’v
e ever heard. This entire conversation has gotten entirely too serious. We need to go back to snipin’ at each other like a couple of jerks.”
“Right, the emotional wounds have just scabbed over, really,” he said, gathering their dinner trash together and throwing it in the garbage. “Too soon.”
“So, we’ll play I Never.”
He shook his head vehemently. “No, no, nothing good has ever followed that sentence. No. RaeAnn Jenkins cried and then threw up in my lap in tenth grade during a round of I Never. I haven’t been right since.”
“Come on. It’s a jail sleepover. What’s a sleepover without stupid, embarrassing games? I’ll finally get some background information on you without the upsetting emotional baggage.”
“That’s not really helpin’ your case.”
“Surely you’ve got a bottle stashed somewhere in the office. What self-respectin’ cop doesn’t have whiskey stashed in his desk drawer?”
“I’m technically on duty. I’m not going to drink on duty in the office. I might as well just lock myself in with key ring number three over there.”
“Fine,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be a drinkin’ game. Go get Janey’s chocolate stash.”
Eric went to Janey’s desk and retrieved the jar of Hershey’s Kisses she kept next to her phone. “I’m not sure about this. I know better than to get between a woman and chocolate.”
“I’ll replace them in the morning.” Frankie snaked her hand through the bars and into the jar and grabbed a handful of kisses. She put five in a row in front of her on the cot and then reached through the bars and set up a little line of kisses on the cot in front of Eric.
“You know the rules. One of us makes a statement about something we haven’t done. If either of us have, in fact, done that thing, we eat the chocolate. Or if we get to the point that we get sick, we just take the chocolate and add it to our stash.”
“Still don’t think this is a good idea,” he told her.
“Man up, Linden.”
“Fine,” he said, adding several more kisses to the lines in front of them. “I never walked out of a movie because it was too awful to stay in the theater.”
“Lame,” she said, rolling her eyes. Though she did take a kiss. Eric laughed but refrained from his chocolate.
“I never cheated in school,” she said. Her eyes went wide when his hand reached for a kiss.
“Really!” she exclaimed.
“I peered at a neighbor’s spelling test in fourth grade,” he insisted. “It’s not like I hired someone to take the SATs for me.”
“I’m just sayin’ it’s nice to see a tiny crack in that ethical armor of yours.”
“I never got a tattoo I regret,” he said, watching her carefully.
She smiled blithely but didn’t take the chocolate. Neither did Eric.
Frankie smirked. “I never got a tattoo.”
Eric rolled his eyes and unwrapped a kiss. Frankie was already chewing on hers.
“Really?” he exclaimed. “It was so dark that night, I didn’t see it. Where is it?”
“There are no follow-up questions in I Never,” she informed him primly. “Unless you want to play You Show Me Yours and I’ll Show You Mine, which is another kinda game altogether.”
Eric’s cheeks flushed delightfully and Frankie cackled.
“I never snuck out after a one-night stand, leaving the other person wondering what the hell had gone wrong.”
Frankie sagged against the cot. “So we’re talking about this now?”
“You told me about having cancer. How much harder can it be to talk about this?”
“But we’ve been doing such a good job of ignoring the tension and pretending it didn’t happen!”
“Have we?” Eric asked, squinting at her.
Grabbing for more candy, she said, “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I don’t think this will make it sound better, but it didn’t occur to me that your feelings would be hurt. Most of my . . . partners appreciate the fact that I leave without being asked, that I don’t linger and ask awkward questions about getting breakfast.”
“Is this something that you do very often?”
“I definitely wouldn’t use the word ‘often.’ It has nothing to do with me ‘not being that type of girl.’ I just don’t have that sort of time in my schedule. I enjoy sex. I’m not going to apologize for that. I’m safe and responsible and I happen to think I’m pretty good at it. You certainly didn’t have any complaints.”
He raised his hands in a surrender position. “Wasn’t gonna say anything . . . and no, I did not.”
She snorted. “But sometimes, all that information I mentioned, the stuff I can’t tell my parents? The pressure builds up and I take a night or two for myself away from everybody else, where I just do what I want without thinking about what anyone else feels about it. I am sorry that I made you feel bad. That was not my intention. I was trying to keep things simple.”
“Well, I was probably a little more vulnerable about it than I normally would be, what with my whole life getting uprooted.”
“I never got tossed out of a bar,” Frankie said.
They both took a piece of chocolate. Frankie held up a hand. “It was Duffy’s fault.”
“I never lost a fight.”
Eric sighed and ate a piece of chocolate.
Frankie winced. “You don’t mean the zombies, do you? Because I think throwing a Segway counts as a win.”
Eric’s mouth fell open. “You know?”
She cringed. “I’m so sorry. Margot found the video through one of her contacts in Atlanta. She has contacts everywhere. She’s like Olivia Pope, but meaner.”
“You’ve seen the video?” He groaned, grinding the heels of his hands into his eyes.
“You looked really good in those uniform shorts, if it makes you feel any better.”
He threw his arms up. “How is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.
“Not really, no.”
“But now I feel bad!” she cried.
“Well, I’m so sorry you’re feelin’ the consequences of your actions. I know it’s a rare moment for you.”
“Easy,” she warned him. “I’m sorry you had a bad experience, but there’s no reason to throw shade at my whole upbringin’.”
“It wasn’t just the zombies. I wish it was that simple, that I was scared of a stupid TV monster.” He sighed. “Look, I’ve been a cop for ten years. I’ve seen bodies after they’ve been hit by trains. I’ve seen them when they’ve been in their apartment for a week, until someone notices the smell. I’ve even seen a few pulled out of rivers. And it only got worse when I started working as an accident reconstructionist and got called to scenes before the paramedics were done. Seeing people who haven’t passed on yet, but they’re moments away from it. You know it and they know it, and sometimes, there’s this look in their eyes, like they just fucking refuse to accept that they’re going to die, they’re just going to keep on going no matter what their body tells them. They just keep going. That leaves a mark on you. There’s some things you can never unsee.”
She nodded, mentally blocking out a series of images that would just not be helpful right now. “Yeah.”
“So, no, I’m not a big fan of zombie movies or TV shows. The idea of the things I’ve seen coming to life and following me around, not exactly entertainment,” he said.
“I’m not much on those movies, either. I see enough of it at work. And the wacky ways they dispose of the zombies are, in my opinion, kind of mean-spirited,” she said.
“Well, of course the girl who holds polite conversation with dead bodies is going to side with the zombies,” he said, chuckling. “Last year, I started developing some . . . tics. Got jumpy at noises. My mouth would go all dry and my palms would get sweaty when I’d get called out to an accident. Couldn’t concentrate long enough to write a ticket. All classic PTSD symptoms, only I didn’t realize that
because as far as I was concerned, I didn’t have any trauma. It certainly wasn’t as bad as some of the people I worked with who were veterans, guys who had seen actual combat. One of them pointed out that I was having problems. I was lucky my shift supervisor liked me enough to get me transferred from traffic to a Segway assignment in the tourist district, instead of forcing me on leave.
“Well, we have what I guess you’d call a strong ‘zombie culture.’ Movie nights at parks, dances and conventions where everybody dresses up as a zombie. Or sometimes groups of people just show up to a movie theater in full makeup to watch a zombie movie. But the worst are the zombie walks. Even if you know they’re coming, it still looks like hell on earth, the beginning of the apocalypse in all of those movies, herds of them ambling down the street, groaning. And their makeup is so realistic. Even when you know it’s not real, it’s just unnerving.
“Most of the zombie walkers are real polite about it. They don’t want to scare anybody or cause problems, they’re just out havin’ fun, like trick-or-treating for adults. But that night, I got a bad batch. They came at me and it was like every nightmare I’ve ever had. That look in the eye, that ‘just going to keep going’ look, that’s what I saw in their eyes. And I just panicked.” He shook his head, swallowing thickly. “I’ll be honest, I can’t remember a lot of what happened.”
“I saw the video. You tried to reason with them. You gave them fair warning . . . and then you threw a Segway at them, which I did not expect.”
“That part I remember.”
“Those things are heavy.”
“You know those stories about mothers who lift cars off of their children?” he said. “Same principle, only with a panicked full-grown man and a Segway.”
“Why didn’t you pull your gun or your Taser or something?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Too many people. I could have hit a bystander. I didn’t want to hurt anybody.”
