A Grave Issue Read online

  “Does Alan already have a plot at Lawn of Heaven?” I asked.

  Rosemarie shook her head.

  “I’ll give you the number to call to set up an appointment with the staff there. They can show you your options.” The next step was difficult. “Would you like to choose a casket now?”

  She nodded again. I ushered her to the second floor, where the showroom was. There are a lot of different kinds of caskets: plain, fancy, extrafancy, caskets with special memory drawers, cloth-covered caskets, steel caskets, solid wood caskets, half couch, full couch, different kinds of linings, and ornaments and additions galore. We also have a whole collection of green eco-friendly caskets now. It’s overwhelming, and I hadn’t even started describing the urns, which included a line of fine-art urns made by local artists (one of Donna’s brainstorms).

  “Did you have something in mind already?” I asked.

  “Something simple. Something elegant. Something like . . . Alan.” Then the tears began to fall, and somehow I was standing in the middle of the casket showroom—where Jasmine and I used to play hide-and-seek—holding Rosemarie Brewer as she sobbed on my shoulder.

  No, it wasn’t awkward at all.

  After I got her calmed down and her selections were made, I tucked the paperwork into the file folder Uncle Joey had made for Alan. Now was the part where we had to talk about money. I took a moment to figure out what everything Rosemarie had chosen would cost. I made sure to give her a set of state-mandated papers that detailed what could and could not be charged and handed it all to her.

  She took a moment to go over it all, nodding. Then she pulled an envelope out of her purse and counted out a stack of bills. “This should cover it,” she said.

  I stared at the pile of cash. It wasn’t the way this usually went. “Are you sure you want to pay with cash, Rosemarie?”

  She shrugged. “It was in the safe by our wills and passports and birth certificates.” Her voice caught on that last item. I guessed what she was thinking—that she’d be filing Alan’s death certificate in the same place soon. I reached out to touch her hand, but she pulled it back. “I guess Alan left it there for a moment like this. He was always a planner.”

  I picked up the stack of money. A strange, damp scent came off of it. It reminded me of when Lola showed me how to dig up bulbs in the garden and separate them. Her daffodils were famous. It wasn’t an unpleasant memory, but I generally didn’t like to smell that when I opened my wallet. My guess was that the cash would spend fine no matter what it smelled like, though. I’d be depositing it in the bank, anyway. Maybe they could figure out a way to fumigate it.

  I walked Rosemarie to the door. Her feet dragged as if she was reluctant to leave and go back home. I didn’t blame her. It had been so strange to come back to this house with Dad gone. I expected him to come around the corner any minute, and when he didn’t, a fresh wave of grief would wash over me. Donna and I had clung to each other. We’d been each other’s solace. Rosemarie was so very alone. Walking back into the house she had shared with Alan must have been especially devastating with no one else there. “Rosemarie, do you have anyone coming to be with you?”

  “Why?” She looked confused.

  “To help you. This is a rough time. Do you have a friend you could call? A relative?” I asked.

  “That’s a good idea.” She looked around as if someone might materialize.

  “Would you like me to call someone for you?” I asked.

  Her eyes came back into focus. “No, that won’t be necessary. I’m fine.”

  We walked the rest of the way to the door. She paused before leaving. “Your dad . . . passed unexpectedly, right?”

  I leaned against the archway, not sure where this was going. “Yes.”

  “What did you do about all his passwords and stuff? I don’t know how to get into Alan’s phone or his computer or his iPad.” She made a gesture of helplessness. “He had all our records.”

  “Well, enough of Dad’s stuff was business related that Uncle Joey had most of the passwords.” Dad’s life had been an open book. It was shared with all of us. Apparently, Alan’s wasn’t.

  “Oh.” She looked down for a second. “You said most. Not all?”

  I thought about that. His laptop had had a password that no one had known. “No, not all. Not his computer.”

  “What did you do about that?” she asked, more life in her eyes than I had seen since she came in.

  “We took it to George over at Byte Me.” Byte Me was the local computer repair and maintenance shop. “He took the hard drive out and plugged it into another computer. He got pretty much all the data off.”

  Her head came up. “They can do that?”

  “Unless it’s encrypted. Then I think it’s a bigger problem.” Dad hadn’t encrypted anything. Like I said, open book.

  “Thanks, Desiree. That’s a big help.” She tried to smile, but it wasn’t working too well.

  “No problem.” I stood in the doorway as she got into her car and drove off.

  * * *

  I placed all the orders for Rosemarie’s choices. Then I unbundled the suit and shoes and all the rest from the clump Rosemarie had shoved at me. The shoes needed shining. The shirt needed ironing. The suit totally needed dry cleaning. I sighed and started going through the pockets and putting the items I found on the counter. I’d put them in an envelope for Rosemarie and give them back to her later. You never knew what someone might have an emotional attachment to, and you could hardly blame her for not having the emotional wherewithal to go through his pockets herself. In this case, I was pretty sure it was all garbage or close to it. A paper clip. Three pennies and a nickel. A receipt from the Cold Clutch Canyon Café (named best café in Verbena by the Verbena Free Press five years running!), and a crumpled-up cellophane wrapper. I smoothed the receipt out flat and then did the same to the wrapper, which is when I noticed the sticker on it.

  Professor Moonbeam’s Dispensary and Bakery.

  I gave the wrapper a sniff. I knew that smell. Since when had Alan Brewer been into weed? Don’t get me wrong. Lots of people smoke marijuana. Or vape it. Or consume it in edibles. They always have. At least, they have since the late sixties. Alan and Rosemarie were of the ages where they definitely would have tried marijuana in high school or college at about the same time they tried beer. It was a rite of passage. Something that people did.

  It wasn’t like it was hard to get now either. There were doctors around who would give people a medical marijuana card for just about anything. All you had to do was walk into their clinic and say you were anxious. Or your back hurt. Or there was a history of glaucoma in your family. Boom. A medical marijuana card would be yours.

  After the last election, you didn’t even need that anymore. Possessing small amounts of marijuana was perfectly legal. But just because it was legal didn’t mean that everyone approved, though. Banks were notoriously fussy about their employees. I happened to know from a story I did on bank tellers that a lot of banks drug tested their employees. Would Alan risk his job for a quick high? It didn’t seem likely. So where did the wrapper come from? Whose was it?

  I put all the items in an envelope to give to Rosemarie later and then went down to the basement to let Uncle Joey know the plans that had been made. When we were done, he put his hand on my shoulder. “You did a good job, Desiree. I know that wasn’t easy.”

  I felt tears prick at the back of my eyelids and rubbed them away. After the mess I’d made of Delia Burns’s funeral, it was good to know I’d done something right. “Thanks, Uncle Joey.”

  “Your dad would be proud.”

  It had been a while since I felt like anything I was doing would have made him proud. “You think so?”

  He patted me on the back with his huge paw of a hand. “I know so.”

  I hauled myself up to the top floor to check on Donna. She was stretched out on the old blue couch with an afghan that Mom had made over her legs. I opened the curtains over the window an
d coughed at the dust that rose up. “How’s it going?” I probably didn’t need to ask. She’d managed to crochet three quarters of a baby blanket in the time she’d been confined to the couch. Her fingers moved so fast that the hook was a blur. My sister wasn’t used to sitting still.

  “I’m bored.” She set the yarn down in her lap. “What’s happening downstairs?”

  “I helped Rosemarie make arrangements for Alan.” I lifted her feet and sat down on the couch, putting her feet in my lap. If it was good enough for Greg, it was good enough for me.

  “Ouch. How bad was it?” She had the good grace to look sad for me.

  “Pretty much as awful and awkward as you’re imagining right now, but it’s done.” I rubbed her feet.

  “I will give you exactly ten minutes to stop that.” She moaned a little. “How was Rosemarie?”

  “I’ll give you two minutes, and Rosemarie was pretty much exactly the way you’d expect her to be. Sad. Subdued. A little angry. Do you need anything else?” I asked.

  She gestured around her. She had tea, an apple, two magazines and one novel, a box of tissues, and about five skeins of yarn in various shades of pink, yellow, and baby blue. “What more could I possibly need?”

  “I have no idea. You’re pregnant. Aren’t you supposed to want pickles and ice cream or something like that?” None of my friends had started to procreate. Donna was the first. I wasn’t really sure what to expect. Maybe I should have read that book she kept by her side like a bible.

  “Aren’t you supposed to have cultural references more current than the 1950s?” she countered. “Oh, thanks for this, by the way.” She held up something.

  “For what?”

  “This?” She opened her palm. In it was a charm for a bracelet. It was a little baby crib.

  “Cute, but why are you thanking me?”

  “Greg said he found it on the porch. I assumed you’d gotten it and put it there for me.” She leaned forward to pat my arm. “It’s really sweet of you. It’s exactly the charm that Dad would have gotten me. I hadn’t even known how much I wanted it until I saw it.”

  “Uh, Donna, I’m glad you like it, but I didn’t get it.” I went across the hall to my room and got the hiking boot charm I’d found on my car out at the Cold Clutch Canyon trailhead and came back to the family room. “I found this on my car when I came back from a hike.”

  Donna took it from me and turned it over in her hand.

  “Who do you think is leaving them? Uncle Joey?” she suggested, but she started shaking her head before I could even begin to disagree with her. “No, he’d just give it to us. He wouldn’t hide them around like weird little Easter eggs.”

  “What if . . .” I hesitated to say what I was about to say. “What if it’s a ghost thing? Like a communication from beyond the grave?”

  Donna sank back on the couch and made a face at me. “I can’t think of two people less likely to buy into a ghost story than you and me. If there were such a thing as ghosts, this place would be crawling with them. Don’t even start down that path. We’ll go out of our ever-loving minds.”

  I sighed. “Fine, but it’s weird.”

  “Weird, but not woo-woo,” she agreed. “What’s on deck for now?”

  “I have the Tennant viewing.” I stretched my arms over my head, hoping to release some of my tension.

  Donna winced. “You sure you can handle it?”

  I made a face at her. “Yes, I can. Oh, and I need to deposit some money at the bank. Rosemarie paid us in cash.” I held up the envelope.

  Donna’s nose wrinkled. “In moldy cash?”

  “She said she’d found it in their safe at home with their wills.” I shrugged.

  Chapter Nine

  I pulled on my work clothes. I won’t lie. They made me sigh. I felt so beige in them. Of course, I was supposed to be beige in them. I was supposed to melt into the background, invisible until someone needed me. Even then, I was supposed to be unobtrusive.

  Donna was right about this funeral being a tough one. It was definitely harder than Miss Delia’s. I had been fond of Miss Delia and would miss her and the way she would smack me on the arm if she thought I looked good. She saw me right before I went to junior prom and left a bruise. I don’t think I’ve ever felt prettier. I knew, however, that Miss Delia had had a good run. So had Mr. Murray. In fact, his run had been so good and long, it had nearly taken his daughter with him.

  I didn’t feel the same way about Michael Tennant. It had been an accident, a stupid accident. A slip and fall off a ladder while cleaning out the gutters. Head cracked on the walkway. At first, he stood up and walked around and laughed about it. Then, according to his wife, he started speaking in garbled sentences. She called 9-1-1, but he’d slipped into a coma before they arrived.

  He’d never woken up.

  Subdural hematoma. Bleeding in the brain. There had been two surgeries to try to relieve the pressure, but nothing had worked. He was gone, leaving his wife and two kids behind, shocked and stunned. I had lost my dad too soon, but I’d had him for close to two decades more than Michael Tennant’s kids had. My heart ached for them.

  “You have to take yourself out of the equation,” Donna had counseled me before I met with them. “This is not about you. It’s about them.”

  I’d tried my best to keep that first and foremost in my mind. This was about their loss, not mine. I hoped my empathy helped rather than hurt.

  I checked to make sure Mr. Tennant’s makeup still looked good. The light in the Magnolia Room was slightly different than it was downstairs, and sometimes that required some adjustment, but he looked great. Just the right amount of color in his cheeks and lips. Mouth not smiling, but not frowning either. That his head looked round was a minor miracle performed by Uncle Joey and the internal workings of this particular casket that allowed you to tilt the body a bit. The original fall plus the subsequent surgeries hadn’t left a pretty picture on the back of his head. In fact, it looked a little like a bad home-ec quilt pieced together from mismatched fabric. Not anymore, though. Not that anyone was going to see the back of Mr. Tennant’s head unless they flipped him over in the casket—something we definitely frown upon at Turner Family Funeral Home. Uncle Joey never cared that no one would know what an artist he was, however. People would come, look at Mr. Tennant, be sad, and leave. They’d never know what he could have looked like or how horrific his injuries had been. I hoped he’d be able to work a similar miracle for Alan Brewer.

  More and more people opted for cremation these days with a memorial service afterward whenever it was convenient. We never tried to dissuade them from that. There are a lot of arguments to be made for it. It gives people time to get there since so many of us are scattered about. The cremains can go nearly anywhere. You don’t have to pay for a plot in a cemetery. There was also, however, an argument to be made for people saying a final good-bye to their loved ones with the loved ones as intact as we could make them. It brings a sense of closure. The grief may never fully go away, but at least you got to say good-bye properly.

  The widow and her two daughters came into the chapel. I walked over to them and stood for a second. “Ms. Tennant, Jackie, and Jennifer, I am so very sorry for your loss. Would you like to take your seats?” I gestured to the front of the room, where the first row was reserved for family.

  “Can we . . . can we see him?” Ms. Tennant asked, sounding timid. She nodded toward the girls, asking the unspoken question about whether it was safe for them to see their father.

  I took her hand and nodded. “Of course.” I led them to the front of the room, where he lay in the Esquire casket (medium range, gasket seal, metal fittings).

  She looked in and turned away abruptly, holding a tissue to her eyes.

  “Is everything okay?” I asked, worried for a moment that we’d done something wrong—made him too pink or too brown or parted his hair wrong.

  “Yes. Yes. I was worried that he’d . . . that he wouldn’t look like him. With t
he accident and . . .” Her words trailed off.

  Apparently Uncle Joey’s work was appreciated after all. “I understand.”

  She reached in and rested her hand briefly on his shoulder, then moved away to let the two girls walk up. Their eyes were so big in their heads, it seemed they had no other features. Holding hands, they approached the casket. The little one also reached in like her mother had, but she took his hand and tucked something inside. “Good-bye, Daddy,” she whispered and then turned and ran to her mother. The older girl patted his hand and then returned to her mother, but at a more stately pace. “Could we, uh, use your restroom?” Ms. Tennant asked.

  “Of course.” I ushered them back out into the lobby and pointed the way. Once they were gone, I went back into the Magnolia Room to see what little Jennifer had slipped into her father’s hand. I hadn’t wanted to say anything until I knew what it was. It was a piece of paper, folded over and over and over into a small square. I carefully undid the folds and smoothed out the creases. It was a drawing. Not quite stick figures, but close. A man holding the hand of a little girl with a big yellow sun shining overhead and flowers around their feet. I knew exactly how she felt. I carefully refolded the drawing and tucked it back into Mr. Tennant’s hand. I had a feeling that he’d want to hold on to something like that for as long as he could.

  There’s something about the ritual of saying good-bye that allows us to move on in peace. I doubted that Jennifer would ever forget her daddy or that she would ever not be sad about losing him too soon. I hoped that what we did that day would allow her to not be tormented by those memories, to not feel like she had unfinished business.

  We’d eventually had a memorial service for Dad. We’d had everything that we had for Mr. Tennant. The big blown-up portrait, the flowers, the music, the readings. We hadn’t had the body, though. We hadn’t had him here. We hadn’t borne witness to the truth and finality of his passing. Maybe that’s why I’d had such a hard time moving on; maybe that’s why I still felt so unsettled. Donna didn’t seem to have the same problem, nor did Uncle Joey. It was just me who seemed to keep this little candle of hope lit in her heart that, without his body, maybe it wasn’t true.