Alice poked her head out of the doorway. “Fuck that,” she replied.
“So that’s a yes?” I rebutted, and my sister stuck out her tongue and withdrew into the blue room again.
Carver bumped his shoulder against mine. “Always a yes.” Then Mom called him from the third parlor to help her move some vases, and he scrubbed me on the head as he went. I smoothed down my hair again, muttering to myself.
“Question,” Ben said, coming back to me as I finished cleaning the table with the stereo. “Did Lee get anything right?”
“Hmm?”
“In his book.”
I tilted my head. “He wrote that we listened to Beethoven’s Für Elise—Carver went through a classical music kick—and that Dad danced with skeletons. Which he did,” I added, “but only on Halloween.”
He snorted a laugh. “I bet it was terrifying.”
“Oh, absolutely not. He’d do this thing where he’d throw his voice and move Skelly’s jaw—it was funny! He was funny. And maybe a little funny looking,” I conceded, and absently ran my fingers across the stereo’s buttons. “I think the worst part is that Lee thought my childhood was something sad and lonely. And maybe sometimes it was. And it wasn’t always great—but god, Ben, it was good. It was broken a little, and banged up, but it was good.” I pulled open the drawer beneath the stereo to show Ben the CDs we had, the ones Dad played. “It was so good.”
Because Dad collected songs and danced Mom around the parlor—and together they taught us how to say goodbye. They taught us a lot of things that most kids rarely even thought of. They taught us how to grieve with widows, and how to console young kids who didn’t quite know death yet. They taught us how to put makeup on corpses and drain out the blood to replace it with formaldehyde, how to arrange clothes so the hospital bruises from the IVs and shock paddles and stickers weren’t quite as prominent. How to frame flowers on a casket to disguise how few some people received. Mom and Dad taught us so many things, and all of it led to this.
They gave us the tools to figure out what to do when they were gone.
And now Dad was.
I took out the topmost CD. A burned silver disc with Dad’s scratching scrawl on it.
Good Goodbyes.
I couldn’t remember how many times, after long viewings and sad wakes, Dad would call us to the funeral home to help clean up—just like this. Just like now. The Days Gone Funeral Home was small, and Dad didn’t like overworking his employees if he didn’t have to, so he worked us instead. I always made like I hated it, the too-clean smell of disinfectant and floral bouquets, the bright rooms, the dead people in the basement, but I had a secret:
I never hated it as much as I said I did.
By the time Mom had dragged me and Carver and Alice to the funeral home, usually on school nights, Dad had already shrugged out of his coat, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, exposing the tattoos he’d acquired in his youth （that most of Mairmont would gasp at if they knew）。 He’d put on this CD, and beckon us into the house of death with a smile and a good song.
“Want a listen?” I asked Ben, showing him the disc like it was a secret.
“What is it?”
I put the CD into the stereo, and pressed play.
The hiss of the speakers sighed through the parlor, and I closed my eyes, and the music started. The antiquated bop hopped from room to room, the shake of the tambourine, happy and joyful and light, and finally—finally—I felt like I was home. The song settled into my bones as if it wanted me to move, like it wanted me to throw my arms up, to twirl, to jump.
I didn’t need to see where I was going. Every corner of this funeral home was my childhood, every inch seared into my soul like a long-lost treasure map.