I remembered Dad standing by the stereo. I remembered the snap of his feet. Pointing to Mom, beckoning her close with an orchid in his mouth and the shake of his hips.
“I didn’t expect this,” Ben remarked, surprised.
“We are full of wonders, Benji Andor.” I mimed the tambourine as I bopped down the hallway.
Carver, putting the guest book away in the office, looked at me like I’d lost my mind as Mom poked her head out of the smallest parlor room. A smile tugged at the edges of her rose-red lips.
“What’s that music, babe?” asked Nicki, fixing his rolled-up sleeves. He must’ve been the one helping Mom situate the flowers for tomorrow.
“Dad,” Carver replied, and he was fighting a smile as I wiggled the invisible tambourine.
I undid my hair from its tight bun and shook it out, because the wake was over, and began to sing along to the Foundations’ “Build Me Up Buttercup.” Dad used to turn up the stereo as loud as it would go, so loud I was sure the corpses rattled in the basement, and take Mom by the hand, mouthing the words, and she’d laugh as they danced through parlors so accustomed to death, and they looked like home.
They were home.
This was home.
Because Dad left us things—little things—so that we wouldn’t be alone. So Mom wouldn’t be alone. So he could still be with us, even if just in the melody of a song. Any song. Every song. Not just the Foundations, or Bruce Springsteen or Bon Jovi or Fleetwood Mac or Earth, Wind & Fire or Taylor Swift.
Whatever song, whatever made us feel alive.
Carver grabbed his partner by the hand, and pulled him into the hall to dance.
The good goodbyes.
I always thought the CD was meant for the people laid up in coffins, with floral arrangements and bouquets and guest books—and maybe it was.
But maybe it was for the living, too.
To keep us moving forward.
Ben watched with a baffled look, so misplaced in a funeral home filled with light and sound, and before I could stop myself I reached out to try to take his hand, to get him to dance with us—when my hand fell through his.
He gave a sad sort of smile, and outstretched his hand. “We can pretend.”
“I like pretend,” I replied, and reached out my hand again, hovering it over his. Then I mimed taking his other hand and he played along—
And suddenly we were all moving and singing. He twirled me out, and back in, and I laughed in a way I hadn’t in years. And Ben was smiling. Really, truly smiling. It sent a shock straight through my core because he’d never smiled like that before. At least not for me.
He was beautiful.
It made my heart skip at the thought, and then the music, rattling in my bones so brightly, and I recognized—quite suddenly—this feeling. It was the kind I wrote about years ago, the kind he talked about, the kind that itched just beneath my fingers, lost on the doorstep of some Brooklyn brownstone—or so I thought.
It was the answer to a question, soft and subtle, but it was there—the kind of feeling, this hope, that had just been hiding, waiting for some specter to take my hand and dance me across the floorboards.
It felt, for a moment in time, like happiness.
29
When the Dead Sing
“PIZZA’S HERE!” ALICE called as she brought a box of Domino’s into the kitchen. We were all sitting around the kitchen table at the house playing spades—Mom, Alice, Carver, Nicki, and me （well, and Ben, but he was sitting on the counter beside the sink, well out of the way of anyone after Nicki accidentally passed through him earlier, shivered, and said, “I think someone rolled over my grave”）。 Alice took down the plates from the cabinet and set them down beside the pizza box, before grabbing a helping for herself and Mom. “No one looked at my cards, right?” she asked as she sat back down at the table.