Dad loved Edgar Allan Poe.
Don’t. Don’t think. I took a deep breath, smoothing out th e front of my wrinkled light blue blouse, and followed my younger sister toward the largest parlor in the funeral home.
The inside was finished with stately oak floors and dated red floral wallpaper. There was a staircase past the foyer that led to the second—and third—floor of the funeral home, but those parts were reserved mostly for my family. We lived here until I was twelve, as weird as it sounded. The stairs up to the other levels of the house looked tempting in that supernatural-murder sort of way. My bedroom was the second one on the left, the third on the left my brother’s, the two doors on the opposite side my parents’ room, a bathroom with a claw-foot tub, and a small study, and then on the third floor Alice had the loft all to herself. The rooms were all vacant now, filled with decorations and spare furniture, dust-covered and forgotten. I knew every creaky floorboard, every rusted hinge. Electric lamps hung on the walls, giving off a subtle yellow glow. On the first floor—the funeral home part of the house—there were three parlor rooms, the biggest to the left, where I reckoned everyone was waiting for me, and a smaller one to the right, beside the stairs to the second floor, and then one just beyond that. Past the third parlor room was a kitchen with a gas stove and old tiled flooring, and across from the kitchen was the door to the basement. Dad used to joke about having skeletons in our closets because we basically did. The basement was where Dad, undertaker and funeral director, prepared the bodies, and I’d been down there a few times, but not enough to really think much about it. I wasn’t the cadaver type, not like Alice, who always loved to watch Dad work.
I wondered, absently, if Alice was going to prepare Dad, too.
“I’m surprised you came back,” Alice said, her voice guarded, and motioned toward the largest parlor room—the red one. “We’re almost done.”
“Sorry, my flight was delayed.”
“Sure.” Then she turned away from me and returned to stand beside Mom, and I let out a long breath. Alice and I weren’t always this unfriendly. She used to follow me around everywhere when we were kids, but we weren’t kids anymore.
And Dad was dead.
Mrs. Williams, a Black woman with short natural hair, was already reading the will when I came into the parlor and stopped in the doorway, her neon-yellow glasses low on the bridge of her nose. Karen Williams had been Mairmont’s sole lawyer for as long as I could remember. I went to high school with her daughter, who ended up marrying a friend of mine, Seaburn Garrett, the caretaker of Mairmont’s cemetery. Beside Seaburn, sitting in a wingback chair, was Carver and his boyfriend, Nicki. Mom’s parents were in a retirement home in Florida, so I doubted they would be making the trip, and Dad’s parents had passed when I was really little. So this was it.
My family.
My heart floundered. It swelled and deflated and felt strange. And I felt so wrong to be here, gathered in this parlor room that smelled like roses and the softest, barest hint of formaldehyde, without Dad.
Mom looked up from her lap when I came into the parlor, and quickly jumped to her feet. “Darling!” she called, opening her arms, and rushed over to me. She drew me into a hug, so tight it was rib cracking, and I buried my face into her warm orange sweater. She smelled like apples and rose perfume, the smell of my childhood—skinned knees and pancakes in the breakfast nook and Sundays at the library, sitting in the stacks reading romance novels. She hugged me so tightly, it felt like every memory was a bone in my body that she needed to hold on to, to make sure they were still here. Still real.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” she said softly, and finally let me go. She tucked my hair behind my ears, and her eyes were a little wet. “You’re still skin and bones, though! What do they feed you in New York—lettuce and depression?”
“About,” I replied, unable to hide a laugh. She squeezed my hands tightly, and I squeezed them back. “I’m sorry I’m late.”