Carver put on his coat and began to button it up slowly. “You two okay? You and Al?”
“She didn’t snap my head off this time,” I replied. “Well, at least not until the end there.”
“Maybe after all of this, you two should have a talk.”
“Carver . . .”
He gave me a look. “Listen to your middlest brother for once.”
And the voice of reason. Somehow. The longer I stayed in Mairmont, the deeper the town burrowed into my skin. It was too small and too comfortable and too steeped in everything I loved about Dad. And my family. And why I left. It hurt just being here.
I said, “I will.”
He held up his hand, pinkie out. “Promise?”
“Promise,” I replied, hooking his pinkie, and he left with Alice and Karen and Seaburn out the door.
Mom lingered for a moment, slipping into her ancient faux mink coat. With it on she reminded me of Morticia Addams and Cruella de Vil and soft winter evenings in the funeral home, closing the curtains and turning out the lights. “Are you sure you don’t want to come eat, Florence?”
“The endless salad and breadsticks are tempting,” I replied. “How did the last two funerals go?”
“Without a hitch. Now all we have is the big one, and I think we’ll close for the rest of the week after that. Give us some time.”
The Days Gone Funeral Home never closed before. Not for snowstorms, or hurricanes, or floods.
It was fitting it took Dad’s death to shutter the doors for a few days.
“I think that’s a good idea,” I replied. “And thanks, but I sort of want to stay here for a while. I just want to . . . sit. In the quiet.”
Mom nodded and pulled me into a tight hug, and kissed my cheek. “I can’t see things like you can,” she said, “but I know he’s here.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that he wasn’t. That his ghost didn’t roam the creaky halls and sit in his favorite parlor chair and that the whiff of cigar smoke, strong and sweet, was just her memories playing tricks.
“I’ll order you some chicken Alfredo to go and keep it at the house if you want it later,” she went on, and with one last lingering look at the foyer and the oaken staircase and the parlors, she left and closed the door quietly in her wake.
And I was alone.
The funeral home felt so empty, and big, and old. I sat down in the red parlor—Dad’s favorite—in his favorite high-back velvet chair, and sank into the silence. The evening was so quiet, I could hear the wind creak through the old house.
The dead singing.
I wondered if the wind was Dad. I wondered if he was in this gust, or the next one. I wondered if I would ever recognize the sounds through the floorboards, the wind swirling between old oak wood, making sounds that, perhaps, could have been voices.
It all finally became real. This week. This funeral. This world—spinning, spinning, spinning without my father in it.
And the wind rattled on.
23
The Casket of True Love
“FLORENCE?”
I glanced up at the voice, quickly wiping the stray tears out of my eyes.
Ben stood in the entryway to the parlor, his hands in his pockets, but all I could see was his faint outline, his face shadowed in the yellow streetlight pouring in through the open windows. Of course he would appear now. When I least wanted him to.
“Great timing,” I muttered, sniffing. God, I probably looked hideous. Half of my eyeliner had already wiped away onto my palm.