Chapter 9
9
Two weeks after the seder from hell and twelve days into his stint as Mom’s replacement, Ezra meets Caroline.
She breezes in while he’s fighting with the printer in the front office, failing to make sense of the chicken-scratch troubleshooting instructions scrawled on a Post-it note. He looks up at the sound of the door closing, poking his head out of the office in case it’s a new client, and it takes him a moment to place her as the woman he’d seen coming out of Dad’s office the night everything went to pieces.
“Good morning,” he says a little cautiously, remembering the polite but displeased way Dad and Aaron had ushered her out the door. Still, Dad would kill him for being anything less than professionally courteous. “Can I help you?”
“Very possibly.” She extends a red-tipped hand. “Caroline Lawrence. I’m here to see Mr. Friedman.”
Ezra shakes it. “Ezra Friedman. Nice to meet you. You’re going to have to be more specific.”
Caroline laughs. “I suppose you’re right. Which of them is available?”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No, not exactly. But they know I like to stop by from time to time.” She regards him for a moment, her dark eyes calculating. She’s taller than he is—the three-inch heels probably help—and he stands a little straighter. “Are they in?”
“I’ll have to check,” Ezra says slowly. Something about her sets his teeth on edge, a feeling of unease creeping over him. “I’m sorry, ma’am, are you a vendor? I’m new, so I haven’t met with everyone yet.”
She smiles. Her lipstick is perfectly scarlet against her very white teeth. “Not exactly. I’m a potential investor.”
Ezra startles. “What?”
“Mr. Friedman—either of them, I suppose—didn’t tell you they were considering selling?”
It’s innocent, the way she says it. Something flickers over Caroline’s shoulder, just out of the corner of his eye, and Ezra doesn’t need to look to know it’s Zayde. “No,” he manages. “They didn’t.”
Caroline hums. “Well, it’s a very difficult environment for small funeral homes these days. My organization offers an opportunity for support, streamlining, increased profits—I’m sure it doesn’t come as a surprise that Mr. Friedman would be looking into joining a broader community.”
It does come as a surprise. Ezra has heard enough of his father’s rants to know that broader community is just another way of saying corporate conglomerates, and that he would rather burn the place to the ground than sell it off.
“Right,” he says, hoping his professional fa?ade is still in place. “Let me just see if they’re—”
“Ms. Lawrence.” Aaron’s voice is cool as he emerges from the stairwell, the carpet dampening his footsteps. “I’m surprised to see you.”
She turns to smile at him, dismissing Ezra as if he’s suddenly invisible. “Mr. Friedman,” she says. “I just thought I’d come by to follow up on our last conversation. We ended it so abruptly.”
Aaron stops beside Ezra, standing close enough to him to radiate brotherly protectiveness. It would be sweet, if it weren’t totally unnecessary. “Like we told you, it was a holiday,” he says. “And I think I also said we’d call you, not the other way around.”
“Given the circumstances, I worried it may have slipped your mind,” she says.
“Circumstances,” Aaron repeats.
She cocks her head to one side. Her blond bob swoops with the movement. “I was very sorry to hear about the situation with your mother.”
Aaron gives a tight-lipped smile. “Thanks,” he says. “Well. Again, like I said, we’ll call you if we’re interested. Not that I don’t appreciate your diligence.”
“I believe in following up,” she says a bit too sweetly, but she adjusts the strap of her bag over her shoulder. “I’ll be going. Give my best to your father, of course.”
“Of course,” Aaron says. He doesn’t move to show her out—Dad would murder him if he caught that, Ezra thinks, but he’s amused enough not to do it himself—and she gives a last wave of her perfectly manicured fingers.
Ezra waits until the door has clicked shut behind her before he turns to stare at his brother. “What,” he says, “the actual fuck, Aaron.”
Aaron stops scowling at the door to look at Ezra instead, his mouth twisting at whatever he sees on Ezra’s face. “Let me guess,” he says. “She told you we’re selling?”
“She tried to.”
“Well, we’re not.” Aaron starts to run a hand through his hair, catches himself, and shoves his hands into his pockets instead. “Not that she’ll listen to that. This is the fifth time she’s been here in two months.”
He brushes past Ezra to go into the office, probably to collect whatever he’d been coming up for in the first place. Ezra follows him. “Who does she work for?”
“Forever Memorials.” Aaron opens a filing cabinet, riffling through it until he comes up with a packet of intake forms. “You don’t need to worry about it. Dad and I are handling her.”
“Right,” Ezra says, trying to keep the doubt out of his voice. “She looked very handled.”
Aaron’s ears go red at the tips. “It’s under control.”
“Aaron—”
“This isn’t your problem,” he says. “You made that loud and clear.”
—
Forever Memorials, according to its aggressively bright, meticulously designed website, is a network of more than five hundred funeral providers across the United States and Canada, advertising personalized, compassionate care at prices affordable for any budget.
Scrolling through the site during his hypothetical lunch break, Ezra frowns as he skims the pages of suspiciously diverse stock photography, the listings of local funeral homes— or funeral service partners —and the seemingly endless casket and service options. He chews the inside of his cheek, then does another search for Forever Memorials reputation with independent funeral homes .
The first result is a thread from one of the forums he’s heard Aaron mention. Everyone seems to have an opinion, from the people whose employers or families had joined Forever’s network to the smaller businesses still clinging to independence. The people who sold to Forever were able to deliver lower prices to their clients, but the trade-off, Ezra quickly realizes, is the “body farms” that Aaron talks about with so much disgust: centralized morgues with embalmers and restorers working around the clock to prepare bodies before shipping them off to the funeral homes for the personalized experience that clients expect.
“And don’t buy the whole ‘Stay on as a manager’ pitch,” someone with the username LookAlive has written. “You’ll get your joining bonus and an intro salary, and then as soon as the ink’s dry they undermine everything your family built. It’s all factory-farm bullshit. I sold my stock and quit to go to law school.”
There are dozens of stories like that. Ezra forces himself to stop gnawing on his cheek before he draws blood. He sighs, rubbing a hand through his hair. There’s a service he’s supposed to help set up for in ten minutes, so it doesn’t make sense to start working on something else. He gets to his feet, grimacing as his back protests the straightening of his spine, and grabs his suit jacket from the hook on the door as he makes his way to the chapel.
—
The family is already there when he slips into the room. Aaron is talking with the wife of the deceased, a tiny woman with a spray of white curls and tortoiseshell glasses that take up most of her deeply lined face, while a few middle-aged men, probably their sons, cluster a few feet away, shuffling through programs.
“There’s just something that’s not quite right,” the woman is saying, her voice tinged with frustration. “I’m sorry, Mr. Friedman, I just can’t put my finger on it.”
“I hear you, Mrs. Green,” Aaron says gently. “Do you want to go through the service again? We could choose another reading, if you’d like.”
“No, it’s not that.” Mrs. Green wrings her hands. “I’m sorry. I’m just not sure.”
Ezra meets Aaron’s eyes across the room and offers him a sympathetic shrug, which Aaron returns with a What can you do? sort of grimace. Ezra tries to convey Solidarity with his eyebrows, then gives up and makes his way to the gathering room off the chapel to make sure that they’re all set on tissues and water bottles and neatly packaged snacks.
He’s not expecting to see anyone there and stops short when he sees a frail old man standing by the bookshelves of prayer books, regarding them with a furrowed brow. Ezra has his mouth half open to ask if he’s lost before he catches the shiver of cold air, and understands.
“Sir,” he says quietly, and the man turns toward him. His eyes are cloudy behind the thick glasses perched on his nose. “Is there something I can help you with?”
The dead man studies him for a moment, and then turns back to the shelves, making a vague gesture toward them.
“The books?” He studies the spines, cataloging the different movements’ siddurim, and then something clicks. “Oh. Yours—the one you used—it wasn’t here?” The man’s face instantly brightens, and Ezra feels a rush of relief. “Okay. Got it. Give me— I’ve got it.”
He abandons his stack of unopened tissue boxes on a side table and hurries back into the chapel, where Aaron and Mrs. Green have their heads together by the podium. Ezra hopes he’s not too far out of line when he says, “Sorry to interrupt, Mrs. Green, but I couldn’t help overhearing you earlier. I was just wondering—did Mr. Green have a favorite siddur?”
Mrs. Green lights up. “He did,” she breathes. “Siddur Sim Shalom. He used it every morning.” She turns to Aaron. “Do you have any copies? Could we have them available for the service?”
Aaron looks startled, but he quickly smooths his expression back into professional calm. “I’ll make a few calls and see what we can do,” he says. “Will you be all right here for a few minutes?”
She nods, all but shooing them off. “Yes, yes. Please, go ahead.”
“Ezra, seriously?” Aaron hisses as soon as they’re out of earshot, heading toward Aaron’s office at a brisk walk. “I know you’re trying to be helpful, but we’ve got, like, an hour before the service.”
Ezra winces. “I know. I’m sorry.”
Aaron rolls his eyes, opening his office door and motioning Ezra inside. “Maybe at least give me a heads-up the next time you decide to start altering the funeral arrangements,” he says dryly, picking up the phone and dialing a number from memory. “Then at least I can block off the time to handle them. Hi, Sandra—it’s Aaron Friedman at Friedman Memorial Chapel. Is Rabbi Marks available? I need a favor.”
Ezra will give him this: Aaron knows how to use a connection. It takes him five minutes on the phone to convince the rabbi at one of the synagogues across town to put a box of siddurim together for them to have waiting in the office for Ezra to drive by and pick up. “Tell them you’re from the Chapel and they’ll hand them off to you,” Aaron says when he hangs up. “Use the main entrance.”
“Got it.” Ezra traces the geography in his head. “I can be back in half an hour.”
“See if you can make it less than that.”
—
Ezra gets halfway to the parking lot before he remembers he left his car keys in his desk. He doubles back to his office to pick them up, only to nearly run into Becca, leaning against the wall by his door, scrolling through her phone. She grins at him. “There you are,” she says, and then her smile fades. “Oh, you look busy.”
“I have to run out to pick something up for the next service,” he says. He slips past her to get his keys, saying over his shoulder, “Do you need me?”
“ Need is a strong word,” she says.
The circles under her eyes are a bit darker than usual, and there’s a pale, drawn quality to her face. Ezra frowns. “You okay?”
She laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “I mean, for a given value of okay . What with…you know.” She gestures vaguely, as if to indicate everything. “I just wanted to stop by and see if you were free for lunch or something.”
“I wish,” he says. “Want to come with me? Not the most exciting quality time, but you can tell me about whatever’s on your mind.”
Gratitude floods into her face. Ezra loops an arm around her and steers her toward the door.
“So,” he prompts as they pull out of the parking lot a few minutes later, “want to tell me what’s going on?”
Becca draws one knee up to rest her foot on the passenger seat, drumming her fingers against her window. “Mom’s called me, like, five times.”
Oh. Ezra automatically tightens his grip on the steering wheel. “Have you talked to her?”
She shoots him a look. “What do you think?”
“Has she left you any messages?”
“Yeah. I only listened to the first one. Just a bunch of excuses and her asking me to call her back. I deleted the other ones.” She pauses. “What about you?”
“So far? Radio silence.” Not that he’d expected anything else. Mom has her patterns anytime there’s a fight: She chases Becca down, waits for Aaron to come to her, and assumes Ezra will read her mind to reach out first.
“Doesn’t that bother you?”
“Of course.” Though this time around, maybe not as much as it should. It’s partly that he’s used to it, but mostly, he just doesn’t have the brainpower to add one more thing to his to-do list. “But you know what she’s like. Everything on her schedule, or not at all.”
“That’s the truth.” Becca picks at the chipped yellow polish on her fingernails. When she was younger, she used to bite them until she drew blood. “I don’t know how to stop being mad at her, but I also just…I don’t know. I want to talk to her, but I don’t want to hear her try to make excuses for what she did. To Dad, but to us, too, you know?”
Ezra swallows. “I know.”
“And I just…I feel so stupid. I used to tell people that they were my marriage role models. And this whole time—”
“Not the whole time.”
“Well, whatever. Years, Ezra.” She slumps back in the seat. “ And now you have to do her job for her, which I know you probably hate, even if you’re not saying it.”
“It’s not that bad.” Ezra checks the intersection, then turns them onto Morris Ave. “I mean, it’s a lot of paperwork and spreadsheets, and I’m not used to spending so much time sitting down, but it could be worse. Mostly it’s boring. So far the most exciting thing was Jonah accidentally sending the wrong obituary to the Journal and watching Melissa swoop in to do damage control.”
“Oh, so just like helping people deliver babies.” Ezra can’t bite back a smile. Becca’s always been the person in his family most supportive of his foray into birth work, despite insisting from the age of seven that she had zero interest in kids of her own. “Do you miss it?”
Ezra shrugs. “I’m still doing it. That’s not the part of my job that got screwed over.”
Becca hums. “That’s something, I guess.” She taps her fingers against her knee, then says, “Would it be really petty and immature of me to leave Mom a really angry voicemail and then block her number?”
It’s such an un-Becca-like thing to say that he jerks them roughly to a stop at the next intersection so he can stare at her. “Seriously? Becca.”
“Don’t Becca me, you know I hate it.” She crosses her arms. “It makes you sound like Mom.” She pauses, considering. “Only worse, because I actually worry about disappointing you .”
“You could never disappoint me,” he says, and means it. “Have you talked to Dad about any of this?”
Becca scoffs. “Please. Talk to Dad? About emotions? You’d have more luck than me.” She pauses. “ Are you having any luck? Talking to him?”
Ezra hesitates, pulling them into the synagogue parking lot mostly on autopilot. It’s not that he and Dad aren’t talking— at least, not intentionally. But Ezra has barely spent more than a minute with him in the past two weeks. He’s been trying not to take it personally. Maybe Dad’s trying to figure out what he needs to say. What he needs to do.
When he does catch his father in the halls, Ezra does his best to smile, to project openness, offering a silent invitation. But when he asks if Dad needs anything, he gets a client folder and instructions to call the livery company, or send over an updated invoice. He might be more offended if Dad wasn’t avoiding everyone else with the same determination, talking only when he truly needs to.
“I don’t know,” he says at last. He turns off the car. “You know me and Dad. It’s kind of complicated.”
Becca sighs. “Yeah,” she says. “With the two of you, it always is.”