5. Everett
CHAPTER 5
EVERETT
“ E verett?”
I pulled the side of the pillow I wasn’t sleeping on a little harder against my head.
“ Everett .”
“Mnnn.” Why was I being bothered at whatever o’ clock in the morning? It was Saturday, it was time to sleep.
“Everett William Mulligan, we have a funeral to do in less than an hour! Now get up!”
A what? A…I blinked my sticky eyes open and stared blearily at the clock on my bedside table. A little after nine a.m., so yeah, I should still be asleep, except…
Funeral. Mrs. Martin. “Shit,” I muttered, pawing around until I found my phone. I had alarms for this, I had alarms for lots of things, why hadn’t it gone off?
Oh. My phone battery was dead.
“Everett, I swear to God, if you make me come into the garbage pile you call a room?—”
“Sorry, sorry.” I threw back the covers and stumbled out of bed toward the door where my sister was standing, arms crossed and frowning. “I’m up. Sorry, my phone died and my alarm didn’t go off.”
“Isn’t there a charger right beside your bed?”
“There is,” I acknowledged, and—good idea. “I’ll take care of it.” I plugged my phone in and watched the battery symbol come to life on the screen. It was at zero—no, one percent. Not cool, but at least it was charging now.
I looked over at my sister, who stared at me as if expecting another apology. Long experience, though, had taught me that in circumstances like this, it didn’t matter how many times I apologized or how sorry I was. None of that made anyone feel better. The best thing I could do at this point was get my ass in gear and keep from making things worse , which was the next step. “I’ll be downstairs in ten minutes,” I said.
“You know, this sort of thing is why Dad won’t give you more responsibility in the business,” Leanne said, apparently determined to drive the point home this morning. “You’re just not reliable.”
“I’m reliable,” I replied, stung. Yes, I’d maybe stayed up way too late last night thanks to my midnight snack at Waffles? with Kyle, but for the most part I was very reliable thanks to the literal dozens of pings and alarms and notes I got on my phone every day. Time-blindness was a real thing, but my mom had helped me figure out ways to deal with it in my teens. For the most part, the system worked flawlessly.
Just not today.
“Oh, please. Look at you. You can’t be depended on even with a million reminders and?—”
“Ten minutes,” I broke in, and shut the door in my sister’s face. Was it nice? No, it wasn’t nice, but it appeared that nobody was in a nice mood this morning, her included, so why shouldn’t I also be a petty little asshole?
I washed, dried, dressed, and styled—aka combed my hair and pulled it back into a manbun, my go-to when I was low on time—and was downstairs from the loft over the top of the mortuary in nine and a half minutes, thank you very much. I made my way to the main house and into the kitchen to find my dad pouring the last of the coffee from the pot into his mug.
He must have read the disappointment on my face, because he sighed and held the mug out to me.
“Don’t coddle him,” Leanne snapped. “He could have had coffee if he’d just gotten up on time.”
“Who pissed in your Cheerios?” Stuart asked, flicking through pictures of cars on his phone as he spooned his own Cheerios into his mouth.
“Why are you so disgusting?”
I waved my dad’s offer away and got the coffee out of the cabinet. “It’s fine, I’ll make some more.”
“Might as well get started filling the big pots, then.” Dad sipped his coffee and immediately grimaced. He grabbed the cream and added enough to turn the brew ghost-white, then nodded appreciatively. “We need enough on hand for forty. Mrs. Martin didn’t have a lot of family, but there’s a group from her church coming, and you know how those church ladies can put it away. Leanne, you got the snacks?”
“I—” My sister paused in her tirade at Stuart and looked at Dad. “I…I forgot to go to the store yesterday.”
Dad frowned. “What are you talkin’ about? You were out for two hours after lunch.”
“I know, but I just didn’t get around to it then, and?—”
Stuart snorted. “You want to lecture Everett about having his shit together when you can’t even remember the same snack run you make every week?”
To my surprise, her eyes filled with tears. Everyone in the room kind of froze. Leanne didn’t cry—ever. She gave as good as she got and she never seemed to let her emotions get the better of her, unless she was pissed off. But tears? “I’ll go now,” she said, pushing back from the table. “I’ll?—”
“I’ve got it!” Stuart, true to form, grabbed his car keys and ran out of the kitchen like his pants were on fire. “Back in twenty!”
“Honey,” Dad said tentatively after the screen door slammed shut, “are you okay?”
Leanne burst into sobs.
Oh shit.
“Aw, baby.” Dad came over to wrap an arm around her shoulders. “Whatever it is, it’s not that bad, huh? Let’s—” His phone began to ring, and he sighed. “I’ve gotta take that.” He kissed the side of Leanne’s head, then gave me a fix this shit look and left the room.
All my earlier ire forgotten, I pulled a chair in close to Leanne’s and gave her a hug. She leaned into me, pressing her face to my shirt, and I was glad I’d chosen the black one today because it would hide the mascara stains so much better. Not that I couldn’t change, but my other black shirt was in the laundry and I honestly preferred the black shirts to the white ones because it was inevitable that I’d get some sort of stain on it, so?—
Leanne made a whimpering sound and I refocused. “What’s wrong?” I rubber her shoulder with one hand. “What happened?”
“It’s Theo,” she said in a voice choked with tears.
Oh shit. “What happened to Theo?”
“Not to him— with him.” She pulled back, biting her lower lip as she glanced up, but not quite at me. “Last night, he—he called me and he wanted to talk, and I told him it was late and I needed to sleep because I was behind on work, and I knew I’d forgotten those fucking snacks so I was going to wake up early to go and get them, and that’s when he said that—” She squeezed her eyes shut. “He said that he wanted to call off our engagement. He said I never prioritized him, and that if I wasn’t willing to pu-put him first then he couldn’t be wi-with me, and, and, and that he wasn’t even sure I really loved him, and I—” Leanne dissolved into tears and I pulled her in close, my brain as close to empty with shock as it had ever been.
Like, dude. Dude. Leanne and Theo had been together since high school. They were a fixture in my life, a foregone conclusion. They were like Mom and Dad had been before Mom died, and even after, I still thought of them most in terms of a team instead of just Dad.
“I’m so sorry,” was all I could say. “I’m so sorry. That’s not fair.”
“It is fair!” she wailed. “I spend so much time working, and I should have figured out something else months ago when business started to pick up but I didn’t , and I took him for granted and now he’s leaving me! I’m the worst fiancée ever ! I wouldn’t even let him set a date because I worried it would interfere with work, I—I—I?—”
There was a little noise by the door, and I turned to see Dad standing there, phone in one hand, looking guilty as hell. “Aw, sweetheart,” he said, then took over comforting duties as only a parent could. “Everett, could you handle things in the chapel for now?”
“You bet,” I said, taking the out. I’d set up dozens of these things before. Or—what was the term for more than a dozen but less than, like, fifty? A score? I’d set up scores of these things before. I could do it.
I made sure the chapel was in order, fluffed the flower arrangements a bit, and put out the tables for the snacks once Stuart brought them back. I even remembered to make the coffee, mostly because I still badly needed some myself, but that was a win! By the time I opened the doors to the mourners at ten till, everything was ready to go.
The church had brought their own officiant, so apart from making sure Mrs. Martin was prepared for viewing, all I had to do after that was sit in the back of the chapel and help out if needed. With nothing left to do, I reached for my phone, then frowned when I realized it was still up in my room. Dang it. Fine. I’d just…sit here and try not to veg out.
“Dear friends, we’re gathered together today to remember the life of Marjorie Amelia Martin. She was a dedicated servant of the Lord, who…”
I could be searching for stuff about Leighton right now if I’d remembered my phone. Shit.
“—seventeen years as church secretary, and?—”
Or at least looking up stuff about piranhas. That was wild that they didn’t automatically swarm whenever something made of delicious meat entered their territory.
“—truly exemplified the virtues of honesty, modesty, and?—”
Except for Steve, who was apparently an asshole.
Man. I really wanted to meet Steve. Maybe if I was lucky I could get Kyle to invite me back to his place and introduce me. Or, you know, let me suck his dick. That would be good too. Both would be ideal.
Dude, slow down. You barely know each other.
Yeah, but we were already engaging in misdemeanors with each other, which implied a certain level of intimacy, didn’t it?
Leighton. Focus on Leighton. What’s the best angle there?
I was pretty sure it was going to be the lady and the kid. Maintaining a social media presence tended to take a backseat when people were dealing with a debilitating mental illness, which addiction definitely was. But if he was with it enough to have pictures of them—up on his wall, nonetheless—he’d probably mentioned them somewhere . Or maybe they’d mentioned him? It was worth a shot. I didn’t want to stumble at the first task and let Kyle down, so…
Kyle. Oh my God, he was so cute. With his glasses, and his scruff, and his little piranha scars and the way he talked about his cats and how he drank his coffee—tiny sip, big sip, set the cup down, repeat—he was just…
“I said, we are ready for the viewing. ”
I looked up to see forty elderly faces all staring back at me, while the minister held the mic close to his face so he could shout into it.
“Ah.” I forcibly rerouted my brain. “Of course. Let me…yes.” They didn’t need me for this part, but some people felt better when they were told that it was okay for them to proceed to gaze at the dead person, yes, single file, excellent, sure, lay a flower down even though I’d have to take it off again before the actual burial.
Luckily, Stuart took over at this point. He loaded Mrs. Martin into the hearse to take to the cemetery where she’d pre-bought a plot decades ago. The mourners filed out to see the deed done, grabbing cookies and fresh-cut fruit and cheese and crackers from the snack table as they went. Since my sister and dad were still AWOL, I cleaned everything up in the chapel, made sure there were no more services to prepare for, then booked it up to my room to see what I could find about Richard Leighton.
There were several Richard Leightons on Facebook, and finding Richard Sr’s page led me to Richard Jr.’s Instagram, where—there was our guy. The same face I’d seen with the woman and baby in the photos along the double wide’s hallway. He went by Rick apparently, or Ricky, and he hadn’t posted to Instagram for over a year. The very last picture was of him with his arm around the same blonde-haired woman I saw in his pictures in the hall, with a baby squished between them and looking like it didn’t quite know what was going on and wasn’t sure whether it liked it.
#dadlife #lovethem #... They went on for a while—honestly too long, some of them were repetitions—but finally down at the end he tagged someone. @RosieRuns
@RosieRuns wasn’t a prolific poster, but she averaged around a picture a day. Most of them were of that blonde baby. I couldn’t find any posts mentioning Rick, but there were gaps in her history that made me think she might have had a bunch of posts featuring him before, and then deleted them. Bad breakup? Bad baby daddy breakup? BBDB? Huh, was there anything I could use that was synonymous for Daddy so I could make it BBBB? Boyfriend? No, that made it read like the baby had a boyfriend, which was just creepy.
“Dude, focus. Find Rosie.” Rosie, Rosie…who else appeared in her pictures? I started searching her tags until I found one of her wearing running gear and a racing bib pulled in close to an older man with silver hair, both of them staring at whoever was taking the picture with not-quite smiles on their faces. #Bostonmarathon
She ran the Boston Marathon two years ago! Ah- ha! Now we were getting somewhere!
Another hour jumping between Facebook and Instagram helped me track down a few more pictures of Rosie, but none were definitive until I found a picture of Rosie on the city website in a branded T-shirt working on the landscaping and figured out where she worked—Abe’s Artisanal Gardens.
Cool, I’d found so much information! Kyle was going to be impressed. I went ahead and texted him an update, asked what he’d learned too, then waited to see if he’d get back to me right away. He didn’t, so I made an effort toward cleaning up my room. Still no text. Fine. It was way past lunchtime, so I went downstairs and ate half the leftover muffins—they were tiny and pistachio, resistance was futile—then made sure all my paperwork was updated, checked in on my sister who wasn’t in her room, made a huge pot of spaghetti sauce for dinner and forgot to make spaghetti to go along with it, so I ate it gazpacho-style, and then…
Finally my phone dinged. It was from Kyle! I checked the message.
Not a goddamn thing.
Oh. Dang.