Chapter 10
Daphne
“The next exit is Fiddler’s Grove. It’s the one for the fairgrounds,” I said quietly, dropping him the info so he could make the right choice.
“I have a GPS to navigate for me, thank you, and we’re not stopping until we get to the lab.” His voice was hard and unrelenting. “That would be on the campus where I’m faculty and you’re a student, in case you’ve forgotten already.”
“It’s still early. We killed a whole day at your house. There’s no reason to rush now.”
His eyes closed momentarily on a sigh. “Maybe not for you. I’ve got a date with a firing squad.”
“All the more reason to prolong it just a bit longer. You said no one’s going to be at the lab on Christmas Eve. That probably includes your executioners.”
His face remained still.
“Please? It’s my lifelong dream.”
“Getting a man fired from a career he’s spent the last eighteen years building?”
I did the mental math. “Sixteen. At most. You started as a music major.”
He grumbled.
“Stop at Fiddler’s Grove,” I said.
He turned his head to narrow his eyes at me. “Fiddler’s Grove is hardly worthy of a lifelong dream.”
“You won’t know until you stop, and I don’t mean that place in particular. I mean a road trip. A real one. Not just driving at breakneck speeds to cover two hundred miles as fast as possible, but one where you stop at the welcome centers. You pick up brochures for cheesy places like the World’s Third Largest Worm Farm and you go there, and take pictures you’ll put in albums and laugh at for years to come.”
“The World’s Third Largest Worm Farm is probably at The Body Farm, which you’re slated to become intimately acquainted with soon enough.”
“But does it harken back to days of olde, like the one-room schoolhouse, blacksmith’s shop, and funeral parlor at Fiddler’s Grove Historic Village? Oh, come on, Chris! It’ll be so fun.”
He clenched his teeth and his jaw froze. “We’ve had enough fun.” He moved into the left lane.
He really wasn’t going to budge on this ethics thing. His attitude had taken me by surprise. Here I was thinking he’d known the whole time, and he thought I was tricking him.
And he’d lose his career over this. Over me. I wasn’t worth it. He didn’t have to tell me in words. Of course I wasn’t worth it.
My chest tightened. I pinched my lips together as sudden tears pooled in my eyes. Oh, God. This is what I get for thinking I was living out my fairy-tale, happily ever after dreams. It was all a facade. My throat grew tight.
“I wasn’t tricking you,” I said, dabbing at the corners of my eyes. “I didn’t know you didn’t know. I never even knew to think something like bureaucracy could come between us. I’m sorry.” I sniffed and wiped again.
“I…” he shook his head. “I didn’t think you’d purposely withheld the information. It was so nice not talking about work yesterday, it didn’t occur to me to ask about yours or to… get the timeline of your life hashed out. I thought that would happen slowly, organically. I’m sorry for lashing out.”
“I’m still the same person I was last night. We have the same connection.”
“I know you are. I know we do. It’s not you, or us, it’s... there can’t be an us . That’s what makes this so fucking miserable. I—Fuck.” His eyes flicked behind him as he swerved into the exit lane. “Tell me where to find this Fiddler’s Village.”
My eyes widened. “Really?”
He sighed and shook his head. “Like you reminded me, no one will be in the lab on Christmas Eve anyway. Nothing’s pressing that can’t wait until this afternoon.”
“Oh my gosh, they do a special thing for Christmas Eve. Caroling and cocoa. Make a right. Follow the fairgrounds sign. Oh, this is going to be great. The perfect holiday tradition.” I gripped his hand on the shifting paddle and he winced like I’d burned him. “And afterward, we can see the Merry Lights of Christmas, Tennessee’s largest drive-through lighted Christmas display. You can’t complain about that because it won’t even take that long.”
“It has to be dark to see Christmas lights. We’ll be in Knoxville by the time the sun goes down.”
“Oh.” I deflated. “Still, I’m so happy you stopped. I think you’re really going to love this.”
He threw the car in park. “Something tells me this is going to be a bad idea.”
“Look! There’s a wreath making workshop!”
“Kind of late for that, isn’t it? You don’t have a wreath by now, it’s probably not a priority.”
“I don’t have a wreath and it’s a priority, especially if I can make my own. When I have a home of my own, I’m putting one on every door.” I moved closer to the sign. “Oh, good. It starts at ten thirty. We didn’t miss it.”
Slipping into the line, I nodded to the older women standing in front of me.
“First time?” she asked. “We do this every year.” The woman shivered in her thick blue coat, almost the same blue as her eyes that sparkled with the joy and anticipation of wreath-making. “It’s family tradition to come to Fiddler’s Grove on Christmas Eve. I’m Patty. This is my granddaughter, Eva.”
“Hi, Eva. I’m Daphne. Are you going to make a wreath too?”
The girl smiled politely until her eyes widened at something behind my shoulder. “Oh, he’s with me. This is my friend, Chris.” I leaned down to whisper conspiratorially into her ear. “I think your wreath is going to be ten times prettier than whatever Chris tries to pull together. I’ll even judge the contest. Give you five dollars if you win.”
She humored me with a smile.
“I already have a wreath, thank you,” Chris said.
“Like Patty said, it’s a family tradition. Remember our plan to rebuild Christmas the way we never got to experience it growing up?”
“Does that mean we have to come back here to... wherever we are... every year?”
I looked around, at the bundled-up revelers sipping cocoa from steamy paper cups, at the Gilded Age post office and dry goods shop, strung with turn of the century electric Christmas lights. I sighed. I didn’t even mind the anachronisms here. “I wouldn’t mind that.”
“You’re in Lebanon, dear,” Patty told Chris. The apples of her cheeks were reddened from the cold and smooth as polished marble. With the twinkle in her eye, and the white puffs of hair coming out from under her hat, she was giving Mrs. Claus vibes.
“Lebanon. Great. It took us an hour to drive twenty miles.”
They started letting people into the building. As we ambled closer, I saw the price of the workshop. Somehow, I’d missed it before.
Fifty dollars.
I stopped short, holding up the line that had formed behind me. I couldn’t afford that. I still had to pay my share of the gas money, and I hadn’t budgeted for Fiddler’s Grove. Spending time here would also mean I’d need to buy food at some point. And it was only right to pay for Chris’s workshop, since I’d goaded him into participating against his will.
It was fine. The house had gone this long without any Christmas decorations. Having a pretty wreath on our rust-stained front door would be like putting rims on a hooptie, anyway.
“You’re right.” I turned to Chris. “This was silly. Let’s not waste our time. We’ll just walk around a little more and head home.”
Chris’s eyes lingered on the price before shifting to me. His hand flattened against my lower back as he gently guided me over the threshold. “Come on. Family tradition, remember? I’ve never had a fresh evergreen wreath. I’m sure it’ll be a delight getting pine sap out of the pristine carpets of the trunk. It’ll add a Christmas tree note to the dirt and moss I’ve recently had the olfactory pleasure of noticing. Two please.” He fished his wallet out of his back pocket, and handed a card over to the guy with the swipey thing connected to his phone.
“Chris, you don’t need to.” The reader flashed and the guy handed back his card. “I... thank you.”
Chris nodded to Pat and Eva. “I think your new friends saved you a spot next to them.”
If my heart wasn’t already three sizes too big, it definitely would have grown after Chris swooped in and saved Christmas for me. I could feel it physically aching under my lungs and ribs. I rubbed my sternum, trying to ease the sensation. There was a pain accompanying this joy that didn’t seem fair.
When the workshop began, we collected our materials. There were various evergreen, fir, and cedar boughs to wire to our choice of a frame, materials for bows and ribbons, and boxes of other crafty things to tuck into the greenery.
I chose Scotch pine boughs to lace onto a grapevine frame, topped off with a floppy, red flannel bow. It was historic and homey, like something the March family would place on the front door of Orchard House.
Chris’s was minimal. And brutal. The tips of the spruce needles stabbed his fingertips every time he repositioned them. Hisses and curses issued from under his breath with every twist of the pliers. At least he was making Eva giggle.
Eva’s wreath, inspired by Taylor Swift, had a mirrored silver ribbon snaking around the circle of evergreens. It was hideous, but she had fun, and more importantly, won against Chris in our little competition.
“It was so nice to get to meet you, Pat. Eva, I think you might have a career in floral design if your singing career doesn’t work out.” I hugged the ladies goodbye.
“Good luck with your school, dear,” Pat said to me before squeezing Chris’s arm. “You’re a lucky man. Don’t let her get away.”
He smiled politely. He had every intention of letting me get away.
He just didn’t know I wasn’t going to let that happen.
Arms laden with evergreens (and face paling as he tried to find a safe place to grasp his iron maiden of a wreath without covering his camel hair coat in sap), Chris was extra quiet as we strolled through the rest of the buildings. Neither of us was in much of a hurry to get on the road. The road meant we had only three hours left of whatever our relationship was.
“The funeral home is from 1920,” I gestured to the plaque outside the door of the white clapboard building.
“That’s not that old. Gus’s family’s mortuary has been there since the 1800s.”
“And it’s still in use?”
“Thriving, from what Decca says.”
It seemed to be one of the more popular buildings in the village. In the back was an embalming room, outfitted with a thick slab of an enameled embalming table and thoughtfully curated objects: an antique embalming machine, prep tools, and wooden crates of arterial fluid bottles.
The front room had been for the public. The walls were decorated in Victorian prints, mourning wreaths, and framed hair work florals. A liturgical kneeler was even placed in front of an empty replica coffin. I knelt on the purple velvet cushion.
“I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that death is something we outsource. I’m not judging. As a society, we’re no longer equipped to handle body preparation and home funerals, but I sometimes wonder what good things get lost when we aren’t forced to deal with the bad.”
He scoffed. “You’ve been spending too much time with Decca.”
“No, that’s what connected us. I’ve always known I’d be involved in deathcare somehow. My dad was a Mortuary Affairs Specialist in the Army. His hope was to do his tours and then live out the rest of his military career as a funeral director at Arlington. His PTSD was so bad after Afghanistan they discharged him. He tried to continue afterward, as a civilian, but he couldn’t get past what he’d seen in-country.”
“I run a DMORT team with Decca,” he said, quietly. “We get called out to mass casualty events like plane crashes or meth lab explosions. It’s hands down the worst thing I do. No matter how rare they are, I live in dread over those calls. Only get through them with a morbid sense of humor and a bottle of cheap booze.”
He sank onto his knees next to me. “You convince yourself what you're seeing isn't real. That’s not an eyeball I’m looking at; surely, it’s plastic. That’s not a human grease stain on the concrete next to the limbless trunk of a man—that discoloration was probably always there.” He blew out a breath and shook his head. “The brain can only handle so much self-deception before you start to think nothing’s real. I couldn’t imagine doing it for years during a war.”
Someone stepped in through the door, looked at Chris and me, kneeling as if we were in prayer, in front of a fake casket, in a fake funeral home, and backed right out through the open door. “My dad gets through it with a lot of cheap booze, that’s for sure. His drinking is a little better now, though. His nightmares are better. His medicine is more calibrated too, now, but it took most of my kid years to get him to stop self-medicating and get the treatment he needed, even through the VA. The stigma has lessened, but it’s still there.”
Chris covered my hands with his and squeezed. I turned from the embroidered Bible verse I’d been staring at. His eyes were soft and far away, but still with me in sympathy. This was what I loved about death care. There was a camaraderie among those who did the work.
His hand stayed on mine, his thumb rubbing across my knuckles. It was no longer a gesture of solidarity, but of longing, of needing to feel my skin under his.
This was hopeless. We’d never be able to stay away from each other. Not for the two years it would take me to graduate. He couldn’t not give in to me. I couldn’t not show my vulnerability around him.
“What are your final wishes?” he asked. “Since I know you’ve already considered it.”
His eyes danced with humor, but there was something else there, too. A sincerity that was constant with him.
“Burial? Cremation?”
I shrugged. “Cremation would be cheaper for Dad.”
“And if money were no concern?”
“I don’t know,” I looked into the casket in front of us. “I love old, rich traditions. It’s not my culture, but those New Orleans mourning parades with horse-drawn caissons and brass bands? I just find them so reverent, and with reverence comes a sense of letting go, you know? I think funerals need to be sad. You need to deal with the sadness before you move beyond it. People are so quick to celebrate, it stifles the grieving process.” I laughed at myself. At what I was saying. “Is it egotistical to want everyone to be really fucking sad at my funeral?”
Chris didn’t smile. “I’d give that to you. A sad funeral. Lots of tradition and ritual. Keep ’em all crying.”
“I thought you wanted nothing more to do with me after today.”
He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, his fingers lingering on my earlobe. I leaned into him, letting myself feel his comfort and melt at his touch.
“Only for as long as it takes you to graduate. After that, I intend to claim every last piece of you. For as long as we both shall live.” He smiled. “So, hurry up and make sure you pass all your classes.”
“Yes, Daddy.”
He let out a breath that was more like a groan, his eyes floating down to my lips before diving in and capturing them with his.
This kiss was hot and desperate. It didn’t matter that we were in public. That we were kneeling on an exhibit in a historic funeral home. That other people were walking in—and straight back out again. He kissed me like I was his now, and he didn’t have to let me go. Like we didn’t have to continue our lives as though we hadn’t met.
His tongue was hot against mine, as his hand tangled in my hair. Our breath clouded in the unheated building.
Finally, we drew back. I stared into his eyes, wild with lust but resigned to sadness.
No sadness. We’ll find a way, I wanted to tell him, but he was so determined to believe he was a dead man walking. Even if we had to wait—which was a feat I knew we’d never achieve—we’d make it through somehow. We’d find a way.
I stood first. I turned to the room and found myself lost. Our kiss had changed so much I had to reorient myself to the real world.
When I stepped out of the shadows of the mortuary into the light of day, I felt lighter. I was ready to take on the world, or at least however many deans had an issue with my being in love with their beloved professor.
I threaded my fingers through Chris’s when he joined me. He didn’t pull away like I’d expected him to. He squeezed my hand right back, mourning the loss of the future we’d both been dreaming about.
We visited the other buildings, filling ourselves with cocoa, kettle corn, and cinnamon sugar-roasted almonds that had been scenting the air, calling to me with their their sweet spice.
“Let’s stop at the gift shop real quick. I want to pick up something to commemorate the occasion,” I said, dropping his hand and walking backward with a giant smile plastered across my face.
Inside was a wonderland of kitsch. There were the usual t-shirts and keychains, but there was also a display of items that would make decent Christmas gifts.
“I’d like to get your mom something. Does she like candles?” His mom probably had a standing order of luxury perfumed candles shipped in from Paris, and had no need of a hand-poured gingerbread-scented jar, but I’d spent the whole day in that woman’s house, and dammit, I was leaving her a hostess gift if it killed me. Chris could always swap it with something more expensive before he gave it to her.
Turning the corner, the wall opened up to a sea of jarred goods: jellies, jams, salsas, and barbecue sauces.
“Chris, look at this. Cilantro jelly!” I said, reaching deep into the back of the shelf where one last jar lurked. “You know, it sounds kinda gross, but I bet it’d be really good on—ow!”
I yanked my hand toward my body, rubbing the heel and waiting for blood to start pooling.
Nothing. Not even a pinprick.
“You okay?” He laughed.
“There’s something sharp back there. Must be a nail or something.” I reached back again for the jar, paying more attention this time.
Chris towered above me, which meant he was standing very very close. I smiled up at him, pushing my body closer to his and wrapping my arm around his waist.
“What could that possibly be good on?” He kissed the top of my head.
“Hm?”
“You were saying that would be great on..."
“Oh, cream cheese. Like how you do with hot pepper jelly. Don’t tell me you’re one of those cilantro tastes like soap people. I don’t think we could be together if that was the case. I put cilantro on everything—the only thing I can really cook are Chipotle dupe taco bowls—damn, that really hurt.”
I shook my hand until Chris caught it, gripping it in his, rubbing his thumb over my fingers.
“I don’t see anything.”
“It’s fine. I’m just surprised. I didn’t brush up against the shelf or anything. I must have just gotten the nail point.”
He bent his head to look. “Probably a spider. It’s dark and cozy back there. You reached in and she thought you wanted to eat her babies.”
“Oh, no. I’m sorry, Charlotte,” I said to the back of the shelf before turning back to Chris with a big grin. “I love spiders!”
“Doesn’t surprise me.”
“You don’t?”
“I’m indifferent. Let’s go.”
I purchased my candle and jelly, and a cheesy magnet for my dad and we said our reluctant goodbyes to Fiddler’s Grove. My reluctant goodbye.
We’d gotten to the car, and he was so busy grumbling about wreath sap gunking up his brand-new trunk, he didn’t notice my hand had swollen so much. Good. If he saw, he’d probably make me go to the doctor. I couldn’t move my hand to open the car door, but I didn’t have health insurance. I couldn’t afford the doctor.
He’d started the car and put it in gear. I could barely breathe to say how much it was a shame we were missing the Merry Lights of Christmas.
It was just a spider bite. It couldn’t get any worse.
By the time he was merging onto the highway, I could no longer control the way my body slumped down in the seat. I heard someone calling my name from far off. The last thing I remembered was the cold window pressed against my temple and blackness closing around the edges of my vision.