2. Evie
EVIE
My dad called me earlier this morning to tell me someone had died. In our line of work, this is technically good news.
“Last minute,” he said.
In funeral-home terms, that means the family called yesterday and needs everything done by Sunday. Basically, the name of the game is that some of us are bound to get fucked over, so we all take turns.
“Tomás is already there,” my dad said.
So here I am, joining him at Sierra Vista Memorial, 8:00 a.m. on a Saturday in November.
In Las Vegas, it’s a chilly fifty-four degrees. I have on a warm coat—an oversized mint-green one with a broken zipper—and my steel-toed boots, because I’m standing in a cemetery about to do something that very much requires them.
My dad holds the opening-and-closing contract at three of the cemeteries in the valley, so the digging often falls to us.
Tomás has already run the machine. The excavator sits parked off the path with its bucket down, and what’s left is a rough rectangle in the lawn with the dirt piled up at one end. The machine gets you most of the way, but it doesn’t get you square.
“I just want to say,” Tomás mutters from three feet to my left, “that I had other plans today.”
“So did I.” I sink my spade into the wall and shave a strip of caliche off the north side. It is, at least, good digging weather—dry and cool, the ground cooperative. In July, this same task has a whole different quality to it. July is penance. “What were your plans?”
“I was going to make focaccia.”
I huff a laugh. “That’s a hell of a plan.”
“I had the dough proofing all night.”
I place a hand on my chest. “A moment of silence for the focaccia.”
“Thank you.” He works his blade down the corner, checking it against the string line. “Who’s this for, again?”
“Zigmund Maxwell.” I pull the work order from my coat pocket, where I’ve been keeping it folded. “Twenty-four. Car accident.”
Twenty-four is exactly my age, a fact that landed hard when I scanned the paperwork at my kitchen table this morning, nursing a coffee and not yet conscious enough to deploy the necessary professional armor.
I’ve been working this gig, in one version or another, since I was sixteen and my dad started dragging me along on weekends. That’s eight years of defense against the steady static of death and grief.
I’ve got a whole stockpile of it by now. A real inventory of indifference.
Twenty-four, though. In this line of work, that’s the kind of number that still manages to find a way in.
“You want to know a secret?” Tomás asks, his gaze fixed on the work order as I fold it back into my pocket.
“I’m almost certain I don’t.”
“I actually enjoy this part,” he says, undeterred.
I scrunch my nose. You get the occasional outlier who enters this trade for some dark, performative thrill, but they’re a rare breed in my experience. The rest of us just sort of drift into the industry because it’s the family trade or because someone has to do it.
“Not—” He waves his spade. “—not in a creepy way. It’s just honest work. The wall is either square, or it isn’t. There’s no room for ambiguity.”
“Unlike the rest of it,” I say with a raised brow.
“Unlike the rest of it, where everybody wants something and nobody can say what.”
“The deceased are so greedy. I’ve always said that.”
He shakes his head. “You know what I mean.”
Tomás is twenty-eight years old, tall and thin, with pale skin covered in his own linework from the wrists up. He has a mortuary license he’s three exams away from completing, and a small moth tattooed on his cheekbone that he did himself at age nineteen.
Beautiful work, but a little intense.
“My dough is probably overproofed by now,” he says solemnly.
I give him a sympathetic smile. “It might be okay.”
He scoffs. “It’s not going to be okay, Evie.”
Tomás is being a bit of a melodramatic asshole. Not that I’m surprised; it’s pretty much the baseline for the specific breed of little weirdos we keep on the payroll at Sutton & Sons.
There’s Gerald, sixty-three, who’s been around since my dad was still in school and who refers to every deceased person as “the guest” regardless of context—including the time he knocked one off a gurney and said, quietly, The guest has had a fall.
Gerald doesn’t believe in urgency or small talk. Gerald does believe, deeply and without irony, in the restorative properties of room-temperature soup, which he eats at his desk every single day at 11:45 a.m. from a thermos that has never once been washed.
Gerald threw his back out on Thursday, bending over to pick up a pen he’d dropped. He’s currently at home doing whatever Gerald does when he isn’t here, which I’ve genuinely never thought about before.
Then there’s Tomás, whom I genuinely adore despite his general intensity. He owns a tattoo studio on Charleston and even gave me an artist’s discount on my last piece of flash, so I’m not about to start questioning his methods now.
Phil is somewhere in his fifties—though his precise age remains a mystery even to himself. He manages the website, our social media presence, and what my father optimistically refers to as “community outreach.” He has a penchant for ordering things we definitely don’t need.
Despite having two actual artists on the payroll, Phil was the one who designed our logo.
I’ve stared at it nearly every single day for eight years, and I still can’t quite decipher the geometry.
There’s a central shape that could be a dove and a skeletal hand depending on how the light hits the glass.
It is uniquely terrifying and objectively terrible in equal measure.
And, of course, there’s my father, Ray Sutton. He named this place Sutton & Sons, despite having exactly one daughter and zero sons, because—as he solemnly informed me—it sounded more established.
He’s the best funeral director I’ve ever met, which is a bizarre thing to excel at, but he truly is. People arrive on our doorstep in the absolute worst moments of their lives, and he possesses a rare ability to make those moments feel bearable.
I’ve witnessed it a hundred times. He sits with grieving families and listens as if he has nowhere else to be, making it his only mission to help them navigate the messy feelings of a final goodbye.
I’ve spent the better part of my twenty-four years wondering if that empathy is a natural gift or a skill he’s had to build over time. I still don’t have a definitive answer.
By ten in the morning, the corners of the plot are perfectly square, and Tomás and I have retreated to the funeral home. The foyer carpet is a stubborn institutional beige that has weathered three decades of heavy foot traffic, the air smelling faintly of lilies and floor wax.
Tomás disappears to check on the status of his sourdough via a remarkably terse phone call to his roommate, the outcome of which appears to be a disaster. I don’t have the energy to listen to his ensuing rant, so I head toward the back to find my dad in his office.
Inside, the room is an array of neat folders and stacked invoices. There’s a single framed photo of my mother on the desk from a lifetime before I was born, and a bowl of matchboxes he’s collected over the years.
He’s on the phone when I knock on the half-open door, but he waves me in regardless and holds up two fingers. I take the cue and sink into the corner chair. Sitting there in the quiet, I catch myself wondering if being twenty-four is always meant to feel this way.
It’s a heavy kind of math to do on a Saturday.
My student loan payment cleared on the first of the month, a relentless invoice for a degree I’m currently using to label guest books. After rent and groceries and the minimum on the card I reserve for emergencies, I had enough money left for exactly (1) special treat.
This month, the indulgence was a candle that allegedly smells like petrichor. Last month, it was the flash tattoo on my wrist. I’m building a life out of small, expensive comforts while I wait for something real to start.
I have a fine arts degree from UNLV that I completed two years ago, and which currently decorates exactly one wall of my apartment. In the sense that the diploma is there, and also decorates zero careers, in the sense that I work here.
Not that I don’t like working here. Despite what my degree implies, I appreciate how straightforward the work is. While it doesn’t demand much imagination, there’s a real satisfaction in knowing we’re doing something meaningful, and I like that everyone here has a clear role to play.
I’ve grown fond of Gerald and his trusty thermos, Tomás and his snark, and even Phil—terrible logo aside. But I admire my dad most of all, mainly for his dedication to helping others and the deep pride he finds in fixing their problems.
All in all, it’s not a bad gig. I just wish it paid a little better.
“Sorry,” my dad says, finally setting the phone down. “You get out there okay?”
“We’re done with the dig.”
“Good.” He opens the folder on his desk. “Maxwell family. The father, Murphy, had a stroke about eight months ago. His late son, Zigmund, was caring for him. He was in a car accident on Halloween. They think he didn’t see the stop sign.”
I swallow thickly. “Shit.”
“Yeah,” my dad replies solemnly. “Murphy’s a wheelchair user, and the ground near the Maxwell plot runs uneven on the east side.
We’ll need to set up on the approach from the main walk.
” He makes a note. “His other son is handling the financial stuff. We’re fitting this one in as a favor to Danny, who’s managing the logistics. ”
Danny Reyes owns the medical supply shop two blocks down from here. He and my father have been routing business to each other for as long as I can remember, which is how small operations survive in this city.
I’ve known him since I was small enough to spin on his showroom stools while he and my dad talked shop. He always keeps a bowl of butterscotch candies on his counter. I once made the mistake of eating three handfuls on an empty stomach and puked them right back up in the parking lot.
“Why is Danny managing the logistics?” I ask.
“The older brother, Briggs, is a professional hockey player. Since their father is in a bad spot and Danny’s a friend of the family, he’s stepping up to the plate. He recommended our place to handle the arrangements. Knows we’ll do right by them.”
“Of course we will,” I say.
I vaguely register the name Maxwell.
When you grow up in a town like this, you hear about the local legends—the kids who actually make it out of the valley. Their names end up in newspaper headlines, airport conversations, and the occasional proud Facebook post from someone’s aunt.
Though I’m oblivious to which sport or team he plays for, hearing the name at all means something. I don’t pay attention to sports, except for whatever happens to be playing on a bar TV when I’m sipping a whiskey ginger.
“I’ll need you on-site after the service,” Dad says. “Tomorrow, eleven o’clock.”
“I’ll be there.”
He nods, already retreating back into the folder, and I get up to go. Before I can reach the door, he adds, “Zigmund was twenty-four. Exactly your age. Isn’t that strange?”
“Yeah, it is.” I swallow the lump in my throat, primed to deflect. “Makes me want to go home and touch a crystal or something.”
The joke lands flat, which is fine. It’s just that I try not to think about my own inevitable death while I’m drinking my morning coffee. It’s bad for company morale.
“Fucks you up a little, huh?” he asks, looking up at me with that steady, knowing gaze.
I shake my head, shut the door behind me, and head for the van.