Chapter 4
Lorna Dell keeps her office above the old hardware store, and she reads my file like I read a body, in order, looking for what killed it.
She's somewhere past fifty, reading glasses, a pen she taps once on each page like she's confirming a pulse, and she does not say oh honey, which is why Reba's cousin sent me to her.
She lingers on the beneficiary form. She lingers longer on the joint account.
When she gets to the cemetery deed she makes a sound I recognize from my own throat at the prep table, the small involuntary one you make when the cause of death turns out to be uglier than the family was told.
"Let me make sure I have this," she says.
"Your husband took a four-hundred-thousand-dollar life-insurance policy that you paid the premiums on out of joint income, and he moved the payout to his girlfriend.
Then he took more joint money and prepaid a grave and a stone for the two of them.
While married to you." She sets the pen down.
"Della, I've done divorce in this county for twenty-six years.
I have never had a man this thoroughly document his own intentions.
He didn't hide an affair. He memorialized it. "
"Fraud." It's Tom Aldis's word, in a lawyer's office now, the scam he smelled across a cemetery desk and couldn't quite name. "Is it a crime?"
"It's beneficiary fraud and dissipation of marital assets, and it's all signed and dated, which means it's not a fight, it's a cleanup.
We freeze the policy. We claw the marital money back out of that plot and that stone.
The court puts you back where you were before he started spending your future on his.
" She caps the pen. "Now the part you'll hate.
Don't confront him. A man who plans his own funeral around you has decided you'll never read the program.
The day he sees your face do what it's doing right now, he calls a lawyer and starts moving what's left where I can't reach it. "
"I host his mother's memorial in two weeks. I have to look at him every day until then."
"Then host it." She almost smiles. "You're the best in the county at standing where everything is falling apart and keeping your hands steady.
Use it. Arrange his mother like you'd arrange anyone's, beautifully, correctly, and pull me every statement, every deed, every dated form, while he thinks you're just the grieving daughter-in-law doing her job.
" She slides a legal pad across. "He hid it in a death file because he thinks death is the one subject you're too tender to weaponize.
He picked the wrong wife to underestimate.
You're not tender about death, Della. You're precise about it. "
---
I arrange at least one funeral every week, so arranging this one is the easiest disguise I've ever worn.
I meet with the florist about his mother's lilies.
I order the guest book and the memorial cards and I set the lettering for her stone myself, because she deserved a good one and because doing it right is the only apology I can make to a dead woman for what her son did at her bedside.
And at night, when Wade is "going through Mom's things" at a house I now suspect has a second toothbrush in it, I pull the records.
The policy statements. The joint-account history, two years of small deposits building toward a grave.
The cemetery deed and the stone order, both their names on them, and my marital income behind every payment.
Wade comes home one of those nights while I'm at the desk, and for one cold second I think he's seen, and then I understand he hasn't, because he leads with grief, as he always does now.
"God, her handwriting's everywhere," he says, eyes wet, and they're real tears, that's the part nobody tells you about men like this, the grief is real and it lives in the same place as the deed.
"I keep thinking she'd want us to be solid, you and me.
After the memorial, Dell, let's take a trip. A fresh start. Just us."
Just us. The man has a grave for two and it isn't ours.
"After the memorial," I agree, and I mean a different ending than he does, and I file one more statement while he goes up to bed in the house we share on paper.
I work the home like nothing is wrong, because the families don't care that my marriage is a fraud in progress, and because Lorna's right that normal is the disguise.
I run a viewing for a retired schoolteacher.
I do the arrangement for a young widower who can't stop apologizing for crying, and I tell him what I tell all of them, that tears are the body doing exactly what it should, and I mean it, and I hold his grief gently as I always have, and then I drive home and pull another bank statement on the man who is planning to be buried beside someone else. There's a strange steadiness in it.
Grief is my profession; I know how to carry an unbearable fact and keep functioning, set it down where it belongs, attend to the living in front of me. The only difference this month is that one of the unbearable facts is mine, and I am, for the first time, the family I'm caring for.
He talks for a while before he goes up, warm and easy and certain everything is normal.
He tells me Maeve has been "such a support through the grief," that I'd like her if I knew her better, that it's a comfort to have someone who understood what those last months with his mother were.
He says it to my face, in our kitchen, the woman's name like a stone he keeps turning in his palm, watching to see if I'll flinch.
I don't flinch. I am a funeral director; I have stood beside a man identifying his child and kept my hands steady enough to hand him the pen.
I can hear my husband praise his girlfriend at my own counter and pour him a decaf and ask if he wants the good mug.
The skill that makes me unbearable to lie to is the same skill that makes me impossible to read, and for thirteen years he mistook the second for safety.
Tonight I let him talk all the way to the stairs, because Lorna said don't tip your hand, and because there's a cold professional part of me that wants the full history before I close the file, the same as I want a complete chart before I ever touch a body.