5. Arrangements
Chapter five
Arrangements
Julie had done this a thousand times.
She had sat in this chair behind this desk in this room that her father had used before her and his father before him, and she had walked people through the worst moments of their lives with the steady competence that was the only real thing she had to offer them.
She knew how to be still in the presence of grief.
She knew how to ask the questions that needed asking without making them feel like questions.
She knew how to hold a room together when everything in it wanted to fall apart.
She had done this a thousand times and she had never once found it easy and she had never once let that show.
But when Jake Peterson called on a Tuesday morning one week after Adam and Hannah's wedding and asked if he could bring Kali in on Thursday, his voice carrying the particular flatness of a man who had been holding himself together for a long time and was not going to stop now because stopping was not an option, Julie had set the phone down after and stood in her office for a full minute before she moved.
She had known it was coming. Pine Hollow was a small town and Kali Peterson had been sick for long enough that everyone knew the shape of it even if nobody said it out loud.
She had seen Kali at the wedding, thinner than she had been in the spring, the blue scarf she always wore tied carefully around her head, her eyes still bright and present in the way they had always been, still Kali, still completely and entirely herself.
Julie had hugged her at the reception and felt the fragility of her and had smiled and said nothing that needed to be said because this was a wedding and there would be time for the other thing later.
Later was Thursday at two o'clock.
She prepared the arrangements room the way she always prepared it, the box of tissues on the corner of the desk and the water pitcher and the glasses and the small bowl of wrapped candies that her father had always kept there and that she kept there still out of habit and because grief sometimes needed something small and sweet to hold onto.
She set out the binders with the options, the music selections and the readings and the practical information about the cemetery and the order of a service, and then she looked at everything she had set out and thought about Jake Peterson's voice on the phone and put the binders away.
Kali Peterson did not need binders. Kali Peterson, she suspected, already knew exactly what she wanted.
Her job today was to listen and to write it down and to make sure that when the time came everything happened the way Kali had decided it should happen.
That was what she could do. That was the whole of what she could offer.
They arrived at five minutes to two.
Jake held the door and Kali came through it ahead of him, moving more slowly than she used to but with the same quiet dignity she brought to everything, and she was wearing the blue scarf and a cardigan despite the August heat.
She looked at Julie with her clear steady eyes and said it was good to see her.
Julie said it was good to see her too and meant it the way you meant things when you understood they were finite.
She brought them water and they sat across from her desk, Jake and Kali side by side the way they had always been side by side for as long as Julie had known them, and for a moment none of them said anything.
Outside the window the August afternoon went about its business, a car passing on the street, someone's lawn mower two blocks over, Pine Hollow in the ordinary middle of an ordinary day.
"I want to do this while I can still do it properly," Kali said. Her voice was steady. She had clearly decided that her voice was going to be steady and it was going to stay that way and that was simply how this was going to go. "I have a list."
She produced it from her cardigan pocket, a folded piece of notebook paper covered in her careful handwriting. She smoothed it on her knee and looked at it for a moment and then looked up at Julie.
"I want Amazing Grace," she said. "Josiah is going to sing it. He already said he would."
Julie wrote it down. "Just Amazing Grace, or other hymns as well?"
"Just Amazing Grace. One song done right is worth more than five done adequately." The corner of Kali's mouth moved. "Jake taught me that about baking and it turns out it applies to funerals too."
Jake made a sound beside her that was not quite a laugh and not quite anything else. He was sitting with his hands folded on the desk in front of him and he was looking at his wife with the expression of a man who was memorizing something.
"Pastor Cole will do the service," Kali continued. "I have already talked to him. He knows what I want said and what I don't." She paused. "I don't want it to be sad."
"Kali," Jake said. It was just her name, nothing attached to it.
"I know," she said, and touched his hand briefly. "I know it will be. I just don't want that to be the whole of it. I want people to leave thinking about the good parts." She looked at Julie. "Is that something you can help with?"
"That's exactly what we're here to help with," Julie said.
Kali nodded and looked back at her list. "I want to be buried in Pine Hollow Cemetery.
Next to the church. I want a simple stone, nothing elaborate.
Jake knows what I want it to say." She did not elaborate on that and Julie did not ask.
Some things were between a husband and wife and belonged nowhere else.
The ordering of the headstone would come later anyway.
"The pallbearers," Kali said, and her voice stayed steady though it cost her something, Julie could see it cost her something.
"Not Jake. Not the children." She said it firmly, like a woman who had thought about this carefully and made her decision and was not going to revisit it.
"Adam Walker. Luke Hayes. Ethan Walker." She paused.
"And three men from the congregation. Pastor Cole can help choose them. Men who knew us when we were young."
Julie wrote the names down. Ethan Walker. She wrote it the same way she wrote the others, without pause, without letting her hand do anything her face wasn't doing.
"Lila Monroe is going to do my hair and my makeup," Kali said.
"She already knows. I talked to her last week.
" Something softened in her expression for the first time.
"She cried. I told her she was allowed to cry beforehand but not during, and she said that was the most Kali thing I had ever said to her, and I told her she was probably right about that. "
Julie smiled. "I'll coordinate with Lila directly."
"The scarf," Kali said. "I want the blue scarf.
The one I always wear. Lila knows which one.
This one." She looked down at her list and was quiet for a moment.
"I have been wearing that scarf for three years and it has become so much a part of how people see me that I think it would confuse everyone if I wasn't wearing it.
" She said it lightly but there was something underneath it, something about identity and visibility and the particular way illness marked a person whether they chose it or not.
"The scarf," Julie confirmed, and wrote it down.
They went through the rest of it methodically, Kali moving through her list with the focused calm of someone completing an important task, which was exactly what this was.
The readings she wanted. The flowers, simple wildflowers, nothing formal, the kind that grew at the edge of Adam's meadow and everywhere else in Minnesota if you knew where to look.
The order of the service. The details of the burial.
And then the meal.
"Funeral hotdish," Kali said, with a finality that suggested this had never been a question. "The women of the church know how to make it and they will want to do something and that is the thing they can do. Let them do it."
"Of course," Julie said.
"And lemon bars." Kali's voice changed when she said it, went softer and more particular.
"Rachel Carter is going to make them. I have already asked her.
She is going to use the recipe from Jake's grandmother, the one he has been making at the bakery since we opened.
" She looked at Jake then, and Jake looked back at her, and the thing that passed between them in that moment was not something Julie felt she had any right to witness but she witnessed it anyway because she was sitting three feet away and there was nowhere to look that wasn't them.
"I want people to eat something that came from him," Kali said quietly.
"Something that tastes like him. Even if he is the one who can't eat it or make it. "
Jake looked down at his folded hands.
Julie looked at her notepad and gave them a moment and wrote down lemon bars, Rachel Carter, Jake's grandmother's recipe, and kept her face exactly where it needed to be.
"I think that is everything," Kali said after a while. She folded her list and put it back in her cardigan pocket with the careful precision of someone conserving energy. "Is there anything you need from me that I haven't covered?"
Julie looked at her notes. "I think you've covered everything," she said. "You've done this very thoroughly."
"I have done most things thoroughly," Kali said. "I saw no reason to stop now."
Julie walked them out. At the door Kali stopped and turned and looked at her with those clear steady eyes and said thank you, and Julie said of course, and then Kali said no, she meant thank you for all of it, for the whole of what Julie did, for being the person who was there at the end of things and made them decent and right.
Julie held herself very still and said it was an honor and meant every word of it.
Jake helped Kali down the front steps and to the car, one hand at her elbow, steady and present, and Julie stood in the doorway and watched them go and did not move until the car had turned the corner and disappeared.
Then she went back to her office and sat down at her desk and looked at the notepad with Kali Peterson's careful instructions written out in Julie's careful handwriting, and she sat there for a long time without doing anything at all.
She thought about what Kali had said. About wanting people to eat something that tasted like Jake. About not wanting the sadness to be the whole of it. About doing this one last thorough thing while she still could.
Julie had sat in this room with a thousand people in the worst moments of their lives and she had held herself together for every one of them because that was the job and the job mattered and someone had to do it with steadiness and grace.
She held herself together now.
But it cost her more than usual, and when she finally stood up and went to put the kettle on in the small kitchen down the hall, she stood at the window while it heated and looked out at the August afternoon and thought about thirty years of a life built from the inside out and eleven children who had arrived by different roads and a man who taught his wife that one thing done right was worth more than five done adequately.
She thought about Mark.
She thought about what it meant to love someone that completely and what it cost and whether, standing here at forty-one with her work and her quiet and her carefully managed days, she had somehow confused surviving loss with actually living.
The kettle boiled. She made her tea. She went back to her desk and got back to work because that was what she did and it was, for today, enough.