8. The Call
Chapter eight
The Call
The phone rang at five forty-seven in the morning.
Julie was already awake. She was almost always already awake at five forty-seven in the morning, had been for as long as she could remember, her body having decided somewhere along the way that five-thirty was the appropriate boundary between night and day regardless of what the calendar said about sunrise.
She was in the kitchen in her robe with her hands around her first cup of coffee, looking out the window at the Anderson Funeral Home sign the way she looked at it every morning, when the phone rang.
She looked at the screen before she answered.
Jake Peterson.
She set her coffee down and picked up the phone and said his name.
"She's gone," Jake said. His voice was steady in the way of a man who had been preparing himself to make this call for a long time and had decided that steady was the only way he was going to get through it. "About an hour ago. The children were all here. She was not alone."
"I'm glad," Julie said. "Jake, I'm so glad she wasn't alone."
"She wouldn't have allowed it," he said, and there was something in his voice when he said it, a tenderness so complete and so tired that Julie had to close her eyes for a moment. "She had opinions about how things were going to go right up until she couldn't anymore. That was Kali."
"That was Kali," Julie agreed.
He was quiet for a moment and she let him be quiet because there was nothing that needed filling in that silence, nothing that words could do that silence couldn't do better.
Outside her window the morning was just beginning to happen, the sky lightening at the edges the way it did in early September, slow and certain and indifferent to the particular sorrows of the people watching it.
"I have her instructions," Julie said gently, when she felt the moment shift. "Everything she wanted. I'm going to make sure it's exactly right, Jake. Every detail."
"I know you will." He said it simply, without qualification, the trust in it so complete that it sat in her chest like something warm and heavy at the same time. "She trusted you. She told me so, after the appointment. She said she was glad it was you."
Julie looked at the funeral home sign and did not say anything for a moment.
"When you're ready," she said finally, "whenever that is, you call me and we will take care of everything. There is no hurry. You take the time you need with her."
"Thank you, Julie."
"Of course."
She set the phone down on the counter and stood in her kitchen in the early morning light and did not move for a while.
She had taken this call hundreds of times.
That was not an exaggeration, it was simply the arithmetic of twenty years of working in and running a funeral home in a small town.
She had taken every one of those calls with the same steady professionalism because that was the job and the job was what she had.
She knew how to receive this information and move through the necessary steps and hold herself together for the people who needed her to hold herself together.
She knew how to do all of that.
She picked up her coffee and found it had gone cold.
She poured it down the drain and made a fresh cup and stood at the window while it brewed.
She thought about Kali Peterson sitting across from her desk with her list in her cardigan pocket, moving through the arrangements with the focused thoroughness she brought to everything, her voice steady and her eyes clear and her mind entirely made up about every detail.
"One song done right is worth more than five done adequately.
" The words played over in her head. She could hear Kali saying them and clutching her list of arrangements while she said it.
She could see the look in Kali's eyes as she said that her oldest son Josiah would be singing "Amazing Grace" for her.
Julie poured her coffee and drank it at the window and let herself have five minutes before the professional part of her brain took over the way it always did, organizing and sequencing and moving through the checklist of what needed to happen and in what order.
She allowed herself those five minutes because Kali Peterson had sat in her office and trusted her with the last careful plans of a life fully lived, and that deserved five minutes of something other than logistics.
She thought about Jake's voice on the phone.
The steadiness of it and the exhaustion underneath the steadiness and the love underneath that, thirty years of it, solid and unshakeable and now carrying the weight of its own ending.
She had heard that particular combination before, in this job, in the voices of people who had watched someone they loved diminish over time and had arrived at the end both devastated and relieved and guilty about the relief.
It was one of the hardest places a person could stand.
Jake Peterson had been standing there for a year.
She finished her coffee and went to get dressed.
By seven she was at her desk making the calls that needed to be made. She would give Jake and the family another half hour before she went to the house to pick up Kali.
She called Lila Monroe first because Lila would want to know and because there was coordination to be done, the hair and the blue scarf, and because Lila had been Kali's friend and deserved to hear it from Julie rather than through the general flow of Pine Hollow information which would move fast once it started moving.
Lila answered on the second ring.
"I know," Lila said, before Julie had finished her first sentence. Her voice was thick. "Jake called me too. He called me right after he called you."
"Are you all right?"
"No," Lila said plainly. "But I will be. And I'll be there. Whatever you need, whenever you need me, I'll be there. The scarf is already pressed. I did it last week." A pause. "I don't know why I did it last week. I just felt like I should."
Julie closed her eyes briefly. "She would have appreciated that."
"She would have told me I was being morbid and then appreciated it," Lila said, and laughed in the way people laughed when the alternative was something they weren't ready for yet.
After Lila she called Pastor Nathan Cole, who received the news with the quiet gravity of a man who had been pastoring Pine Hollow long enough to know that this was the part of the work that cost the most and mattered the most and could not be done any way other than fully present.
He said he would reach out to Jake directly and that the church would be ready whenever they needed it.
Then she worked through the rest of the list, the practical and necessary things that needed doing, and she did them with the competence that was the best thing she had to offer on a morning like this one.
At eight-fifteen she picked up the phone and called Ethan.
She had thought about this call while she was making the others, had been aware of it waiting at the end of the list the way you were aware of something without looking directly at it.
It was a professional call. He was a pallbearer and pallbearers needed to be notified and that was simply the next item on the list and she was going to treat it exactly that way.
He answered on the third ring, his voice carrying the slight roughness of someone not long out of sleep.
"Julie," he said. Just her name, but the way he said it, like he had looked at the screen and something in him had come to attention, made her grip the phone a little more carefully.
"I'm sorry to call early," she said. "I wanted you to hear it from me. Kali Peterson passed away this morning. Jake called me just before six."
The silence on the other end lasted only a moment. "How is he?"
It was the first thing he asked. Not when or how or what happens next, but how is Jake, and something about that made her throat tighten in a way she was not prepared for and had to manage quickly.
"He's steady," she said. "The way Jake is always steady. But it will hit him. It will hit him when the steadiness runs out."
"Yeah," Ethan said quietly. "It will."
She told him what he needed to know, the practical information about his role, that she would be in touch about timing once the arrangements were confirmed with the family. She kept her voice even and her words clear and professional and she did not linger.
"Julie," he said, before she could end the call.
"Yes."
"Are you all right?"
She looked at the oak tree outside her window. The morning light was full on it now, September light, warm and certain, the tree exactly itself the way it always was.
"I'm fine," she said. "This is what I do."
A pause. "That's not what I asked."
She closed her eyes. He had said that to her before. Not those exact words but that exact meaning, and she had not had a good answer for it then either.
"I'll be in touch about the arrangements," she said. "Thank you, Ethan."
She ended the call and set the phone down on her desk and looked at her notepad with its careful list of tasks, most of them checked off now, and she thought about Kali's voice saying one thing done right is worth more than five done adequately, and she thought about Jake pressing the phone to his ear in whatever room he was in right now with his eleven children around him and thirty years of a life that had just changed its shape entirely.
Funerals had a way of forcing people to stand still long enough to notice the shape of their own lives again.
She had thought that before, had thought it in this office and at gravesides and in the quiet aftermath of services when the last car had pulled away and she was left with the particular silence that followed grief.
She had thought it and filed it away the way she filed most things that cost too much to look at directly.
Maybe that was part of grief too. Not just mourning the people you lost, but mourning the versions of yourself that disappeared alongside them.
She picked up her pen. Then she put it back down, thoughtfully.
She had to go pick up Kali and begin the careful work of getting her ready.
Because she knew everyone in town, this was the part that was the hardest. It was always hard, but when the person was also a friend, it was hard and something else.
Special? She wasn't sure if that was the right word, but it was close. It was special and important because it was a friend.
She went back to thinking.
Sometimes life brought you to painful crossroads where the life you imagined died before the next one fully existed yet.
She sat with that for a moment, just a moment, and then she got back to work because Kali Peterson had trusted her with something important and she was going to make sure every detail was exactly right.
It was the only thing she could do now. It was, as always, enough.