Chapter 21 Josephine Stammerer
Josephine Stammerer
Now that my mother was dead, there was nothing for me to do.
Calix, apologetically, left me with Josie. He had to write a letter to the Body in Corcagia telling them about my rescue. Josie, for her part, had to finish preparing my mother’s corpse for its funeral rites.
I, who had been so frenetically busy when my mother was alive, was now the only one without a job.
Tomorrow would be my mother’s funeral. Everybody would come.
The farmhands who’d worked with her and my father.
The merchants I’d bullied into giving me a bit of extra food for her.
Everyone would want to jostle and stare at me — me, the only woman who’d ever been dragged to the underworld and brought back unharmed.
And then, after the funeral, everyone would go home. And everything would go back to normal.
Except for me. Because I had never known normal.
My normal had been walking, in secret, to the mouth of the underworld.
Heating edenica herbs over the fire. Force-feeding my mother.
Reading to her from the farmhands’ books after my voice had long since fallen hoarse.
Without my mother, my normal would mean spending every day cleaning the Stammerers’ house.
The Stammerers weren’t moving to Corcagia anymore, because they didn’t have to worry about Josie getting kidnapped. The danger was past.
Even for me, it was past. The bad thing had already happened.
I ate dinner at the Stammerers’ house. The meal was potato stew and bread, prepared by Hattie, their cook, who had heretofore been my coworker.
I ate four bowls of the soup and a full loaf of bread in under eight minutes.
Mr. and Mrs. Stammerer watched me disapprovingly.
I didn’t give a shit. My mother was dead and I’d almost starved.
“My compliments to the chef,” I said to Mr. Stammerer. Josie snorted. After that, her parents looked disapprovingly at her instead of me.
I slept in the Stammerers’ spare room that night.
It was clean and appropriately furnished with a well-made pine end table and wardrobe.
The bed was bound in white crisp sheets.
If I had not spent two nights sleeping in the bed of the Prince of Darkness, I would have thought it downright luxurious.
Now, all I could think was that it could really use a fireplace and a rug.
I could have slept in my own hut, but I couldn’t bear to sleep in the same room as my mother’s corpse. As I lay there, staring at Josie’s ceiling, I thought about how that meant I had abandoned my mother twice.
Josie knocked on the doorframe at dawn and walked in without waiting for me to answer. Classic rich girl.
She was holding a hamper. She looked down at me. I was sitting on the floor, pulling on a pair of boots. “Hi,” she said. “Are you okay?”
What a stupid question. I would never be okay again. “Yeah.”
“Are you… going somewhere?”
I looked down at the boots. I hadn’t really been paying attention to what I was doing. Now I realized that I’d automatically risen at dawn and started dressing for a walk to the underworld. “I guess not.”
“You can go out if you want to,” Josie said awkwardly.
“No one’s keeping you here. I just, um.” She shifted.
She placed the hamper on the white bed. She brought out a dress that I had seen on her many times: a sturdy black dress, knee-length, with a scooped neckline and long sleeves.
“I thought you might want something to wear to the funeral.”
I stared at it. It was a lovely dress on plump, freckled Josie. It would make scrawny, blonde little me, on the other hand, look almost as corpselike as my mother. Possibly more so. At least my mother’s corpse had makeup on. “Um. That’s really sweet of you, but…”
Josie pinched her face up anxiously.
My temper flared. I knew very well why she was looking at me like that; it was because she was right, I had nothing to wear.
I looked down at myself. I was wearing one of my own threadbare dresses, which I’d taken from home before moving into Josie’s spare room.
It was pale and too small and utterly unsuitable. Downright disrespectful, in fact.
To my horror I felt tears rising. Choking me. So much wasted time and energy thrown away to try to save my mother, and now everyone would think I wasn’t honoring her at all, just because I had no fucking outfit.
“Fine,” I said roughly to Josie. I thrust my hand out. “Give it to me.”
Josie hesitated. Then she said, “There’s something else in the hamper.”
Monarch’s balls. What fresh hell awaited me now? But I looked in the hamper.
It took me a second to recognize the violet dress.
When I did, my stomach swooped. Josie had had it cleaned.
The lace gleamed a pearlescent white. The violet silk, as brilliant as the sky on the horizon at dusk, was lush and soft to the touch.
Its hue glowed in the dawn light from the window, in a way it had never done in the catacombs.
“I…” My voice was hoarse. I cleared my throat. “I don’t think I can wear this, either. I don’t think it would be appropriate. Thank you, though.”
Josie bit her lip. “Your mom…”
I could not stand that Josie had memories of my mom that I did not have.
“I sat with her a lot. As you know. And she wasn’t always lucid, but when she was, she talked about you, and she said —”
“Don’t tell me,” I said automatically. I almost covered her mouth. Whatever it was, I was absolutely certain that it would hurt too much for me to bear.
“I think I should,” she said. “I think things are different now that she’s gone.
Because she said… Persephone, she said you shouldn’t be here.
She said you were too good for this place.
Too smart, too ambitious, too special. I used to, um, try to talk her into letting you go, but I think she was afraid to.
Too afraid for herself, you know. Because you were taking such good care of her. ”
A chasm was opening in me. Yawning. I had been right. I didn’t want to hear this.
“And I didn’t always understand what she meant. But when you came back from the underworld, when I opened that door and saw you standing there in this dress, the only person ever to come back without going crazy, I thought, That’s the Persephone her mom always saw.
“And I think that’s the Persephone that should be at your mom’s funeral.”
Josie folded the black dress back into the hamper and pressed the violet one deeper into my hands. I looked at it. It was so soft. Hades, Prince of Darkness, had put his hands on this dress.
I said, “This dress is too fancy and it’s not black. Everyone will think it’s wrong.”
“Fuck those people,” Josie said.
A barking laugh jolted out of me. “Josephine Stammerer!”
Good, sweet, perfect Josie blushed. But she drew her eyebrows together defiantly. “I mean it. Your mom was right, Persephone. You’re too good for this place. You might as well look it.”
“I was made for this place. You are too good for it. You should be in nursing school in Corcagia.”
Josie rolled her eyes. “That’s not what my mom thinks.” Then she looked stricken. “Um. Sorry. Anyway, I’ll leave you with both dresses. You decide.” She scuttled out, looking, bizarrely, for all the world like Elke trying to get the hell out of Hades’s bedroom while I brandished a spear at her.
I smoothed both dresses out on the bed. I regarded both of them.
I whispered, almost inaudibly, shaping the syllables the way Josie had shaped them: “Fuck those people.”