Chapter Twenty-Four
The next morning, I exited the shuttle bus with about sixteen residents in swimsuits and cover-ups.
We were returning from a bikini car wash, which had been a highly requested activity.
The money would be donated to some local foster care funds since there wasn’t actually anything the residents needed to fundraise for.
There was just a small but die-hard group determined to participate in a bikini car wash.
Admittedly, our shuttle driver did most of the washing and many of the cars still had a film of desert dust when they drove away, but we didn’t get any complaints.
With an hour to go before lunch, I was on my way to set up a flower-arranging class a local florist had agreed to teach when I ran right into Morgan as she turned the corner from the front offices.
“Vera,” she said. “I need you on morning duty.”
“Like tomorrow morning? Or this morning? And duty for what?”
She shook her head as she checked a text on her watch. “No, mourning. As in sad. I need you to go to a funeral.”
“Um . . . do I know the deceased?”
She sighed and I could see she was getting a little impatient. “When a resident passes away, Dr. Buckley and I try to go to the funeral or wake if we can, but I’m double-booked, so Dr. B is flying solo.”
“And he needs a chaperone?”
“Yes. A hundred percent yes. He says weird shit sometimes. One time, he tried to comfort a resident’s granddaughter and ended up telling her about some kind of sound you make when you’re dying called a death rattle. It was very much the opposite of comforting.”
I nodded. We hadn’t seen each other since the other night. Not that anything should be awkward. Nothing even happened. Well, except for the part where I tried to get off to the thought of Eli in the shower.
“Okay, yeah, I can go. I’ll share our condolences and make sure Eli leaves his morbid chitchat at the door. When is it?”
“I need you there in thirty minutes.”
“Uh, can you get my flower-arranging seminar going in the demo kitchen? I just need to grab my car keys.”
“Dr. B prefers to drive. Besides, when I’ve driven us, he gasps like a little bitch every time I hit the brakes.”
“Got it.”
“Don’t forget to wear your name tag, so they don’t think you’re some random funeral crasher.”
She was gone before I could even ask why the hell someone would crash a funeral.
* * *
As Eli and I stepped inside the front door of the Trinity Grove Funeral Home, I nudged him with my elbow. “Does this count as a Dead Moms Club field trip?”
He glanced down at me from the corner of his eye with a slight smirk, before an elderly woman hobbled over to him. “Dr. Buckley, what on earth are you doing here?”
His lips spread into a warm, rehearsed smile. Not that it felt fake. Just prepared. “Clara, please accept my deepest condolences.” He held a hand out to me. “From myself and everyone at Starlight Palms. This is my colleague Vera.”
Clara’s white hair had a slight curl and was cropped close. She pursed her trembling lips together in a closed-mouth smile. “We can’t thank you enough for all you did for our Russ.”
“Well, he’ll be terribly missed,” Eli said, and then in a conspiratorial voice, he added, “But just between the three of us, I think I’ll miss having a reason to see you most of all.”
Clara shook her head with a sly smile and reached up to pinch Eli’s cheek before giving him a gentle slap. Then she turned to me. “This one is a damn flirt.”
Her gaze drifted beyond us to the group that had just come in, and then she waved us farther inside before ducking away.
“Very smooth,” I told him. “Morgan told me you needed a babysitter to contain the morbid word vomit.”
“It’s early yet,” he said. “And Russ was a bit of a bastard. In the final hours, he kept calling his wife by his former mistress’s name. He was also one of the twitchier bodies we’ve had. Scared the new orderly to death while we waited for the funeral home to pick him up.”
“Did it feel good to get that out of your system?”
He exhaled. “God, yes.”
I scanned the foyer to find a large portrait of Russ, a man who I vaguely recognized as a grandfather on a long-running network sitcom that was always on in the waiting room of the ER I usually took Mom to. “What do we do now?” I whispered to Eli.
“Well, we sit in one of the back rows for a little while and look like we’re contemplating the beauty and tragedy of life and death, then we lay eyes on the deceased before we make our escape. Respectfully.”
We sat in the second-to-last row of pews, thighs pressed together.
I tensed, but Eli was wholly unbothered by our proximity, so I let myself relax into the warmth of his like it was the most normal thing.
Like when you brush up against someone you know so well that you don’t even think about it.
And I wanted to punish myself for the way my pulse quickened at the slightest touch.
From where we sat, the profile of Russ’s face was visible. His casket was open from the waist up. All around him were elaborate floral arrangements and stills from his time on Family Unit. It was one of those shows that had been on the air since before I was born and well into my college years.
Something about all of these photos of Russ felt wrong, because none of them were him.
Nearly every photo was of a man he’d played on TV, but where was Russ?
Were there wedding photos? Did he have grandkids?
An obscure hobby? Had his life started and ended with a silly network TV show?
Was his former mistress here? Did Clara know about her?
I had a hard time imagining what photos might surround my resting body, but the idea that a life could be captured by a few snapshots made a knot form in my chest. It was too much pressure. To be summed up in a two-hundred-word obituary and a few snapshots.
“Go time,” Eli whispered as he stood.
I stepped out into the center aisle and his hand grazed my lower back as he guided me toward the front.
We approached the casket and stood there above the body. He wore a golf polo, matching pants, and one of those hats with a pom-pom on top. At least the clothing his family had chosen reflected an apparent love for golf.
“Yep,” Eli whispered. “Still super dead.”
I coughed back a snorting laugh. “You are wildly inappropriate.”
“I see a lot of nearly dead people every day. Gotta find the jokes where you can.”
We stood there in silence for a moment. After what felt like a respectful amount of time, I felt his gaze slide over me. “Ready?”
I nodded and we ducked out of the room to the foyer. We moved along the outskirts of the guests toward the exit, but just as we were about to leave, a woman in a navy blue skirt suit stepped out in front of us. “Hi there,” she said. “I couldn’t help but notice your name tags.”
I glanced down to the Starlight Palms tag on my chest. “Oh. Right.”
“I hope this is okay, but I’d love to send you back to the facility with some literature for your residents.”
Eli eyed her suspiciously.
“I’m new here,” she quickly explained. “I’m looking for ways to capture new clients, but, um, there’s no real way to go about that without feeling like a leech.” She shrugged. “But hey, everyone dies, right? And planning in advance really is the kindest thing you—”
“We’d love to take some pamphlets back with us,” I said.
Eli made a grumbling noise as she stepped into the front office to retrieve a handful. “Maybe she wouldn’t feel like a leech if funeral homes weren’t in the business of draining the life savings from grieving families. What’s the point of an upgraded casket if it’s just going in the ground?”
“Is that more trauma I smell?” I asked.
“Not trauma,” he said. “Annoyance.”
As we walked past the guest book, I noticed Hollis bent over as she signed her name. She wore dark green slacks and a black silk blouse.
“I’ll be right out,” I told Eli, and he nodded.
“I hear we’re going to New Orleans together,” I said to Hollis.
She stood up and turned to me, her expression moving from briefly uneasy to her usual nonchalance. “Vera, so good to see you. How did you know Russ?”
“Oh,” I said, “I didn’t. I’m here as a Starlight Palms ambassador.”
She stepped aside so the next guest could sign the book. “Right.”
“And you?” I asked.
“Old rivals, you could say. We never liked each other, but we always shared a sort of respect. Despite playing a handsy grandpa, he actually looked out for the women in this business behind the camera. Even if his ego was more inflated than half the breast implants in Hollywood.”
My lips parted into a slight smile. That was the kind of thing I wanted to hear about someone at their funeral. It was the sort of honest truth I hoped people would say about me one day.
Hollis cleared her throat. “Vera, you should know that I won’t be going to New Orleans with you and Ruby.”
I shook my head, trying to understand what she meant. “Something more important on your dance card?”
She moved half a step closer to me. “We decided to take a little break.”
“Oh. I . . . I’m sorry.” Ruby was definitely the kind of person you might need a break from, but she and Hollis had seemed more closely sewn since I’d arrived at Starlight Palms.
She nodded. “Would you do me a favor and check on Ruby?”
“Of course,” I said. Although, I’d only seen Ruby wounded a handful of times. She tended to be a little vicious during moments like these. You approached at your own risk.
In the car, I thumbed through one of the pamphlets from the funeral home.
The outside read End of Life Planning and then in a smaller font: The earlier you plan, the more control you have. The inside broke down every possible option in broad strokes. Burial, cremation, a memory grove for natural burials, and even a burial at sea.
On the back, the last heading read: Living Funeral.
Say goodbye on your own terms. A living funeral is sometimes referred to as a pre-funeral or a living wake and is held while a person is still alive. It is a chance for the predeceased and their loved ones to celebrate life and ease anxiety surrounding death.
“Have you heard of this?” I pointed to the section in the pamphlet. “Living funerals?”
Eli nodded. “My mom had one, sort of. It was really just a dinner party with her favorite people and favorite food. I was dreading it, honestly. I almost didn’t even go.
But the memory of it outweighs the pain, I think.
” He shook his head like he was trying to push it back into a safer corner of his brain.
“Besides, all these people get together to say nice things about you at your funeral and you don’t even get to hear it.
I guess it’s a good option if you’re not a shitty person. ”
“Or if there’s anything to say about you at all.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I have plenty to say about Vera Stein.”
EXT. YOU SCREAM ICE CREAM ROOFTOP–NIGHT
They climb up just to watch the lights.
POPPY
What are we even doing?
ARLO
Saying hello to the moon. What if it’s lonely?
POPPY
We have to get back to work.
ARLO
Not until you say hi to the moon.
POPPY
(sighs and screams)
HELLO, MOON!