It took me a long time to fall asleep in Josh Baxter’s old bedroom, but at least I wasn’t awakened at six o’clock by Sarge’s wake-up bell. The bedside clock said 8:36 when I finally opened my eyes, the whirring fan in the window the only noise. Reluctantly I dragged myself out of bed, clad only in the big Bulls T-shirt and pair of shorts Jodi had handed me to sleep in. Finger combing the snarls out of my hair, I wandered into the kitchen, where Amanda Baxter was perched on a tall kitchen stool wearing blue-and-orange-plaid pajama bottoms and a rumpled tank top, trying to keep the calico cat on her lap from getting into her cereal bowl.
“Oh. Mrs. Fairbanks!” she burbled, quickly swallowing her mouthful. “I’m so sorry to hear about your mom . . .” She dumped the cat and hopped off the stool to give me a hug. “I’m so glad I had a chance to meet Gramma Shep last Sunday. She reminded me of my grandma—the one in Des Moines, not New York. My dad’s mom doesn’t even want to be called ‘Grandma,’ go figure . . . Oh, Mom said to tell you she took Daddy to work, but she’ll be back soon. Coffee’s hot—you want some?”
I nodded, hiding a smile at Amanda’s monologue as the girl poured a mug of coffee. I added milk from a jug sitting out on the counter and sipped. The hot liquid felt good going down, waking up body parts still sluggish from my five short hours of sleep.
Amanda took the elastic band out of her honey-blonde hair, shook her head, and regathered the tousled locks back into the band. She eyed me tentatively. “What’s going to happen to your mom’s doggy now?”
I shook my head. Dandy . . . just one more worry in the long list of decisions I had to make.
“Wish I could take him. Peanut and Patches are okay, but I miss having a dog. You would’ve liked Willie Wonka, our chocolate Lab—he was a sweetheart. But I’ll be going back to U of I in August, my second year.” Amanda eyed me cautiously. “But my folks might take him if you need a home.”
I gave her a wan smile. “They already offered. Sweet of you to be concerned about him, Amanda. But speaking of Dandy, I need to get back to the shelter. He’s probably really confused that my mom isn’t—” A sudden lump in my throat cut off my words, and I scurried for the bathroom before I blubbered in front of Amanda.
Jodi was back when I reappeared in the same slacks and top that I’d worn yesterday, my hair damp and frizzled. I held up my cell phone and made a face. “Dead. I need to get back to Manna House and charge it before I can make any calls.”
“Use our phone, Gabby! It’s fine.”
I waggled the cell. “Unfortunately, all my numbers are in here.”
“Well, let’s get going, then.” She held up two travel cups. “Have coffee, will travel. Oh—grab that bagel and one of those bottles of juice, if you’d like.”
True to her word, Jodi put both herself and their Dodge Caravan at my disposal for the day. But I wasn’t really prepared for the grief-stricken faces of many of the shelter residents when we came into the multipurpose room. The women who weren’t already out for the day gathered around, bombarding me with questions and comments. “What happened, Miss Gabby?” “But she wasn’t sick!” “It’s good, ain’t it? I mean, that she didn’t die of cancer or somethin’ painful, right?” “Gonna miss her powerful.” “Gramma Shep—can’t believe she gone.” “Hope I go that way—bam. Gone. My gramma got sick and was in the bed for months . . .”
Jodi finally rescued me and spirited me away to my office. She ran up to the bunk room and brought down my charger, and while the cell phone was recharging, we made a list of things I needed to do. Call Aunt Mercy. Decide what we should do about a funeral. Try to get on a conference call with my sisters. Go to the funeral home, choose a casket, make arrangements.
“What arrangements?” I wailed to Jodi. “I’m sure my sisters and Aunt Mercy want to have the funeral back home—and we have to bury her beside Daddy. But what’s it going to cost to ship my mom’s body all the way back to Minot? And how long would that take, Jodi?” I threw down my pen, grabbed a wad of tissues, and pressed them against my eyes to stem the tide of new tears rising to the surface.
Jodi scooted her chair close to mine. “Gabby . . . Gabby, let’s stop a minute and just pray, okay? I’ve been trying to learn to pray first, before I get into a big stew . . . Wait. I think I hear Estelle in the kitchen. Let me get her, and the three of us can pray.”
Sure enough, Estelle had come in to make lunch, but she crowded into my tiny office in her big, white apron and hairnet, shut the door, and the two of them laid hands on my head and started to pray. Jodi prayed for God-given wisdom and peace in the middle of this painful loss. Estelle prayed that God would pull everything together—all those decisions to be made, all the jagged pieces of my life—and “knit them together in a way that’s good for Gabby and her family.”
That’s when I lost it. “But . . . but . . . but . . .” I tried to say, the tears coming harder. “With Mom gone, I . . . I . . . can’t afford the apartment Lee—Mr. Boyer—found for me. And . . . and . . . if I don’t have an apartment, I . . . I can’t get my boys back!” The last words were swallowed up as my whole body shook with sobs.
The two women just held me, crooning and soothing as if I was a child. And finally my sobs quieted, and I mopped my face and blew my nose.
“Now, listen, Gabby Fairbanks,” Estelle said, her voice soft but firm. “God hasn’t brought you this far to leave you. If that plan for the apartment doesn’t work out, it means God’s got a better plan in mind. You hear? Trust Him, baby. Trust Him.” She gave me another hug and slipped out of the room.
“She’s right,” Jodi said. “I’ll call the Yada Yada sisters to pray about the apartment thing, but if you can put that aside, let it sit in Jesus’ lap, let’s work on the things that need to be done today.” She stood up. “Why don’t we go to the funeral home first and, you know, find out how it’s done when somebody dies in one city but needs to be buried in another state.”
I nodded, blew my nose again, and followed her out into the dining room. Then I stopped. “Wait . . . have you seen Dandy since we came in? Or Lucy?”
As it turned out, no one I asked had seen Lucy or Dandy all morning. At the reception desk, Angela shook her head. “But you know Lucy. Sometimes she takes the dog out and doesn’t come back for hours. Just takes him along to do . . . whatever it is she does. I’m sure they’ll be back eventually.”
Jodi had already wandered outside. “Well,” I said to Angela, pushing the front door open to follow, “if she brings Dandy in while I’m out, tell her to wait here for me. I want to spend some time with Dandy too.”
Jodi was standing on the sidewalk beside the big Manna House van parked in front of the shelter, standing on tiptoe in her sandals, peeking inside. As I came up to her, she turned. “Gabby, this is going to sound funny, but . . . back there, when we were praying, I think God gave me an idea how to get your mom’s body back to North Dakota.”
“What do you mean?”
“Drive the casket there. Yourself. In Moby Van.”
I stared at her. “In that? I mean, can you do that?”
She threw up her hands. “I don’t know! But the idea just dropped into my head while we were praying about what to do, like God was giving an answer. I didn’t say anything back there, because, yeah, it sounds crazy. But standing here looking at this big ol’ van, I’m thinking, why not? We prayed for an answer, didn’t we?” Jodi giggled nervously, as if she couldn’t believe she was talking this way.
“But . . . but . . . I’m sure you’d need some special permit or something. Who in the world would we ask about something like that?” I made a face. “They’ll think we’re nuts.”
“Probably. That’s why you’re going to ask.” Jodi laughed and pulled me toward her minivan. “Come on. I’ll drive you to the funeral home. Then it’s up to you.”
“Me! It’s your idea.”
“Hope not. If it works, we’re gonna give God the credit.”
We sat across the desk at Kirkland & Sons Funeral Home as the impeccably dressed man tapped his pen on the papers in front of him. He had sallow skin, thinning hair, and an annoying habit of pushing his horn-rims up his nose every few minutes. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Fairbanks; personal transport of a body is highly irregular. However, we can transport your mother’s remains to . . .” He squinted at the paperwork. “. . . Minot, North Dakota, if we have the name and address of the appropriate funeral home for delivery.”
“How much?”
“Well, that depends on the mode of transportation. We can arrange for air, train, or ground. When do you want the body to arrive?”
“Why, as soon as possible. A few days . . .” I glanced at the calendar on the wall. Today was Tuesday. Give a few days for my sisters to travel . . . “By this weekend?”
“Well then. We would probably need to send one of our hearses, which would run about . . .” He tapped some figures on his calculator. “. . . four thousand dollars.”
I stared at the man. The “discount package” he’d already offered added up to roughly five thousand, which included the casket—a moderately priced metal one in medium metallic blue with silver shade and a white crepe interior—and service fee for staff and facilities (“All paperwork, death and burial certificates, embalming, hairdresser, use of our chapel if you so desire, the hearse for transport . . .”).
I blew out a slow breath. “Can we, uh, have someplace where my friend and I can talk in private?”
“Of course.” The man politely showed us to a small “family room” with padded chairs, a coffeepot, and pitchers of ice water and closed the door behind him.
I looked at Jodi. “Jodi, I can’t afford this! That’s almost ten thousand dollars!”
She nodded. “I know. But the man said it was ‘highly irregular.’ He didn’t say it was illegal. I think we ought to check it out. I’ll . . . I don’t know. Call the County Clerk’s office or something. And maybe you should call your aunt Mercy and find out what the funeral home in Minot says.”
I called Aunt Mercy at the library where she worked. She couldn’t talk long, but she promised to call the funeral home that had handled everything when my dad died. “I think my brother had prepaid funeral costs here for both him and Martha. I’ll call you back as soon as I find out anything . . . Oh, I finally got hold of Honor. She’s pretty broken up. But she sounded like she would come for the funeral—drive, I think. I don’t know about her boys. But I’ll call her back as soon as we can make plans.”
It was already past noon. I told the funeral director we had to talk with family and I’d be back soon. Jodi and I walked a few blocks until we found a tiny restaurant and ordered homemade vegetable soup. I wasn’t sure my stomach could handle anything heavier.
My cell phone rang halfway through my soup. Aunt Mercy. She was almost laughing. “Mr. Jacobs said, ‘Hogwash. Of course you can transport the body!’ He said all you need is a permit from the county—which the funeral home there can get for you—and a vehicle that will hold the casket. Period.”
“You’re kidding!”
“I’m not, sweetheart. Here’s the information you’ll need to fill out the permit. And I was right; your father prepaid for a casket, embalming—everything. There might be a few extra expenses since two funeral homes are involved, but the big things are covered. Jacobs said to tell your funeral director to call him if he has any questions.” I jotted down the information on a napkin, including Mr. Jacobs’s phone number. “And Gabby, as soon as you decide when you can get here, let me know so I can make arrangements for a service on this end. Celeste and Honor need to know when to arrive. And there are a lot of people here who were very fond of your mom and dad.”
Jodi was waiting impatiently for news, her soup getting cold. Even though she was in her forties, she whooped like a schoolkid when I told her what Aunt Mercy had said. “See? See what God can do, Gabby?” She shook her head in amazement. “To tell you the truth, I’m still surprised when God answers my prayers. Some faith, huh?”
“Well, don’t stop praying yet. I haven’t even asked Mabel—or the board—if I can use Moby Van for something personal like this. And that huge van must be a gas hog. Can’t imagine what the gas would cost all the way to North Dakota and back.”
Jodi pulled a stray strand of brown hair out of her mouth and chuckled. “A lot less than four thousand dollars, anyway!” She waved her soup spoon at me. “And I think we should go back and take apart Kirkland & Sons ‘discount package’ and see what it’d cost for just the things you actually need. You won’t need to use their chapel, unless . . .” She stopped and looked at me funny. “Gabby? I know you’re going to have a funeral service for your mom back in Minot, but there are a lot of people here who’ve come to know and love your mom. Especially at Manna House. Why don’t we plan something here for the staff and residents? Josh and Edesa got married in the multipurpose room at Manna House. I’m sure we could do a funeral. A memorial service to celebrate Martha’s life!”
I got a little teary. “I’d like that. I know Mom would like that too.”
We ate our soup in silence for a minute; then I put my spoon down. “I can’t do it. Can’t imagine driving my mom’s casket all the way to Minot by myself in that big ol’ van. You gotta admit, Jodi, it’s a little weird.”
Jodi turned her head and gazed out the restaurant window at the misty rain that had started since we’d arrived, almost as if she hadn’t heard me. Then, as if somebody had flipped her On button, she snatched up the bill for our soup and dug out a ten from her purse. She left both on the table. “You won’t have to. Come on. Let’s go.”
I scooted out of the booth and followed her out of the restaurant. “What do you mean, I won’t have to?”
She took my arm with a grin and started off down the sidewalk, ducking raindrops. “Because I’m going with you!”