26

Ever since I went as a kid with my dad hunting for parts to fit his ’62 Chevy pick-up I’ve loved junkyards. The smell of oil-soaked dirt and rusting engines, the unexpected beauty of scripted chrome, thrusting tail-fins, bug-eyed headlights and gap-toothed grilles, the very heat that sang from so many packed carcasses bleaching in rows of steel, glass and rubber thrilled me like an archaeologist exploring ancient ruins. I could roam for hours wondering who drove that rusting shell of a ’48 Lincoln, sky blue ’62 Ford Galaxy, or sun-faded yellow ’64 Chevy Impala. What children or dreams were conceived on those now torn canvas seats, and which crumpled fender and spidered windshield turned the wheel to coffin? The pleasure I got out of a good junkyard was not much different than other people might find wandering through a cemetery, except most graveyard visitors don’t get the side benefit of shopping for body parts.

Sandwiched between a Ford Thunderbird and a Chrysler Imperial I found what I was looking for, a 1976 Cadillac Eldorado with a showroom-condition right fender, even if the rest of the car looked like it had collided with a freight train. Armed with socket and crescent wrenches, a rubber mallet and a can of WD 40 lubricating solvent I popped the hood and went to work. Even properly equipped I just about tore a rotator cuff trying to torque loose the lug nuts bonding the fender to the wheel-well and frame. An hour of sweat pulled the fender unscratched, a baby blue I liked so much I thought I’d paint the whole car that colour. I prised loose the old fender and bolted on the new one right there at the junkyard, attached a new set of headlights and gave the grease monkey who ran the place the scrap. I drove out of the yard feeling about as proud of what I’d accomplished as I’d ever felt about anything.

The Little Chapel of the Dawn rested on a street corner in Santa Monica, a mock-Tudor-style mortuary fronted by trimmed hedges and a flower box appropriately pushing up daisies. The junkyard celebrated death; the mortuary buried or burned it. I preferred jet noise, clanging metal and the crunching of safety glass underfoot to piped church music and solemn whispers from men with the demeanour of professional grief. Despite my preferences, I didn’t think the authorities would let me bury Gabe in a junkyard. I parked in front of a stone walkway that cut invitingly through the lawn to a welcome sign on the closed front door. The door had one of those old-fashioned brass front latches, friendlier than a doorknob, where you press on a thumb-sized flange inside a projecting brass ‘s’ and the thing springs open. A rustic wood sitting group, padded by plaid cushions, welcomed me to a country cottage front parlour with warm wood-panelled walls and latticed windows. On the far wall hung a painting of big-eyed dogs frolicking on the grounds of an English estate. I wondered if I hadn’t stumbled into a pet mortuary by mistake but the sixty-something receptionist didn’t flinch when I informed her I’d come to make arrangements for my husband. Gabe would have howled with laughter. The Little Chapel of the Dawn perfectly complemented the Special Memory Wedding Chapel™ in Las Vegas; I married him in kitsch and I’d bury him in kitsch.

A dark-suited, sombre-lipped gentleman in his early sixties stepped into the parlour to ask, ‘May I help you, madame?’ like he didn’t know what I was doing there. He didn’t get many widows my age in Santa Monica. The morticians in South Central, Watts, the barrios of East Los Angeles, they handled young meat all the time, but Santa Monica was too white and too safe for brutally premature death. When I presented him with the coroner’s release form he led me to the conference room, where he propped his elbows on a black-lacquer table, steepled his fingers beneath his chin and asked, ‘Have you given any thought regarding how you wish to treat the remains of your loved one?’

‘I want to burn him,’ I said.

He blinked once, heavily. ‘Cremation, you mean?’

‘My husband was beaten, stabbed, strangled and drowned. I’ve seen road kill look better. Burning is the only way to give him back his dignity.’

He nodded once, solemn and dignified, to indicate he agreed that my decision made perfect sense. In a black leather notebook he jotted down the preference and said, ‘To begin: we need some basic information about your husband, for example, his full name, the date and place of birth, that sort of thing.’

I dug our marriage certificate and Gabe’s employment record from my duffel and did my best to answer the questions. I didn’t know where he had been schooled, his educational degrees or professional associations, if any. Each field left blank testified how little I knew him.

‘Maybe we had better move on to the arrangements themselves,’ he suggested. ‘How would you like to contain the cremains of your dear departed?’

‘Cremains?’

‘Forgive me, an industry term. The body is not reduced to ash as some believe, but to skeletal fragments, which we grind into a fine powder and call the cremated remains, or cremains.’ He laid a four-colour brochure on the edge of the table, folded open to the first page. ‘We carry a wide selection of funerary urns, from this engraved sterling silver designer model to classic bronze – or for those on a budget, a cardboard box.’

The business of death chilled me. I left the Little Chapel of the Dawn needing to talk to somebody. In a city of fleeting affairs and transient friendships everybody needs one or two people they can depend on in a crisis. Though I counted Big Brenda as a friend I had not known her long or well. Frank might have done me a favour but not without expecting something in return; I didn’t know him at all. If friendships were the measure of a woman I was pretty damn small. That left only family.

Though the people who worked the cash registers and stocked the shelves at K-Mart would be friendly enough I didn’t think it right to walk into the store unannounced and ask for my mom. I didn’t want to embarrass her. Every family has its dirty linen but nobody wants it walking into their place of work. I cruised the parking slots outside the store but didn’t see her Ford Escort. She had probably car-pooled with a co-worker, maybe the younger woman I’d seen in her company on my last visit. I parked the Cadillac on the blacktop and waited for the change of shift. When she walked out I’d tell her that I was returning in person her call of the day before. Even if our talk lasted less than ten minutes the drive would have been worth it.

I recognized the co-worker when she came alone out of the employee entrance behind the store. With her home-permanent hairstyle and owlish glasses, she looked like my mother’s true daughter. She jumped back and put her hand to her breast when I stepped out of my car and called to her. What tales she must have been told to appear so frightened.

‘Sorry to bother you, but I’m looking for –’

She barricaded herself behind the wing of her car door. ‘Haven’t you heard?’

‘Heard what?’

My mother had been admitted into Henry Mayo Memorial Hospital with a broken hip and a laceration above her left eye. My brother Ray had called the shift manager two days earlier to report it. Her co-workers had sent flowers and a get well card. An accident in the home, they all thought. I knew my father well enough to picture what happened. Some accident.

The Mayo was a modern community hospital built to serve the needs of an affluent commuter suburb that had paved over the oak and grass hills near my old home town. I jogged down a pink-tiled hall beyond the nursing station and poked my head into a bright and cheerful room with two beds and a window looking out to the central courtyard. My mom lay in the bed by the window, her eyes directed to the television set attached to the wall. I crept up to her bed and placed on her lap a golden yellow teddy bear that had caught my eye in the gift shop. A tag around the bear’s neck read, I Love You.

‘You shouldn’t have,’ my mom said when I bent to kiss her cheek. The bandage above her eye didn’t conceal the bruising beneath it. She looked frail and broken in that room. I tried to smile. I failed.

She asked, ‘You got my message?’

‘Last night. But you didn’t leave much of one.’

‘I didn’t want to be dramatic, dear.’ She always knew how to understate things.

‘He hit you, didn’t he?’

She jerked her head aside to keep me from seeing the truth in her eyes. ‘I fell,’ she said.

I don’t know why I was so angry. My dad hit everybody. When I was growing up I just accepted it. Everybody’s dad lost their temper, mine more than most. Every week he hit somebody, every week somebody got their ears boxed or face slapped. Some weeks, it was my mom he hit. She never complained. She never left him. Maybe that was what angered me so much.

‘Why do you lie about it? Just because you pretend he didn’t hit you doesn’t mean he won’t do it again.’

‘I told you, I fell.’ Her voice was solemn, as though belief could convince her the world was flat. ‘It happened coming down the front steps.’

‘Don’t you see that he’s put you in the hospital?’

The woman in the bed by the door stirred beneath her covers.

‘Please, Mary, don’t raise your voice.’

‘I’ll lower my voice when you raise yours. Are you going to suffer in silence for the rest of your life?’

‘We were preparing for bed and I forgot to, to get the mail. It was dark and the corner of the welcome mat was turned up. I was coming down the front steps –’

‘No! He hit you and you fell. He started drinking after work and didn’t stop. Maybe you said something that set him off and maybe he just felt mean, but he hit you, like he’s always hit you, only you’re getting older now, and you can’t take it so well. This time when he knocked you down you broke. The next time he might kill you.’

‘Quiet please!’ The crisp white uniform of a nurse flashed through the door. The expression on her lined face was stern and her tone tolerated no nonsense. The hospital was no place for a family argument, she said. I did my mother no good and disturbed the other patients. I should go. I pulled my arm away when she reached for my elbow.

‘I’ll be quiet,’ I promised.

‘The nurse is right,’ my mother said.

I felt small and bad. I said, ‘I’m sorry, I just think you should defend yourself.’

‘This is not the time or place,’ the nurse insisted, her voice gentler but no less firm.

My mom turned her eyes back to the television set. ‘You’re just like him, Mary Alice, you’re more like him than any of us. That’s why you hate him, and why he hates you. It would be better for all of us if you didn’t come back here for a while.’