Chapter 2

I stepped into the lawyer’s office, and I was surprised to see how cramped it was. There was a desk near the back of the room, almost touching both walls, and two chairs sat in front of it. Just next to the door was a large bookcase that was leaning to one side, as though it might fall over at any moment. It had piles of important looking books on it, the kind you would certainly expect a lawyer to have.

The lawyer himself, Mr. Goddard, was sitting behind his desk. He removed his reading glasses when I entered the room, followed by my mother. He squeezed himself between one end of the desk and the wall and made his way to us, extending his hand. After I shook his hand, I stepped aside for my mother to do the same.

“Please, have a seat, and we can get this underway. I know now is a time of pain and sadness, and I doubt either of you want to spend more time in here than necessary,” Mr. Goddard said. He was a large man with an immaculate goatee perched on his chin. His eyes were narrow and pale blue, and his brown hair thinning.

It was obvious to me that the lawyer was right about me not wanting to spend more time in his office than necessary. The place was so small that it felt like an elevator, and the whole room was stuffy. There was a window in the office, right behind the desk, but it was firmly shut. I spent a moment wondering if it would be rude for me to ask him to open it. I decided to suffer in silence.

My mother chose one chair, and I dropped into the other. I looked over at her, and saw her hand dip into her purse. She pulled out a white handkerchief, and dabbed at her eyes, a move I had seen plenty of times in the short time I had been home. It looked exactly like what a good grieving woman would do.

That wasn’t to say I thought my mother wasn’t grieving, of course. I knew that she was. Whatever her faults, and there were really too many to list, she had loved my father, and he had loved her, for some reason I had never figured out.

“Thank you for seeing us a little earlier than you had planned,” my mother said, smiling at the lawyer. “I have a church group function today, and I couldn’t miss it.”

Mr. Goddard nodded as he sat back down at his desk. He folded his beefy hands on the desktop in front of him. “Church is important,” he said.

“It is the most important thing I know of,” my mother said, “but we don’t see you there every Sunday, Henry. Shall we see you there this week?”

It was all I could do not to scream and dive through the window. I didn’t have a problem with church in general; it was more a problem with my mother. Living through my childhood had been bad enough, being forced to attend the countless hours of church functions most days of the week. But to be back, and to see that my mother wasn’t any different now than she had been when I was a child, creeped me out a bit, to be honest. It was fine to be religious, but she was a fanatic and not even a borderline one. If God were a business, she would certainly be the number one salesperson in the office.

The lawyer had a manila folder on his desk. He flipped open the cover and pulled out a document that consisted of a good number of pages. I sincerely hoped he didn’t intend to read each and every page. He picked up his reading glasses and set them on the end of his nose once more.

“Now your husband, and your father, of course,” he said, nodding to each of us in turn, “has left a few things to others, and they will be notified in due course, but I thought we could go ahead and go through it since you two will be receiving the bulk of his estate, such as it is.”

My mother and I both nodded, waiting for the man to go on.

“Thelma, you are to receive the residence behind the funeral home, the considerable sum of your husband’s savings…” and the lawyer continued, while my attention drifted. Of course, my mom was to receive most of my father’s things, if not everything. I figured he would leave me something, maybe his prized Gary Ablett Senior signed AFL football jersey. Football was something I only marginally cared about, but my mother didn’t care at all, so my father had gravitated to me as his football buddy.

Indeed when the lawyer was finished with my mother and looked at me, the jersey was the first thing he mentioned. The second thing, however, took me by surprise.

“And also, Ms. Bay, your father has instructed that you are to take over the day-to-day running of the funeral home. More precisely, he has left the funeral home, the acreage on which it stands, and the business, to you.”

My mouth dropped open, and beside me my mother said, “What?”

I looked at her. She was as shocked as I was.

Mr. Goddard went on. “Thelma, as I said, you are to receive the residence on the allotment behind the funeral home, but your daughter is being given the business itself.”

“I can’t run a business,” I said.

“You’re right!” my mother screeched. “You don’t know the first thing about it. I’ve been by your father’s side for years. And this is how he repays me? I’m so hurt. I’m so hurt that I’m completely speechless. How could he do this to me? He could never make a decision for himself. He didn’t even discuss the will with me. In fact, I’m not sure this is even legal. I should be the one to take over the business.”

“You can do it!” I said. “Believe me, I’ll give it to you.”

“Actually, hold up a moment!” Mr. Goddard said as he raised a thick finger in the air, commanding our attention. We both looked at him, and he went on. “The deceased states that if Ms. Bay is able but unwilling to run the funeral home, it will simply be put up for sale. She is the only person in the family he wanted to run it.”

I looked at my mother. “Okay, we can sell it.”

“Absolutely not!” my mother said. “With God as my witness, and of course, being the great Christian that I am, he is always my witness, but as God as my witness, no one but our family will ever run that business.” She fixed me with a withering glare. “Laurel, I feel in my spirit that God is telling me to oversee the business and do periodic checks on you, to make sure you are indeed running it. I believe God is telling me that I alone should manage the purse strings.”

“We can sell it,” I repeated. “I don’t even want any of the money.”

My mother pulled another white handkerchief from her purse and dabbed at her forehead. “No! What would I do after that money was gone? I need to work. I need that business.”

“But if I run the funeral home, you wouldn’t get money from it, anyway,” I said, confused.

“If you ran it, obviously you would hire me as the general manager,” my mother said sharply.

To be honest, I hadn’t even considered hiring my mother. Not that I had ever thought about running the funeral home, but if I had, she’s not someone I would hire. And I wasn’t even sure the funeral home had ever had a general manager. That sounded more like a job you would get in retail. Dad had always done the lion’s share of the work himself.

Behind his desk, Mr. Goddard looked a bit uncomfortable. “That’s all the will says,” he said, rising from his chair, no doubt trying to get us to leave. I took the hint and stood, and my mother did the same. I shook the lawyer’s hand and then my mother did, too.

My mother then leaned over the desk, and peered into the man’s eyes. “You know, I meant to tell you, I suggest you look into changing your name. The name ‘Goddard’ is blasphemous. If you don’t change it, I wouldn’t expect you to be welcomed into heaven. I told Pastor Green of my concerns last year, and I’m surprised he didn’t mention it to you.”

The lawyer’s mouth dropped open, but he quickly shut it. “I’ll, uh, keep that in mind.”

My mother nodded and patted his cheek. Then she turned and walked out of the office. I threw an apologetic look at the lawyer, and followed her.

We had driven to the lawyer’s office together, something I was now regretting. We climbed into my car and I started the engine.

“So you can leave it all to me, but you can appear as though you’re running the business,” my mother said firmly, as I pulled into the street. “That was obviously what your father really wanted.”

“What if the lawyer finds out?” I asked.

“Now, you don’t need to be a little brat,” she said. “You’ve caused me enough problems as it is. You took three days to be born, and you’ve given me trouble ever since. Did you know, a woman came up to me in the hospital bathroom and asked me if I’d had a boy or a girl? I was forced to admit that I hadn’t had the baby yet. Do you have any idea how embarrassed I was? I knew then what I was in for with you. You caused me trouble then, and you’re causing me trouble now.” She paused and took a deep breath. “Well, we can make it look like you’re running it, but I’ll do it.”

I sighed. Mom always pulled out the three-days-to-be-born story when she was super mad with me. “Mom, I don’t live here. I don’t want to live here. I don’t even live in this state. I have a life! I have another job.”

She snorted rudely. “A retail store assistant? Hmpf!”

“Mom, you know I’m a jewelry valuer.”

She pursed her lips. “Well, I won’t sell it.”

I shook my head. I got on the small two-lane highway and headed back to the small town in which I had grown up. Everything around here was small. It drove me nuts.

“It’s not up to you, Mom,” I said, quite bravely. “It’s up to me, and I don’t know the first thing about running a funeral home. Dad did it all. He embalmed until Janet came along; he hosted the gatherings. Everything. What am I supposed to do?”

“You need to do it, because I guess it’s all up to you. But you cannot sell it.”

“I’m going to sell it,” I said quietly. “I can’t see any other option.”

“You need to pray more,” my mother said in a huff. “Come to the church outreach meeting with me today.”

“No,” I said with enough severity that my mother let it go, and we drove on in icy stillness. When we got home, she got out in stony silence and went directly to her car. She pulled out of the drive and headed toward her church.

I went inside. The place was empty. No one was working that day. The business was dead, so to speak, while everything got ironed out. I walked down a long hall and then opened a plain white door. It led to a corridor, and I found myself in the embalming room. There was a slanted metal table there, and numerous tools that were foreign to me. Dad had spent a lot of time here. He prided himself on making people look as natural as possible after death, and he was very good at his job. Of course, as the business had grown, he had employed Janet to do that.

Dad wasn’t around. He wasn’t a ghost and I knew he wouldn’t be one. The only people who stuck around were those who had been wronged or needed closure. My dad wasn’t that kind of man, and as much as I would have loved to see him now and speak with him, I was glad he had gone on.

Yet standing in that cold room, it was almost as if he were still here. “I don’t understand, Dad,” I said aloud. “I don’t know the business. I grew up in it, but I don’t know it. I don’t live here anymore. I don’t want to. I don’t want to live near Mom, or with her.”

I shuddered at that thought. My words echoed off the plain walls and the table, and there was no answer to anything I was saying. I knew there wouldn’t be, but it felt good to get it off my chest. I turned and headed back outside.

The expansive building that comprised the funeral home was tastefully furnished, designed to be open and to hold a lot of mourners. Out the back was our family home, and I made my way out there. I pulled a salad out of the fridge and sat at the small kitchen table. I felt more lonely than I had in a long time. I almost wished that the old man, Ernie, would come by, so that I’d have someone to talk to. I knew that wasn’t how it worked, though. I was always on the ghosts’ schedules, and they were never on mine.

I knew my mother was right. She had a nice sum of money now, but she couldn’t live off it forever. If I sold the place, could we get enough for her to be set for the rest of her life? I had no idea. As I sat there over an empty plate, nibbling on a tomato, I somehow knew I was going to stay. It dawned on me slowly, but I knew it to be true. I was going to stay, and as much as the thought upset me, somehow, a small part of me was excited.