On Thanksgiving morning, Tiff appeared to levitate above a makeshift stage in the dining hall of the nursing home. She wore silver slippers, pajama bottoms patterned with pink elephants, and a fake-fur shrug over an old T-shirt. Yellow feathers were clipped in her hair. She lay back on a thin board above two trick folding chairs.
Doc and Tiff had performed magic at the Willow House every Thanksgiving morning for the last four years—their showstopper was a dollar bill bursting into flame to light Tiff’s exploding cigar. Usually I stayed home to cook, but this year Ivy had insisted on hosting Thanksgiving in her home. She’d spent the week sprinkling glitter on pinecones for decoration and experimenting with mincemeat-pie recipes culled from old cookbooks.
So Tiff had dragged me to the Willow House, where I refused to remove my coat. I kept my purse in my lap. Not only were these people close to my age, some slightly older, some slightly younger, but I’d known many of them for years. Some had been prominent members of the community—there was a park in our town named after one of the men, and one of the women had owned a café on one corner of the town square for fifty years. I’d written the obituaries of some of them already and filed them in a folder marked Impending Doom.
It’s not what you’re thinking. I’m actually opposed to what I call the itchy-trigger-finger method of obit writing—before a celebrity has even choked out his famous last words, the writers of the world thrill to be the first to bear bad news, so they keep obits of the notable written and at the ready. But, in all modesty, I’ve written obits of the local elderly only because they’ve asked me to. I’ve been in the business for so long, since my girlhood, that I’ve created portraits of these people’s grandparents, their parents, even some of their children. I’m as much a part of the traditions of death as a gilded lily.
Doc ran a large silver hoop over Tiff to demonstrate that there were no hidden wires. People kindly applauded, but no one seemed amazed. Doc released Tiff from her hovering, lowering her to the chairs. She extracted herself from the illusion, stepped to the front of the stage, and curtsied. “Thank you, thank you, ladies and gents,” Doc said, pulling a bouquet of ugly flowers from his top hat.
“Essie?” said someone to my left. There stood an old, old woman, still quite lovely, with thick gray hair and wet blue eyes. She wore a silky white gown, and she put her hand on my shoulder. Was she the angel of my own impending doom? To die while visiting a nursing home, how perfect, I thought, but there were any number of perfect deaths for a writer of obituaries. Any end would be fitting. To simply slip away some night in my sleep would seem almost ironic.
“Bernice,” she said, reminding me. Of course. My dear Bernice, who had, since our youth, always been the prettier of the two of us. Her life had been a dream, every minute of it unmarked by tragedy, so, naturally, we’d drifted apart years before. With my own life having been so slipshod, I must’ve been a nagging reminder that, in a heartbeat, everything good could be lost.
I took Bernice’s hand, just for a friendly squeeze, but she held on to mine, so we stayed that way, holding hands, as we spoke. “I thought you’d moved in with your kids,” I said.
“I did,” she said, “but I just kept falling, falling, falling. Breaking things, breaking myself. I’m just skin and bones anymore. And not good skin and not good bones.”
It did feel as if, even with my weakling’s grip, I could shatter the bones in her hand with little effort, and maybe that was what made me feel so overcome with affection for her just then. I wanted to take her home with me, where we could live our last days as eccentric relics, doddering and afflicted, our once-a-week curl-and-sets falling apart lock by lock together. We could endlessly reminisce, live in the past to an unhealthy degree, then politely kill each other some winter night before bedtime, stirring poison into our cups of whiskey-spiked chamomile tea, wearing party hats. Then, nervous about our double homicide, we could lie in bed together, holding hands again, frightened and waiting, still wondering, after all these years, if we even believed in our own souls.
Bernice pulled her hand away. “Well, you take care, Essie,” she said with what I interpreted as a privileged tone of dismissal, and just like that, my fantasy of our last-ditch life together dissolved. Bernice shuffled off, content with how things had gone for her. She had no need for a pact of any kind.
And neither did I, damn it. I would not be one of those people, weepy and spiteful, who they had to drag, kicking and screaming, to her hole in the ground. It was someone else’s turn to have a long life of writing obituaries. I did indeed, I was certain, have it in me to bow out gracefully. I vowed right then to retire, to leave them all wanting more. I’d write my last obituary—for Bernice—and I’d tuck it into my file of impending doom.