The telephone rang, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. I’d lived and worked in the funeral home for four whole days, waiting for that telephone to ring, my skin itching with anticipation. Honestly, I would have preferred a trip to the dentist. My heart beat so hard in my chest, I coughed just as Mrs. Clancy appeared at the casket room door. “This is why we must be ready at all times. Put the rag down and follow me.”
“Where?” I asked, but she was already gone.
Mrs. Clancy stood at the phone desk in the kitchen, resting her hand on the receiver. “Where’s your mother?”
“Hanging the laundry.” How convenient.
The phone rang again.
Mrs. Clancy turned the telephone to face me. “Answer the telephone. The sooner you know your job, the sooner I’ll be able to come and go as I please.”
She handed me the receiver.
“Hello?” a male voice said on the other end of the line.
Mrs. Clancy’s dentures clacked as she whispered in my ear. “Clancy and Sons Funeral Home, serving the North Fork Valley since 1920.”
“Georgia, is that you?” the man asked.
“No, this is Amy. Would you like to talk to Mrs. Clancy?”
Mrs. Clancy shook her head sharply and pushed a notepad and pen across the desk.
I repeated Mrs. Clancy’s prompt and added, “How may I help you?”
“There’s not much to be done now,” the man said, “but to bury her.”
My breakfast burned the back of my throat. “Oh.”
“Who’s calling?” Mrs. Clancy asked.
“May I ask who’s calling?”
Once Henry T. Bigelow hit his conversational stride, no detail seemed too mundane or intimate to exclude about his sister’s death. “We found her just after we’d come back from moving the irrigation pipes up t’ the mesa, you know. She was feeling poorly most of last week, complained about feeling tired, spent a lot of time in the outhouse, she did. Other than that, whatever was bothering her didn’t seem to slow her down none. Bert says she was stronger than most men though she weren’t much taller than my belt buckle. But she was getting old, that’s for sure.”
Mrs. Clancy put her cheek to mine to listen in. She smelled sour like she hadn’t taken a bath in a few days. Old people and twelve-year-old boys couldn’t smell themselves coming or going. I breathed through my mouth.
The man continued his reverie. “We knowed something was wrong when we didn’t smell no bacon from the kitchen. It wasn’t like her, though, to leave good meat on the counter where the flies could get to it. Bert swore up and down, but he wrapped the bacon up neatlike ’cause that’s how Mildred always done it. Then he goes stomping off ’cause he says we’ll be needing some more ice here pretty quick. Bringing the ice up from the ice house, that was Mildred’s job. She done got the cows milked and the cream skimmed before she lay down in her daffodil bed to die.”
Mrs. Clancy took the phone. “Henry T. Bigelow, you old coot.” She shook her finger at the receiver. “Don’t be rattling off a bunch of nonsense. The sooner we get Mildred in here, the better she’ll look come viewing day.”
Whatever Henry T. Bigelow said made Mrs. Clancy roll her eyes. “Suit yourself, Henry, but you wrap her up nice. I won’t be picking manure out of her hair. And make sure she doesn’t roll around that trailer. Do you hear me, you old fool?”
* * *
THE DOORBELL RANG. Mom and I huddled behind her bedroom door.
Mrs. Clancy bellowed, “What are you doing? Not through the kitchen. For heaven’s sake, we have a ramp out back.”
“The trapdoor’s in the hall, ain’t it, Georgie?” asked a male voice I recognized as Mr. Bigelow.
“Henry, people stopped calling me Georgie fifty years ago.”
“I think it’s been more like sixty, don’t you, Bert?”
“Bring her in then, you old fool.”
Men shuffled and grunted in the hall, and the floor groaned under their weight. One uttered an epitaph no one would dare chisel into a headstone. Mrs. Clancy called for me, but Mom held me tightly.
“Not yet, fofa. Not yet. Stay here.”
“Are you happy, Henry?” asked Mrs. Clancy.
“I’d heard about the chute, but I never believed it. Thanks, Georgie, that settles my mind a bit.”
“Now get out of here. I’ve got work to do.”
Outside, sparrows chirped and bicycle tires clattered over gravel. “Mom, I’ll be okay. They have her in the basement. I don’t want to make Mrs. Clancy mad.”
Mom crossed herself and glanced toward heaven. “I must be crazy. Blessed Mary, what was I thinking? A funeral home? Dead people in the basement? I never should have brought you here, fofa.” She pulled her suitcase off the closet shelf and threw it open. With a shove, she pushed me toward the door. “Amy, go pack. We can’t stay here.” She scooped handfuls of satin and lace out of the dresser drawer. “Why are you standing there? Go tell that woman we’re moving out.”
I took the wad of lingerie from Mom’s hands. “Mom, really, we’ve been in tough places before. This isn’t any different—”
“Oh, fofa, you don’t know. Nothing good can come of this.”
“We could pray.”
“Don’t start with me, Amy.”
I returned her lingerie to her pleading hands. “Fine, where exactly do you propose we go? And how will we get there? Perhaps Prince Charming will pick us up.”
“Yes, that’s what we need.” Mom rifled through her purse. “I wouldn’t call him Prince Charming, but he seemed friendly enough, and he has a big truck.” Mom dumped her fat wallet and several tubes of lipstick onto the bed. “He wrote his name and phone number on a napkin.” Out came the embroidered hanky I’d made for her in Blue Birds and a bundle of coupons. “I wasn’t going to tell you. He bought me a drink, just one. I think his name is Bruce. He offered his help, said to call if we needed anything.” She held up a cocktail napkin. “Here’s the number. I’ll call while you talk to Mrs. Clancy.”
I blocked the path to the door.
“Amy, please, I can’t stay here.”
I ignored Mom’s violation of her pinkie pledge about men and softened my voice like you would to coax a kitten out of a tree. “Living here is ideal. You were right about that. We don’t pay rent. It’s so nice to have a washing machine and clothesline right here. The flower garden is pretty, the prettiest we’ve ever had. And that boy H will keep the lawn nice. We only have to treat the families with kindness and keep the place tidy. We can do that. You’re the kindest person I know.”
“There is a dead person in this house at this very moment.”
“I know. It’s hard. Think of something else. Think of how brave you were after Daddy died. You searched and searched for the perfect place to raise me, and you found Gilbertsville. And remember how we ate popcorn on the porch and waited for the first call of the loons on a summer night? Remember baking lavadores for the carnival? I love those cookies. Even old Mrs. Prinzki wanted the recipe. And Mom, think of the night of the Sleepy Eye pageant, how beautiful you felt on the runway with every eye in the auditorium watching just you.”
Mom stood taller. “Yes. You’re right. We have to be strong.” She leaned into the mirror to check her reflection. “Hand me a tissue.” Once she’d cleared her face of mascara, she knotted her blouse at her waist. “Look out the window. Make sure those terrible men are gone.”
I assured her they were. That wasn’t good enough. Mom insisted I confirm that Miss Bigelow had been safely deposited in the basement workroom. I stood outside the bedroom door for a long time, waiting for my heart to settle behind my sternum. I slipped off my shoes to walk from room to room. In the kitchen the drippy faucet filled my cereal bowl. A fan stirred the dust mites in the reposing room. A moth flitted around a lamp in the chapel. Ordinary things continued on as if Miss Bigelow was still there to see and hear them. At the closed basement door, I stopped to wonder who, besides her brothers (and that was debatable), would notice she was no longer there to tighten a dripping faucet or to turn off a fan or to shoo a moth out the door? Could someone leave so light a footprint on this earth that her passing was forgotten by the next rainfall?
That night, I lay in bed like a plank, trying but failing to think of anything but the dead body that lay in the basement. Surely Mrs. Clancy had covered Miss Bigelow with a blanket. Did she still wear her house dress? Her shoes? Her watch? Would the mortician check to see if she wore clean underwear? To settle my brain, I prayed for everyone I knew from A to Z. First, Annette, the only person I’d ever known with hair coarser than mine. She’d come new to my school in the middle of third grade, wearing her hair parted down the middle and held flat to her head by two barrettes the size of tongue depressors. Now that she was headed for the University of Illinois in Chicago, I prayed that she had cut her hair into one of those short curly-top dos that had become popular. I prayed for Bobby Kennedy’s eleven children, although technically they weren’t anyone I knew. They all paid so dearly for having a dad too noble for this world. I drew a breath. Maybe the same had been true of my father.
Carlos came to mind when I thought of names that began with C. He’d fled Cuba with his mother and sister when his father had been jailed for disagreeing with Castro. Carlos barely spoke English when he arrived at my elementary school, but he told me he loved me every day. I prayed for his father to join him in America. D is for dad. I know. It was useless to pray for someone who had already died, but reason never seemed to matter when I thought of seeing my dad in heaven someday. When I’d been saved, I drove Mom to madness asking about Dad’s standing with God. Mom finally assured me that he’d been a faithful member of the Beautiful Savior Lutheran Church.
“But he was Portuguese,” I said.
“It was a mixed marriage. His mother was a Lutheran.”
I figured the Lutherans preached a good come-to-Jesus sermon. They had churches in every city I’d ever visited, so I prayed for my dad, that he was enjoying the fine mansion Jesus had built for him and that he thought of me, even while basking in the glory of God’s presence. I possessed a surety that he was there waiting for me.
Thank you, Lord.
By the time I got to the Vs, Vinita Mae Lundquist popped into my head. She was Gilbertsville’s old maid. She never opened her shades. Lord, be her light. I lay there listening to the clock ticking and the cricket’s chirrup, and because I couldn’t help myself, I wondered if Miss Bigelow had ever counted a cricket’s chirrups to determine the temperature.
The latch of my bedroom door clicked and the whine of the hinges slid to a higher octave as the door opened. My mother trotted on tiptoe to my bed and lifted the covers to join me. There was no sense pretending to be asleep, so I scooted close to drape my arm over her stomach. At my touch, her belly softened with a sigh.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” she said.
“You don’t have to whisper.”
“I got a job at the hardware store.”
“But—”
“We need cash to pay for the car repairs and for living expenses in California.”
“We were going to do this funeral thing together.”
“You and I both know I won’t answer any death calls or drive a hearse.”
“You can’t leave me here alone.”
“In a couple months, you’ll be living alone in Santa Barbara. This is good training for you. If you can manage a funeral home, you’ll do fine in the big city.” She turned away from me. “I have to be there by seven o’clock. Farmers like to shop early.”
“How … when did you get a job?”
She yawned. “Last night at the Stop-and-Chomp when Bonnie and me—”
“Bonnie and I.”
“Bonnie and me stopped there for coffee and pie. I was just about to ask the waitress for an application when the Gartleys walked in. They own the hardware store on Main Street. Bonnie went to high school with Russell. They joined us and showed great interest in my story. The wife, I can’t remember her name, wants to see my tiara. When I told them about the Pontiac, Russell offered me a job—Kno application, no nothing. The wife …” Mom yawned again. “I wish I could remember her name. She’s nice too.”
Uh-oh.
“They have the cutest chicks at the store. You should come to see them when you’re done cleaning.”
“I have to feed the mortician, remember?”
“Make sure Mrs. Clancy pays for the ingredients.”