The worst of all possible scenarios was waiting for me when I got home.
The best would have been an empty house, but that’s a lot to ask when you live in a Gothic funeral home with your aunt and grandmother upstairs and your mother down the hall, as well as several not so lively residents in the basement cooler.
Our house used to be a private mansion owned by a nineteenth-century coal baron before coal went bust in the 1930s, along with the rest of Potsdam. My great-grandfather Harold Graves bought it when prices were rock-bottom during the Great Depression, and according to family legend he became a funeral director just so he could have an excuse for owning a place this impractical.
Since then, it had been divided into sitting rooms and parlors, a chapel, several offices, and two apartments, one for my mother and me on the ground floor, and one for grandmother, Oma, on the top. My aunt Boo had her own digs in the renovated carriage house behind the garage.
Boo moonlighted as our embalmer when she wasn’t cutting and styling hair at Sassy Cuts—or getting tattoos. The woman was covered in swirls of ink and intricately stenciled words like Carrion, which was imprinted across her hips. I had no doubt that if she’d been around, Boo would have quietly cleaned my wounds, poured me a cup of hot chocolate, and listened without judgment.
Instead, I walked in on Mom and her boyfriend, Perfect Bob.
They were in the kitchen—back from a brisk run, judging from their glistening red cheeks and coordinated spandex—chopping mounds of brightly colored autumn vegetables. Lots of purple beets, orange carrots, and the revered dark, leafy kale.
Mom and Bob were insane about kale. If they weren’t stir-frying it or pulverizing it and sneaking the glop into brownies, they were baking kale leaves in the oven and crowing about how the bitter, dried, nasty green flakes were sooooo much better than potato chips—a blatant lie.
“Hi, sweetie,” Mom chirped as she dumped a handful of red peppers in the wok. “It’s late. We were getting worried.”
We? I cut my eyes to Bob, who bit into a raw carrot and nodded. Bob was what I suspected every single woman in her forties craved. He was tall and fit, with a distinguished smattering of silver in his closely cropped hair. He ran thirty miles a week, helped with the cooking, fixed dripping faucets, and never forgot to lower the toilet seat. That was what made Bob perfect.
That he was also chief of police made him impossible.
Bob zeroed in on my bloodied arm before I had a chance to cover it. “What happened there?”
“Nothing,” I lied, as Mom gasped.
“That’s not nothing,” she cried, rushing around the center island to inspect the damage. “That looks vicious.”
I mumbled something about an accident as Mom dragged me to the sink and turned on the water, squirting Palmolive over my wounds.
“Ow!” I yanked my arm back, but Mom was faster, gripping my wrist and forcing me to endure more.
“You’ve got to get those cuts clean and Palmolive is just as good as anything,” she insisted, using a damp dishcloth to remove the dried blood. “Was it some sort of animal? God, I hope it wasn’t rabid. Those shots are awful. Did you see if it had a tag?”
She was firing questions so rapidly, I couldn’t answer.
“It didn’t have a tag,” Bob said coolly. “It was a human.”
“What?” Mom flipped off the water, for which I was deeply grateful. She glanced over her shoulder at Bob, then at me with alarm. “Lily, is this true?”
I remained silent. The last thing I needed was Mom making a call to the parents of a classmate, like back in fourth grade when Erin’s best friend, Kate Kline, spread rumors that our living room was filled with rotting corpses. With that move, Mom pretty much clinched my status as an outsider.
Bob stepped closer and squinted at the gashes. “That must have been some catfight. Who’s the lucky fellow?”
Due to the disgusting sexism of his question, I refused to form a real response.
“You wouldn’t understand, Bob,” I said, laying another sheet of Bounty on the cuts. “It was random.”
“A and B is hardly random.”
Assault and battery. Bobspeak.
“Do you want to press charges?” he asked.
I shook my head. No way.
“If this incident took place at school, you might have to report it under the new antibullying ordinance.”
“It didn’t,” I said. “It was in the cemetery.”
“The cemetery!” Bob arched his eyebrows. “What were you doing there on a Saturday evening?”
This was why I had a problem with cops. God forbid you should be found in a graveyard under the age of twenty-one.
“Sacrificing infants to Satan,” I replied. “As one does.”
“I volunteered her to do some yard work,” Mom said, leaning against the sink and signaling with her pursed lips that I should tone down the sarcasm. “I want the name of the person who did this to you, Lily. And don’t tell me it’s none of my business. I’m your mother and you’ve been injured. I have a right to know.”
I sighed at my mother’s constant overprotectiveness. “Okay, but you have to swear not to immediately get on the phone or go to the principal claiming that I’m a victim of bullying.”
“I’ll do whatever I want, thank you.”
My arm was bleeding through the paper towels. I ripped off another sheet and covered it. “Erin Donohue.”
Mom dropped her jaw. “That lovely girl did this?”
“She’s not so lovely, Mom. I’ve been trying to tell you that forever. Seriously, she is Lucibitch.” I made a mental note to share this incredible new nickname with Sara, my best friend and fellow Erin Donohue victim.
Bob said, “Who?”
“You remember Erin,” Mom said. “You gave her a Crime Stoppers Award last spring for turning in those kids who were ‘selling’ pot.”
They were hardly selling. They’d brought a bag to school with about enough marijuana in it to stone a squirrel. Erin had jumped at the chance to rat them out in order to add another accolade to her college résumé.
“Oh, yeah. The skinny redhead. I liked her drive.” Bob smiled. He was a big fan of ambition. “Isn’t she the one who started that virginity group?”
I rolled my eyes.
“The Purity Pact,” Mom said, adding pointedly, “Now, there’s a good Catholic girl.”
As if I should have been ashamed for not leading a clique of hypocritical whack jobs espousing an antiquated, sexist, and quite frankly primitive philosophy that squarely defines women as chattel.
Bob turned to me. “You’re not in the Purity Pact, are you?”
“Dude, seriously. Do I seem like the type to join a cult of virgins?”
The tips of his ears turned pink.
Thankfully, this interrogation was cut short by the sudden ringing of our business phone. Mom answered it and retrieved a stack of yellow Post-its and a pen we keep at the ready.
“You want to know how much to burn a body?” she repeated for our benefit.
Bob made a face.
“Um,” Mom continued, “when did your loved one pass?”
We watched Mom’s expression transform from mild annoyance to downright shock.
“So, your grandfather hasn’t died yet, but you’re in the ICU and the doctors assure you it will be any time now.” She scribbled doodles on the Post-it. “You’re from out of town and just doing some comparison shopping while you’re here.”
To Bob’s credit, he flipped the caller the bird.
“I see,” Mom said, her brown ponytail bobbing with outrage. “Well, then, I suggest you go with Riccoli and Sons. They’re a very reputable funeral home that excels in speedy and affordable cremation.”
If by “reputable” you mean a 20 percent markup on everything from obituaries to caskets, I thought, admiring my mother’s ability to sound so gracious when she was actually applying the screw.
Mom slammed down the phone and fumed. “I know with business slowing I should have taken that, but . . .”
“You have your ethics,” Bob said, going over to her. “And that’s why I love you, Ruth.” He kissed her lightly on the forehead.
Normally, Mom and Bob’s PDAs left me mildly nauseous, but I was so grateful the attention had been directed away from Erin and me that I took advantage of the situation to slip away. I figured that as long as I was careful to keep my cuts out of sight, out of mind, the cemetery claw fest would become a nonissue.
But by then, of course, I’d already dug my grave.