I’d only ever been to one other funeral in my life. A few years ago, friends of my parents lost their six-year-old son to leukemia. His name was Ferran. He’d been born with thick black hair as a baby. He enjoyed riding his bike and baking cookies. He spent the last few month of his life stuck in a bed.
My dad worked with Ferran’s dad, and though our families never hung out together outside of company picnics, I knew what the Amaris had been through. The treatments and the extended hospital stays, the expensive medications and the steadily worsening prognosis. The year before his passing, the community had a Festival for Ferran to raise money for treatment, a pitch-in street fair complete with kissing booths and pool-noodle swordfights. Naturally my family ran the mystery jelly-bean challenge booth: identify all five flavors correctly and get a prize. In total we raised eight thousand dollars, enough to pay for a few months of meds, maybe. They didn’t stop him from dying, though. All the kisses and jelly beans in the world couldn’t have done that.
Ferran’s funeral service was held in a big Catholic church, filled to the aisles. The priest led the congregation in prayer after prayer, some of them in Latin. There were songs and poems. Ferran’s older sister stood up and sang an a cappella version of “Stand by Me,” but she couldn’t make it through the chorus without breaking down, which choked me up, because crying can be contagious. I remember that the sun was brutal that day, sneaking through the haloes of the saints in the stained-glass windows, beating down on us later as we stood at the gravesite. I remember my mother holding my sweaty hand the whole time as they lowered little Ferran into the ground.
Papa Kwirk’s memorial, as my dad insisted on calling it, wasn’t going to be held in a church. Not because Papa Kwirk didn’t believe in God—I knew he did, because I’d asked him once. We were standing by our Christmas tree looking at an ornament, given to us by a friend, showing Jesus in the manger. Papa Kwirk was telling me how he’d once had to sleep in a barn too, “though no camel-ridin’ kings showed up with bags fulla gold for me.” That’s when I asked him.
“Hell yes. I believe in all of ’em,” he told me. “I wouldn’t’ve come back from ’Nam otherwise.”
Papa Kwirk believed, but he never went to church, at least not that I knew of. Maybe he couldn’t find one in town that would let him worship all of ’em at once. Or maybe he had too many other ways to spend his Sundays. On Sunday God rested, or so I’m told, but resting wasn’t really Papa Kwirk’s style.
Which all helped explain why his memorial service was being held at a neighborhood park instead of a church. That, and the fact that Papa Kwirk would have liked the idea of being surrounded by trees rather than walls. That’s what Aunt Gertie said, and she was the one calling the shots.
We arrived at the park early at my father’s insistence, following the little yellow flags and parking the Tank in the one space marked by a white sign that read Immediate Family. That was us. Immediate. The clouds sported angry gray bruises that threatened rain, so Mom pulled two giant umbrellas from the trunk that she kept there, just in case. She wasn’t allergic to rain (though she was afraid of lightning); she just didn’t want to get her nice black dress wet.
I scratched my armpits where my fancy fresh-from-the-package dress shirt was itching me. The pants itched too. When I complained about it out loud, Aunt Gertie told me that being uncomfortable was the price you pay for beauty and pointed to her own high heels. She then told the girls that they looked gorgeous in their dresses. “Don’t your sisters look pretty?” she said, poking me with her elbow.
“You really don’t want me to answer that,” I told her.
The park was pretty, though. A patch of emerald studded with elms and evergreens and yellow and orange flowers, like flickers of fire, sprouting from pockets of mulch. A playground could be seen in the distance, peppered with kids running and swinging. I had to remind myself it was Sunday afternoon and there was no school for them either. They were all dressed in shorts and T-shirts, lucky jerks.
“You’ll ruin your outfit,” Mom said, noticing me staring longingly at the playground. “Besides, it doesn’t look like we’re that early after all.”
In the center of the park sat an amphitheater, which Aunt Gertie said was used for summer concerts sporting local musicians. Today it was packed with white plastic folding chairs, already filling with people. Lots of people. “Quite a crowd,” I said.
“I told you, your grandfather had a big family,” Aunt Gertie said. “Everyone in town knew him. And most of them even liked him, which is to their credit.” She grabbed my hand—hers was surprisingly rough for someone who had spent most of her life in New York City conference rooms negotiating business contracts—and walked with me, all the way down to the front row, her heels clicking on the paved steps. There, on a small metal stage, sat Papa Kwirk’s casket and a few chairs, but little else. No flower bouquets. No wreaths or flags. A podium with a microphone stood next to an easel, on which sat the only other evidence for why we’d all gathered here: a portrait of the man himself.
Except it wasn’t a portrait, exactly. It was a caricature. One of those silly drawings you can get at the zoo or at Disney World for twenty bucks, where your head is twice as big as your body and everything’s slightly out of proportion. Grandpa’s caricature was especially overblown. His ears were much too big and his inky eyebrows too bushy. The artist had drawn him sitting astride Jack Nicholson, smiling, missing tooth and all. That missing tooth used to drive my great-aunt crazy.
The casket was closed, thankfully. Which meant that instead of seeing Papa Kwirk’s waxy face, layered in makeup, with a forced, tight-lipped smile, I would get to remember his giant gap-toothed grin. I thought it was better that way. Obviously so did Aunt Gertie.
Dad felt differently.
“Closed casket?” he asked, pointing up at the stage. His suit must have been itchy too, because he’d been squirming in it ever since we left the house.
“Jimmy’s wishes,” Aunt Gertie said. It was the fourth or fifth time I’d heard her say it already this morning. Every time Dad would ask a question, Aunt Gertie would deflect it or say it was a surprise and then follow it with “Jimmy’s wishes,” which only frustrated my father even further.
He looked about ready to self-combust now, staring at the sparse scenery onstage. “And that’s the best picture of him you could find?”
“That’s the picture he wanted,” Aunt Gertie replied. I could tell by the vein now visibly throbbing above Dad’s pinched brow that he didn’t approve. Of any of it. The closed casket. The park. The picture. I could also tell by the expression on Aunt Gertie’s face that she didn’t much care whether he approved or not. “Now if it’s all right, I have some people I’d like to introduce you to,” she said.
“Yes. Of course,” Mom answered for us, trying to keep the peace.
The next thirty minutes were spent shaking hands and taking hugs from people I didn’t know: a parade of strangers coming up and putting their mitts on my shoulders, telling me all about myself. “Oh, you’re Frank’s grandson,” they’d say, as if I needed a reminder. “He used to brag on you all the time. You still play soccer? He always said you were almost as good-looking as he was.” They gushed over Cass and Lyra too. “So beautiful. So grown up.” I didn’t realize Papa Kwirk talked about us that much. And to the entire town too. It seemed like they all wanted to meet us.
And yet nobody said what they were supposed to say. Nobody said, “I’m sorry.” It was as if they were specifically instructed not to. That’s what you say at feeyoonerals, of course, and this wasn’t one of those, though it wasn’t all that much fun, either. Instead they told us how they’d come to meet my grandfather. What they remembered most about him. Little snapshots from Papa Kwirk’s past accumulated with every handshake.
A man named Howie, from the American Legion, who once challenged my grandfather to an oyster-eating competition that ended badly for both of them.
A woman named Georgia who said Papa Kwirk once saved her cat from being eaten by a coyote.
Papa Kwirk’s postal deliveryperson, a boulder of a man with huge hands that swallowed your own, who admitted that Papa Kwirk always left him a snifter of brandy in the mailbox on Christmas Eve.
A waitress at one of his favorite restaurants, who said Papa Kwirk always tipped five bucks whether the meal was ten dollars or thirty. “Even if he just came in and ordered a cup of coffee, he’d leave a five under the saucer. What a sweetheart.”
The processional marched on. Dad seemed to recognize some of them. A librarian who had been working at the local branch since Dad was a kid and reminded him that he once returned a book that was five months overdue. Another ancient-looking lady from the neighborhood who lived in the condo next door to Papa Kwirk and would bake him white-chocolate macadamia nut cookies “because they were his favorite.” A dentist. A barista. The owner of a bowling alley. They all had some connection to Papa Kwirk, which seemed to them to mean they had some automatic connection to us. But they were all strangers to me.
They were mostly adults, too, closer to Aunt Gertie’s age. There were a few other kids, but they kept their distance or hid behind their parents, which was exactly what I would have done, which was what I wanted to do, but it was my grandfather who had died, so I was required to stand there and smile-frown-nod.
One girl had the courage to come right up and introduce herself, though.
“Hi,” she said, extending her hand to me.
After a nudge from Cass I said hi back. Apparently because this girl was about my age, I was the family’s designated first responder.
“You’re Frank’s grandson?” she asked.
I nodded dumbly. I didn’t expect another kid to call my grandfather by his first name. I was also having a little trouble forming words. The girl had black curly hair, dark skin, brown eyes. Her braces had turquoise bands that made it look like she had a mouth full of jewels when she smiled. She wore a blue sundress with bright orange flowers that for some reason made me think of Hawaii. Or at least of Hawaiian Punch. That made me thirsty. Or maybe my mouth was just dry.
“He was a strange bird,” the girl said, shaking her head.
“He was?” I mumbled. He was. Of course he was. But to hear this girl say it, this girl I didn’t know . . . it felt weird somehow. Like breaking the rules. Were you allowed to come to a funeral, or even a funneral, and tell the grandson of the deceased how weird his grandfather was? Who was this girl? Had I met her before? Had she come over to the house once while we were visiting? Did Grandpa introduce us? I swear I didn’t recognize her.
And I didn’t think I would have forgotten.
“Sorry,” she said, which was the first apology I’d heard that afternoon. “I didn’t mean strange in a bad way. I just mean he was unique. He had his own beat. Which is cool. Because who wants to be the same as everyone else, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, though I wasn’t really sure. There was such a thing as too different, wasn’t there? Too out there?
“You’re pretty lucky, you know,” the girl continued, her hands folded in front of her.
Lucky? Did she mean to have Papa Kwirk as my grandfather? I hadn’t really thought about it. I mean, he did give me a dead chipmunk once. I was about to ask how she knew him when Aunt Gertie interrupted.
“Oh. Hi, Ms. Kwirk,” the girl said brightly.
“Hi, Tasha. You’ve met my great-nephew, I see? Rion, this is Tasha Meeks. She’s a friend of the family. Your parents are here, aren’t they, dear?”
“In the back.” Tasha pointed. “I just thought I would come up and tell you that I’m ready. And to thank you again for the opportunity.”
Ready? What was she ready for? Was this one of the surprises that Aunt Gertie kept warning us about? And why was I sweating so much all of a sudden?
“Well, in that case, let’s get this party started, shall we?” Aunt Gertie said.
“It was nice meeting you.” Tasha waved as she walked up the aisle to the back of the amphitheater, her flowery dress swishing with each step.
“Such a sweet girl,” Aunt Gertie said, pulling my attention away from the swishing. “It broke her heart when Jimmy passed, though she’s too tough to admit it.” Then, before I could ask why, Gertie turned to the rest of our family and said we should all take a seat.
Given what we’d already seen, I thought that was probably good advice. Whatever was coming, whatever surprise Papa Kwirk had in store for us, it would be better faced sitting down.
The crowd quieted on cue when my aunt walked up onto the stage, and I wondered if they all knew her just as well as they’d known my grandfather. I’d heard somebody say once that funerals were for the living. Maybe the big crowd that had gathered had less to do with Papa Kwirk and more to do with comforting his family, particularly his grief-stricken sister. Though Aunt Gertie didn’t appear grief-stricken. She looked cool and composed as she tapped on the mic.
“This thing on? Guess so. Well, all right. Hello, everyone,” she began. “So nice of you all to make it out here this afternoon to honor Jimmy’s memory. I know if he were here, he would probably look out over this huge crowd and say, ‘What a lousy bunch of moochers! We’re not feeding them all, are we?’”
Laughter rippled through the crowd. I looked over at Dad to see if we, as a family, were supposed to find this funny, but his look was stern, his jaw rigid, so I kept a straight face too. Though it did sound like something Papa Kwirk would say.
“My brother Jimmy—or Frank, as most of you know him—had a saying,” Aunt Gertie continued. “‘That which doesn’t kill us will only try harder next time, so you might as well make the most of the space in between.’ Actually, Jimmy had a lot of sayings, but that’s the only one that isn’t R-rated. And it’s also the one that sticks out to me the most, because I really think he believed it.”
I glanced around, taking in the faces of the crowd, all eyes fixed on Aunt Gertie in her sleek black dress with its fancy white scarf. I looked straight behind me and saw Tasha, in the back row, looking serious as Aunt Gertie continued her eulogy.
“Those of us who knew him knew that Francis Tyler Kwirk was a salty, sharp-tongued, son-of-a-you-know-what, but my brother also had the biggest heart of anyone I ever knew. And whether his foot was in his mouth or halfway up your rear end, you knew that that big heart of his was in the right place. I think just about everyone in attendance today can reach back and think of something kind my brother Jimmy did for them. Whether he helped you build your deck . . . or fix your leaky faucet . . . or just bought you a drink at Bailey’s, we’ve all owed him something at one time or another. Some of us still owe him. How much do you owe him, Larry?” Aunt Gertie called out, scanning the crowd.
“Sixty-five bucks,” a man in the audience called out. “Plus interest.” This caused another trickle of laughter.
“You keep it,” Aunt Gertie said, smiling. “Take Cindy out to dinner somewhere.”
I could only assume that Cindy was Larry’s wife. I had never heard of either of them. Two more names tethered to me only by the memory of the man lying in the closed cherrywood coffin onstage. And yet they all understood. They laughed. They smiled. Some of them seemed to be dabbing at their eyes with tissues or shirtsleeves, but even still, this was nothing like Ferran’s funeral, where everyone was a sobbing, stuttering wreck. Suddenly I felt out of place, like there was some big inside joke that all these people were in on and I would never get. Like I was back at the Ren Faire, the only one without a sword and a pair of leather pants.
On the other side of my mother, Dad started tapping his heel, his leg bouncing up and down like a jackrabbit. She placed a hand on his knee to quiet it. It worked for about three seconds. And then he started up again.
“I don’t need to tell you all how Jimmy lived his life,” Aunt Gertie continued. “How hard it was at times. The things he’d seen and suffered through. You all know. You’ve heard the stories. All I can say is that if the rest of us live twice as long as he did, we’ll still only live half as much. He was a good brother, a devoted husband, a loving father and grandfather, and a true Kwirk. He was also my best friend. May he rest in joy, because I’m almost positive he’d find resting in peace too boring for words. Goodbye, Jimmy. I’ll sure miss ya.”
Aunt Gertie turned and blew a kiss toward the casket. Someone behind me blew their nose. It sounded obnoxious, too loud, like an elephant’s roar. A little girl sitting in the aisle across from me giggled. It all seemed so strange.
And it was just getting started.
My aunt gestured toward the crowd. “Now I’d like to welcome to the stage some fellows most of you have heard of, and some of you have even heard . . . the Salty Shakers.”
With that, three old men stood and made their way up the stairs with applause at their backs. I had never heard or heard of the Salty Shakers, and I doubted anyone outside of Greenburg, Illinois, had either. The Salty Shakers, apparently, were a musical group.
More specifically, they were a barbershop quartet.
Except they weren’t a quartet anymore. Three mostly bald men stood around the one microphone on stage. They were dressed in red-and-white striped vests and matching red pants with shiny white loafers, making them all look like squat, fat candy canes. I had never seen these men before in my life and wondered how I hadn’t managed to spot them in the crowd. They stuck out worse than Waldo.
“Hello, Greenburg!” the lead Salty Shaker cried out, earning him a cheer from the audience. In the next seat over, my mother had her hand cupped over her mouth, as if she was afraid something might fly out of it. My father just looked sick. Pasty white. With a tinge of green.
“We are the Salty Shakers.” Another big hoot from someone in the back. “And this will be our last performance. In honor of one of our own. The dearly beloved Frank Kwirk.”
Cass leaned over and whispered in my ear. “Grandpa was in a barbershop quartet?”
I shrugged. It was news to me too. At that moment, I tried to imagine what Papa Kwirk would have looked like in one of those too-short vests and those blinding white shoes, but before I could even wrap my head around it, the lead singer said, “Frankie . . . we know this one was your favorite. Hit it, fellas.”
The guy on the left, who was skinny by comparison to the other two, started in with the bum-bum-bum of a bass line. Then the guy on the right launched into some kind of do-do-do melody, the tune of which struck me as familiar, though I couldn’t quite place it. Until the guy in the middle started to sing.
“A well’a bless my soul. What’sa wrong with me?
I’m itchin’ like a man in a fuzzy tree.”
That’s when I recognized the song. It was Elvis. I’d heard Grandpa crank it up on our family’s ancient radio while sitting in the backyard at our house, gnawing on a licorice whip and telling me that they don’t make music like they used to. I believe my response at the time was “Thank God.”
Now the ghost of Elvis had returned at my grandfather’s funeral. In three-part harmony.
“I’m in love. Unh. I’m all shook up.”
The lead singer, a man with hardly a wisp of hair on his head but plenty of girth around his waist, started to wiggle his hips and thrust his pelvis. The crowd cheered. Cass covered her eyes. I didn’t blame her. I kind of didn’t want to watch, either, but I couldn’t bear not to. All around I could see people bouncing their knees and tapping their feet. Even Aunt Gertie, standing off to the side of the stage, was wiggling her bony shoulders.
The three old men finished the song to rousing applause and another hoot from the back. “Salty Shakers! Yeah-aa! You guys rule!”
“Thank you. Thank you very much,” the lead singer said. He glanced over his shoulder and pointed at the casket. “That one was for you, Frank.”
Aunt Gertie wiped a tear from her eye as she clapped them off stage. “That was marvelous, gentlemen. Though it’s just not the same without Jimmy’s tenor, is it? And now, before we finish this part of our program with a prayer, I want to introduce a young lady who would like to share a few words with you all. Tasha?”
I still had the image of some old geezer in red pants working his pelvis burned into my retinas when the girl with the blue-and-orange dress marched down the center aisle and up to the stage, accepting a hug from Aunt Gertie before taking the microphone.
I’d never heard Grandpa Kwirk mention this girl. Not once. And yet there she was, up on the stage, about to talk. And here we were, his son and daughter-in-law and his three grandchildren, sitting in the audience. None of us had been asked to say a few words, and yet this mysterious girl was up there, twisting the mic around in both hands, one foot knocking the toes of the other.
“Sorry. I’m a little nervous,” she began. Then she cleared her throat and took a deep breath. “Thanks, Ms. Kwirk, for letting me be up here today. For giving me a chance to share with you . . . with all of you . . . how much Frank means to me. I realize I hadn’t known Frank near as long as most of you, but I certainly knew about him. The motorcycle guy, I used to call him, because you could hear that big hog of his up and down Main Street every Saturday night. I used to be afraid of that motorcycle, actually. Just the sound of it made me shiver. It sounded dangerous. Like if it saw you, it might get a mind of its own and chase you. And the few times I saw its rider, I thought he seemed dangerous too, with his leather jacket and his cowboy boots and that missing tooth of his.” She turned and looked at Papa Kwirk’s obnoxious drawing, smiling a little. “He was an outlaw. A stranger. And definitely someone I should stay away from. But that was before I got to really know him.
“I didn’t meet Frank until a few years ago, when my father had his accident. Most of you know what my dad was going through and how hard it was for him. What you might not know is that it was Frank who came to Dad’s rescue. He helped my father recover. To overcome. And in the process, I got to know the dangerous-looking man on the motorcycle. In fact, I even got to ride along.”
How could I have never heard about this before? Why hadn’t Papa Kwirk mentioned it? I glanced over at my mother, but she was transfixed by the girl with the microphone spilling her guts up on stage.
“It was Frank who sometimes picked me up from dance practice when my mom was at work and Dad couldn’t drive,” Tasha continued. “Often taking a detour to the Tastee Freez for a chocolate-and-vanilla twist. ‘Best of both worlds,’ he’d always say.”
Several people in the crowd nodded and smiled. Apparently the Tastee Freez was the place to go in Greenburg.
“Some nights he would come over to talk to my dad or to pick him up for a meeting. And when he’d come in, if I was hunched over my homework, Frank would sit down at the table beside me and ask if I needed help. And it seems like I always needed help.” The girl paused, glancing over my head, over all of our heads, to the back row. “And I wasn’t the only one. I remember one night in particular. Mom was working the late shift and Dad was gone. I was home by myself and someone knocked on the door. I looked through the peephole to see Frank with my father leaning up against him. ‘Your daddy slipped,’ he said. Frank carried my dad to the bedroom, and I peeked through the doorway as he laid my father down. He took off Dad’s shoes and socks, tucking the one inside the other. Then he asked me when my mom was supposed to come home.
“That’s the night I learned how to play Texas Hold’em. Betting with goldfish crackers. We played hand after hand until my mother walked in the door around midnight. I remember Frank asking her not to be too mad at my father. And also telling her that she’d better watch out for me, because I had a killer poker face. By the end of the night, all the goldfish were mine, though I suspect Frank was just letting me win.”
Tasha paused, licked her lips. She looked like she was about to lose it, but after a deep breath, she regained control and kept going.
“I’m not sure what he means to all of you, but for me Frank Kwirk is all about motorcycles, and twist cones, and going all in, even if it means losing your crackers. And being the kind of guy who remembers to take your shoes off and stays with your scared little girl till midnight so she doesn’t have to feel all alone. So I guess I just wanted to say . . . thank you, Frank. Thanks for helping my family. And for being there when it mattered most.”
The girl handed the microphone back to Aunt Gertie. She got even more applause than the Salty Shakers. I heard a sniffle and looked over to see my mother tearing up. Dad, however, remained stone-faced, staring at Papa Kwirk’s closed casket.
I couldn’t even begin to imagine what was going through his head.
“Thank you, Tasha. That was lovely,” Aunt Gertie said. “Now I’d like our good friend Pastor Mike to please come up and lead us in Jimmy’s favorite prayer.”
Finally, I thought, something you’d expect at a funeral, a pastor and a prayer—though the man huffing his way up the steps wore a beige wool sweater instead of a cleric’s collar or a robe. I didn’t know Papa Kwirk prayed that much. Not enough to have a favorite, anyway. I tried to think of the last time I prayed—probably last month when we got our midterm report cards. Somebody out there must have been listening, because I managed to squeeze out a B in social studies and avoid a lecture from my dad on the importance of good grades.
“Let us all bow our heads,” Pastor Mike said softly.
The crowd went silent again, and I shut my eyes and tried to imagine God, all blinding halos and shining trumpets and oohing angels—or maybe just something like the aurora borealis—but all I could picture was Papa Kwirk in a too-tight Salty Shakers outfit. Sitting on Jack Nicholson. Eating a twist cone.
Any other time it would have made me laugh.
Five seconds of silence passed before Pastor Mike spoke. What came out next took half as long.
“Good friends. Good treats. Good Lord. Let’s eat. Amen.”
“Amen,” the crowd repeated, except for Lyra, who said, “Hallelujah,” because two syllables were never enough for her.
And then, as if they had heard our collective prayer, the food trucks arrived.