“Okay, yeah, I can go. I’ll share our condolences and make sure Eli leaves his morbid chitchat at the door. When is it?”
“I need you there in thirty minutes.”
“Uh, can you get my flower-arranging seminar going in the demo kitchen? I just need to grab my car keys.”
“Dr. B prefers to drive. Besides, when I’ve driven us, he gasps like a little bitch every time I hit the brakes.”
“Got it.”
“Don’t forget to wear your name tag, so they don’t think you’re some random funeral crasher.”
She was gone before I could even ask why the hell someone would crash a funeral.
* * *
As Eli and I stepped inside the front door of the Trinity Grove Funeral Home, I nudged him with my elbow. “Does this count as a Dead Moms Club field trip?”
He glanced down at me from the corner of his eye with a slight smirk, before an elderly woman hobbled over to him. “Dr. Buckley, what on earth are you doing here?”
His lips spread into a warm, rehearsed smile. Not that it felt fake. Just prepared. “Clara, please accept my deepest condolences.” He held a hand out to me. “From myself and everyone at Starlight Palms. This is my colleague Vera.”
Clara’s white hair had a slight curl and was cropped close. She pursed her trembling lips together in a closed-mouth smile. “We can’t thank you enough for all you did for our Russ.”
“Well, he’ll be terribly missed,” Eli said, and then in a conspiratorialvoice, he added, “But just between the three of us, I think I’ll miss having a reason to see you most of all.”
Clara shook her head with a sly smile and reached up to pinch Eli’s cheek before giving him a gentle slap. Then she turned to me. “This one is a damn flirt.”
Her gaze drifted beyond us to the group that had just come in, and then she waved us farther inside before ducking away.
“Very smooth,” I told him. “Morgan told me you needed a babysitter to contain the morbid word vomit.”
“It’s early yet,” he said. “And Russ was a bit of a bastard. In the final hours, he kept calling his wife by his former mistress’s name. He was also one of the twitchier bodies we’ve had. Scared the new orderly to death while we waited for the funeral home to pick him up.”
“Did it feel good to get that out of your system?”
He exhaled. “God, yes.”
I scanned the foyer to find a large portrait of Russ, a man who I vaguely recognized as a grandfather on a long-running network sitcom that was always on in the waiting room of the ER I usually took Mom to. “What do we do now?” I whispered to Eli.
“Well, we sit in one of the back rows for a little while and look like we’re contemplating the beauty and tragedy of life and death, then we lay eyes on the deceased before we make our escape. Respectfully.”
We sat in the second-to-last row of pews, thighs pressed together. I tensed, but Eli was wholly unbothered by our proximity, so I let myself relax into the warmth of his like it was the most normal thing. Like when you brush up against someone you know so well that you don’t even think about it. And I wanted to punish myself for the way my pulse quickened at the slightest touch.
From where we sat, the profile of Russ’s face was visible. His casket was open from the waist up. All around him were elaborate floral arrangements and stills from his time onFamily Unit. It was one of those shows that had been on the air since before I was born and well into my college years.
Something about all of these photos of Russ felt wrong, because none of them werehim. Nearly every photo was of a man he’d played on TV,but where was Russ? Were there wedding photos? Did he have grandkids? An obscure hobby? Had his life started and ended with a silly network TV show? Was his former mistress here? Did Clara know about her?
I had a hard time imagining what photos might surround my resting body, but the idea that a life could be captured by a few snapshots made a knot form in my chest. It was too much pressure. To be summed up in a two-hundred-word obituary and a few snapshots.
“Go time,” Eli whispered as he stood.
I stepped out into the center aisle and his hand grazed my lower back as he guided me toward the front.
We approached the casket and stood there above the body. He wore a golf polo, matching pants, and one of those hats with a pom-pom on top. At least the clothing his family had chosen reflected an apparent love for golf.
“Yep,” Eli whispered. “Still super dead.”
I coughed back a snorting laugh. “You are wildly inappropriate.”
