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“I have so much I want to ask you. About your life, about my father, and his father, and your son.”
“I can give you some answers,” Dick said. “The rest you may not want to know.”
“I’m not frightened,” Mr. Wainwright promised.
“This reunion is really touching,” I said, backing toward the office door. “But if I see one of you cry, I may actually implode. So I’m going to go elsewhere.”
How did I end up going to so many funerals in one year?
There was no one else to plan Mr. Wainwright’s service, which I found very sad. His nephew, Emery, sent a telegram from Guatemala saying that he wouldn’t be able to make it to town for weeks. Emery advised us to proceed without him. Seriously, he used those words. Real sentimental guy.
The nighttime service was held three days later, after the police finally released the body. Mr. Wainwright had a hand in the planning, which definitely helped me cope with the grief. He was in attendance at the memorial, of course, though very few others were. It was just me, Dick, Andrea, Gabriel, Jettie, Jolene, and Zeb. Daddy came, though we neglected to tell him that we couldn’t speak ill of the dead, not out of respect but because the dead was standing right there.
Mr. Wainwright didn’t belong to a church, so there was no one to give a eulogy. In fact, he’d left specific instructions that he did not want to be buried. He wanted his ashes spread into the Ohio River, where they would “float downstream to the Gulf of Mexico and out into the oceans, circulating around the world.”
There was no visitation, no pimento cheese, no irritating relatives circling like vultures.
In other words, it was the best funeral I’d ever been to.
The riverfront in Half-Moon Hollow was a series of half-finished cement docks and inlets. The county commission had started dredging to build a channel for a riverboat in the 1970s, hedging against the chances that riverboat gambling would be legalized in Kentucky. When the state referendum failed and the outraged populace voted the commission out of their seats, the project was abandoned, leaving a gap in the Hollow’s watery smile. Which, in a way, was fitting.
The one project that was completed and used was the public restrooms. I tried not to think about that.
The water, smelling of old pennies and new fish, lapped gently against the cement embankment. The moon was only half-full and half-mast, lending a soft, kind light to the proceedings. Mr. Wainwright asked that we avoid the traditional black in favor of cheerful colors, forgetting, of course, that Gabriel didn’t own anything in cheerful colors. Dick’s plain white T-shirt, sans sarcasm, lent an appropriate sense of solemnity to the proceedings.
The earthly remains of Gilbert Wainwright were stored in a hollowed-out copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls that Dick had purchased from a novelty store. Mr. Wainwright thought it was hilariously funny. I held the book in my hands and stood at the edge of the dock, shaking a little from the wind and the nerves.
“We’re gathered here today to say good-bye to the mortal body of Gilbert Wainwright. He was a good man and a good friend. I didn’t know him until late in his life. But he became very special to me in that time. He was a man with an endless thirst for knowledge. He asked the questions that other people are afraid of and never doubted that the answers were out there, waiting to be discovered. I’m going to miss you, Mr. Wainwright. You were kind to me when you didn’t have to be. You gave me a place to belong when I was adrift. Thank you.”
“You will always have a place there, my dear,” he said, chucking my chin with his clammy invisible hand.
I handed the book to Dick. “It’s only right,” I said, smiling despite the surreality of the situation. “He was your family.”
“Quite right,” Mr. Wainwright told Dick. “I’d be honored.”
“This is the weirdest funeral I’ve ever been to,” Zeb whispered.
“Shh,” I said as Dick stepped forward.
Dick cleared his throat. “It’s not right for a man to bury his children, so to speak. But this is the path we chose. It’s a vampire’s lot in life to watch those around him age and die. Gilbert, I’m sorry we didn’t get to know each other better.” In a low voice, out of my father’s earshot, he murmured, “But I hope you stick around for a while, so we can make up for that.”
Gabriel was looking at Dick with a strange expression. The whole “Dick reproduced” thing had definitely thrown him for a loop. I slipped my hand in his and gave him an encouraging nudge. Gabriel stepped beside Dick and with a stiff arm patted Dick’s back as he sprinkled the ashes into the churning water.
“Good-bye, cruel world,” Mr. Wainwright wailed in a fading mock cry.
Everyone but Andrea, Zeb, and Daddy turned to stare at him. He grinned. “Too melodramatic?”
“Why is everyone laughing?” Daddy asked.
“It’s a vampire thing. We laugh at death,” I told Daddy, who nodded sagely.
Mr. Wainwright insisted on a reading of his will right after the memorial. The funeral party, without Daddy, met Mr. Wainwright’s lawyer, Mr. Mayhew, the only male Hollow resident over seventy whom my grandmother had never dated, at the shop. He greeted us warmly and told us what nice things Mr. Wainwright had to say about us all.
“I’ve known Gilbert Wainwright for forty years. In that time, he spoke of two things ad nauseam: the supernatural and you. He enjoyed spending time with you, very much,” he assured me. “You made the last year of his life very comfortable and happy.”
“Is he here now?” Mr. Mayhew asked.
I looked from Mr. Wainwright’s apparition to Mr. Mayhew’s wry smile. “Yeah. How did you know?”
