intimacy of his voice made my toes curl. Right there in my scuffed shoes, they curled up and sighed. All ten of them. It felt really strange, in a toe-sighing kind of way.
Scott walked me to the door and helped me on with the coat he’d retrieved from the couch. Then he took my hand and kissed my fingers. “I’m glad I get to pursue you,” he said.
“Yeah? I’ll let you know how I like being pursued.”
“Is that a challenge?”
“Take it however you want, Coach Taylor.”
“See you tomorrow?”
The thought of it made my blood launch into the second verse of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.”
“Yup. I’ll be the girl with the stressed-out hair and the expanding waistline.”
“I’ll be the guy with the ‘I’m pursuing an idiot’ T-shirt.”
“Good—then we should recognize each other.”
I left his apartment and tried not to laugh out loud as I walked down Kandern’s darkened streets. I did a Dorothy heel click instead.
The funeral director’s heels clicked by on the tile floor outside the empty viewing room. Trey and I had sneaked in there moments before to get away from the chaos of sympathy and empty words. We’d been relieved, once inside, to find the Wedgwood-blue room absent of caskets and flowers and guest books and tears. It was a space that smelled of air freshener and wood polish, and it was blissfully uninhabited by the dearly departed. Trey and I slid down the wall just inside the door and found comfort in the lush carpet and even lusher silence.
“You’re cremating me when I die,” I said, my voice a little rough from too many days of grieving.
“You can Cuisinart me for all I care, just don’t do a viewing.”
Mom had died just four days ago, and we’d been in full-on funeral mode ever since. She’d been considerate enough to have most of it planned, from the coffin to the plot to the Bible verses and music, but the days of grief-tinted activity had still taken their toll on us.
“You think Saccharine Psycho will pull the alarm when she figures out we’re missing?”
“Let her.”
The funeral director was one of those women so intent on masking their clout with artificial sweetness that she’d quickly become “the bane of Mom’s burial,” “the inhumanity of her inhumation”—and that was just a small sampling of the terms we’d coined for her intrusion into Mom’s death. She had avalanched us with so much gushing sympathy in the past few days that we were still reeling from the kindness overload.
“She was such a lovely woman,” Trey said in a syrupy voice, imitating Saccharine Psycho to perfection.
“And isn’t her makeup tastefully done?” I continued in kind. “She looks like she’s just resting peacefully.”
We let out simultaneous sighs and listened to the muted voices reaching us through the viewing room’s thick wooden door.
“This is probably the most socializing Mom’s done all her life,” I said after a few moments.
“No kidding.”
“She’s taking it well,” I said. “Barely breaking a sweat.”
“She looks good,” Trey said.
She did. They’d done her hair and makeup well enough to hide some of the wear and tear of Davishood.
Trey and I had spent as much time as possible at her bedside during the five weeks she’d been seriously ill and beyond medical help, though my teaching and his chefing had sometimes made it difficult. She’d been lucid almost to the end, sweet with the nurses and loving toward us. Talkative, too—like she’d needed to retell all the highlights of her life just one more time.
We’d listened to her stories and smiled at her embellishments and patted her hand when she’d teared up. We’d filled in the blanks of dates and details erased from her mind by the rigors of survival. And we’d taken deep breaths and counted to ten when she’d tried to reframe some of our family stories in a saner, brighter light.
She drifted into sleep midstory and drifted into eternity midsleep, weakened by her strokes and by the cancer rotting her resistance and her will. It was the gentlest, quietest death I could have wished for my mother, the woman who had gently and quietly endured the lashes and lacerations of a life spent with my dad. She’d set a high standard of dignity despite the degradation, of poise despite the poisonous contempt, and she’d honored her ex-husband to the end. It was that stubborn loyalty that galled and humbled me.
“She was a good mom,” I said.
Trey nodded. “She did her best under some pretty tough circumstances.”