thumb in the direction of the front door. “Wrong person. They’re just gathering in there.”
He breathed a sigh of relief, then seemed to remember that the box in my hands had once been a person. He took half a step back, once again almost losing his balance and falling backward. Without another word, he ducked around me and headed for the door of the funeral home.
Tucking the box under my arm, I pulled out my phone to check the time. I was going to miss the last bus. That figured. I’d half expected it when I’d scheduled with the funeral home but after all, your father only dies once.
The walk home was only a few miles, but walking alone at night, in a badly fitting suit, carrying my dead father’s ashes . . . was kind of awful. I thought about downloading a rideshare app for about half a second but dismissed it. I didn’t have money to burn, and it was only a few miles.
In the dark.
At night.
Through a less than savory part of town.
If anyone attacked me, I did have a big blunt object to hit them with. No doubt Dad wouldn’t appreciate being considered a weapon, but if it came down to him or me, I was gonna pick me. I didn’t think of myself as a selfish person, but living with John Bradford had taught me that if I didn’t look out for myself, no one else was going to do it.
Less than a block later I had to stop to take off my jacket. I ran my cuff along my brow, embarrassingly damp, and took a few deep breaths. My lungs weren’t burning, and I didn’t have a stitch in my side, but I was walking, for fuck’s sake. I shouldn’t have to be breathing deep from walking a few dozen yards.
Yeah, fine, I was pretty out of shape. People thought if you didn’t have a car you were more likely to walk places and be fit, but at least for me, that just wasn’t true. I didn’t have a car, so I took the bus. Or more often, I stayed home.
Sitting at home, reading a book, eating macaroni and cheese, and going to bed early—that was the life.
The life of a constipated octogenarian, my best friend, Beez, told me regularly, not the life of a single nearly-thirty-year-old who didn’t want to die alone, covered in cheese.
That sounded pretty okay to me. Relationships were dangerous and not worth the risk. Maybe I’d get a cat someday if I decided I was willing to clean a litter box. That was more than enough company.
The shop was closer to the funeral home than my house, I thought to myself about three blocks in. I was still trying—and failing—to find a way to walk that didn’t make the ill-fitting pants slowly climb up my ass crack. Instead, I had to stop every few steps and yank the fabric down.
If I took a left on Starling Lane, I could be at the shop in ten minutes. There was a couch there that was long enough to sleep on. An old, kind of uncomfortable couch.
I glanced down at the box of . . . Dad . . . and shook my head. Nope. I wasn’t facing that tonight.
Plus sleeping on that old couch was likely to make me feel like the octogenarian Beez was always accusing me of being. I wasn’t sure thirty-year-olds were supposed to be exhausted all the time, but maybe I was just ahead of the curve on the whole aging thing.
Besides, if I slept in the store, I’d miss breakfast, since there was never any food in the shop. Lunch too, since I always packed that in the morning before—
Shit. I’d used the last of the milk on my cereal that morning. Was there bread left in the house for peanut butter and jelly? I sighed and rolled my neck, trying to release the sudden tension gathering there.
Maybe I had some ramen.
I did not want to go to the store at night. The bodega on the corner near my house got robbed on the regular—twice in the last month alone—and almost always at night. It wasn’t even in the worst area of town, just close enough to the highway entrance that it made for a swift getaway.
For the hundredth, or thousandth, time since I turned eighteen and came into control of my mother’s “estate,” I thought about selling the house. I’d tried to sell it the