was horribly bony beneath his shirt) and gave him a shake.
“Mr. Harrigan, wake up!”
One of his hands fell out of his lap and dangled between his legs. He slumped a little farther to one side. I could see the yellowed pegs of his teeth between his lips. Still, I felt I had to be absolutely sure he wasn’t just unconscious or in a faint before I called anyone. I had a memory, very brief but very bright, of my mother reading me the story of the little boy who cried wolf.
I went into the hall bathroom, the one Mrs. Grogan called the powder room, on legs that felt numb, and came back with the hand mirror Mr. Harrigan kept on the shelf. I held it in front of his mouth and nose. No warm breath misted it. Then I knew (although, looking back on it, I’m pretty sure I actually knew when that hand fell out of his lap and hung between his legs). I was in the living room with a dead man, and what if he reached out and grabbed me? Of course he wouldn’t do that, he liked me, but I remembered the look he got in his eyes when he said—only yesterday! when he’d been alive!—that if he was a younger man, he’d take this new income stream by the balls, and squeeze. And how he’d closed his hand into a fist to demonstrate.
You’ll find many of the opinion that I was ruthless, he’d said.
Dead people didn’t reach out and grab you except in horror movies, I knew that, dead people weren’t ruthless, dead people weren’t anything, but I still stepped away from him as I took my cell phone out of my hip pocket, and I didn’t take my eyes off him when I called my father.
Dad said I was probably right, but he’d send an ambulance, just in case. Who was Mr. Harrigan’s doctor, did I know? I said he didn’t have one (and you only had to look at his teeth to know he didn’t have a dentist). I said I would wait, and I did. But I did it outside. Before I went, I thought about picking up his dangling hand and putting it back in his lap. I almost did, but in the end I couldn’t bring myself to touch it. It would be cold.
I took his iPhone instead. It wasn’t stealing. I think it was grief, because the loss of him was starting to sink in. I wanted something that was his. Something that mattered.
* * *
I guess that was the biggest funeral our church ever had. Also the longest cortege to the graveyard, mostly made up of rental cars. There were local people there, of course, including Pete Bostwick, the gardener, and Ronnie Smits, who had done most of the work on his house (and gotten wealthy out of it, I’m sure), and Mrs. Grogan, the housekeeper. Other townies as well, because he was well liked in Harlow, but most of the mourners (if they were mourning, and not there just to make sure Mr. Harrigan was really dead) were business people from New York. There was no family. I mean zero, zilch, nada. Not even a niece or a second cousin. He’d never married, never had kids—probably one of the reasons Dad was leery about me going up there at first—and he’d outlived all the rest. That’s why it was the kid from down the road, the one he paid to come and read to him, who found him.
* * *
Mr. Harrigan must have known he was on borrowed time, because he left a handwritten sheet of paper on his study desk specifying exactly how he wanted his final rites carried out. It was pretty simple. Hay & Peabody’s Funeral Home had had a cash deposit on their books since 2004, enough to take care of everything with some left over. There was to be no wake or viewing hours, but he wanted to be “fixed up decently, if possible” so the coffin could be open at the funeral.
Reverend Mooney was to conduct the service, and I was to read from the fourth chapter of Ephesians: “Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you.” I saw some of the business types exchange looks at that, as though Mr. Harrigan hadn’t shown them a great deal of kindness, or much in the way of forgiveness, either.
He wanted three hymns: