Funeral Hotdish (11 page)

“You’ve got a
drug dealer
in Northville and they haven’t caught him yet? It can’t be that hard to find a drug dealer in Northville. And what’d you call him? Crabapple? What kind of name is that?”

“He left town,” her mother noted, while her father bitterly talked over her, “No, they haven’t caught him. It’s that kid who works for Huntsie. It’s his nickname.”

“Where’d he go?”

“Nobody knows. He left the same night Amber died.”

“Oh, God. That’s terrible. He’ll probably never come back. If he sold drugs that killed somebody, I bet he just keeps running.”

“I hope so.” Her mother mumbled under her breath.

“That bastard better come home and face the music,” her father bellowed.

“We need to let the law take care of this,” her mother loudly interjected.

“Bullshit,” her dad said back. Joya knew she’d tapped into a continuing fight between her parents. But her law and order, NRA-member dad was objecting to the law taking care of a drug dealer? That didn’t make sense.

“I’m a little lost here, Dad. Of course the police—or it’s the sheriff there, isn’t it?—the sheriff should take care of this.”

Her dad yelled into the phone. “If we had a sheriff that got off his ass and did his job, yeah, but we don’t have that kind of sheriff. How can I expect he’ll do a better job this year?”

“Ralph, calm down. I’m sure he’ll do his job now that poor Amber is dead.” Her mother didn’t sound convinced, and her dad certainly wasn’t buying it.

Lights were flashing and bells were clanging as last year’s fiasco came back to Joya. Her dad and his pals were furious when the sheriff wouldn’t stop a kid they thought was pushing drugs. She could still hear her dad mimicking the sheriff. “No proof. You got no proof. All you got is what the little bird shot at.” Well, Amber was now dead, and wasn’t that proof? And if it were proof, then this Crabapple kid was in real trouble, which made him dangerous.

“Dad, I’ve done some stories about drug deals. These people are nasty. They don’t let anything get in their way. They’re dangerous. I agree with Mom that this is a job for the sheriff. Even a lazy sheriff isn’t going to let a death go unpunished—he’d never get reelected if he did. And in this case, he’s after….what is he after? Cocaine? Heroin?”

Even as she said the words, Joya thought it was absurd to think the Amber she knew had snorted cocaine or shot up horse. All she knew about Amber’s demise was her dad’s original pronouncement that “dope is dope.”

“One of those pills,” he told her now. “Those party pills. What do they call them? Estatic? Something like that.”

Joya stopped breathing. Now she was the one screaming into the phone. “Ecstasy? You mean Ecstasy?”

Startled, her parents in unison acknowledged that was it.

“Whoa, honey…” began her mother.

“Where’d it come from?” Joya pressed on, with horrible possibilities dancing in her head.

“Who knows?” her dad said. “I suppose Fargo or Minneapolis. They don’t make that stuff around here.”

“You know, kids don’t normally die from Ecstasy,” Joya informed them, thinking it was news they didn’t know.

“That’s what they say,” her Dad came back. “But Amber’s dead. And Johnny might as well be.”

“Don’t say that,” her mother admonished. “He could still come out of it.”

Joya missed the next couple of sentences as her mind chased the absurd possibility that the Ecstasy ring they thought Sammy headed in the Southwest had reached all the way to North Dakota. Was that even possible? But in her distraction, she almost missed her mother’s complaint: “The last thing we need is for somebody to take the law into his own hands.”

“What? What’d you say?”

Maggie Bonner said the words again. Joya’s father snorted in rebuttal.

“Oh, God, no! That would be terrible,” Joya declared, waiting for her father to agree that law enforcement must be in charge here. He didn’t say that. He didn’t say anything. His silence sent a chill down her back.

She could feel her hands sting from hitting the pavement. The shot-backfire was fresh in her ears. She needed to scare her dad like she’d been scared.

“Dad, the Mafia is behind a lot of drug rings in this country. And the last people in the world you want to mess with is the Mafia. They don’t think twice about killing anybody who gets in their way. They go after families, too. You mess with the Mafia and everybody you know is in danger. Let the sheriff take care of this. They’re trained to deal with criminals like that.”

Her dad stayed silent. No wonder her mother was worried.

Ralph Bonner changed the subject, putting an ending the discussion. Joya’s nervousness hit on high alert. By the time she hung up, she walked out of the fog of her depression to a roiling stomach.

Ecstasy had found its way to Northville.

Her mom and dad were fighting over a drug dealer—
a drug dealer
—named Crabapple.

Her dad was ready to take the law into his own hands.

Maybe Sammy…?

All that was stone cold bad.

***

Joya immediately dialed Cousin Alice’s number in Northville. Sunday afternoon. The bakery was closed. She should be home. But she wasn’t. Joya left a worried message: “Hey, Alice, just had an unbelievable call with my folks. What’s this about Ecstasy and some guy named Crabapple? Is my dad turning into a vigilante? Call me. What the hell’s going on back there?”

Monday, when she got home from work, there was a voice mail from Alice.

“Things are a mess here, but there’s nothing you can do. Don’t worry. This is a bad time for us. You know what they say, ‘It takes a village to bury a child.’”

Joya felt chills up and down her spine.

Chapter Nine

Tuesday, November 23, 1999

Nettie Schlener had to learn to live a life she no longer wanted to live.

From the moment she heard the horrible words that her daughter was dead, everything had been sucked out of her. Joy. Hope. Happiness. Wonderment. Contentment. Delight. Cheer. Gladness. Enjoyment.

In its place were intolerable burdens. Grief. Sorrow. Anger. Worry. Distress. Misery. Heartache. Wretchedness. Gloom. Hatred. Despair.

Her sister Arlene told her she’d predictably go through seven stages of loss—from shock and denial to pain and guilt to anger and bargaining to depression to an upward turn and then reconstruction until she reached acceptance and hope.

But Nettie never got beyond the anger. She never emerged from the depression. She never moved close to hope.

Her daughter’s death was even worse than her husband’s seventeen years ago. Although if anyone had told her that then, she would have screamed in disbelief.

“I had the perfect life,” she’d tell anyone who’d listen. When no one was around these days, she’d tell herself. “I married my high school sweetheart in an elaborate wedding with six bridesmaids in blue. I wore a lace gown with a long veil that trailed me as Dad walked me down the aisle of St. Vincent’s. Richard was so handsome, and everyone said I was beautiful. It was one of the best weddings Northville has ever had!”

If she had her druthers, she’d still be wearing that gown and dancing with her groom. And some days now, she thought she was.

“We had a good marriage,” Nettie announced, greeting family that rushed to her home at the news of Amber’s death. They looked aghast at her, knowing she wasn’t in this moment, but unclear what moment she was in. “Richard farmed and worked at Heartland Candies in Hankinson in the winter. You know, he made lollipops. That’s why they call Hankinson ‘the sucker capital of America.’ Isn’t that funny?”

Something was funny here alright, but it wasn’t a seventeen-year lapse in reality.

“It was the life we’d always imagined living. It was just perfect. And then, praise the Lord, I got pregnant.”

Her family let her talk because what else could they do?

“We announced the happy news at the two Thanksgiving dinners we ate that year, one with his folks, the other with mine. You were all there. Remember how thrilled you were? We didn’t even have a spare bedroom in the trailer, but we fixed up a nice spot we called the ‘nursery.’ Richard built a rocking crib in the barn—he started it the first day he learned we were pregnant.”

Nettie was almost dancing across her living room as she entertained her horrified family.

“My sisters gave me the most adorable baby shower! I bet half the town came to the Senior Citizen Center they rented. You know, the Center always has a fake Christmas tree in the corner that they decorate for each holiday. They have hearts for Valentine’s Day and pumpkins for fall, and of course, ornaments for Christmas. Well, my darling sisters got permission to remove the summer flowers and replace them with baby toys and trinkets. It was just adorable.”

And then Nettie stopped talking and started crying and everyone guessed she’d come back to the present. But they were wrong. Nettie had gone to the spot in her heart that had been the darkest until now—the spot she’d never reveal to anyone. The spot she would deny was even there.

Two nights after the shower, Nettie and Richard had a fight, a stupid quarrel about the baby’s name.

She and Richard normally saw eye to eye on everything. They had since they’d started dating in their sophomore year. She was strong-willed, like him (and he loved her for it) and normally they worked everything out by talking it through. But Nettie’s hormones were playing havoc with her emotions and
she
would decide the name of their first child.

If a boy, she wanted him named after her father. If a girl, after her mother. That meant Amos or Eunice.

Richard laughed out loud, convinced his wife was joking. She started to cry when she realized he thought the names were ridiculous.

“Those are fine names, fine names,” he cooed to quiet her down. “But not for our child. Those are old people names. You want to honor your parents, but do you really want our boy called Amos? Or our girl called Eunice? Think of the horrible nicknames they’ll get. Ammo. Mousey. Unnie. Ewie. God, we can’t saddle the kid with that!”

He was sure she’d see his wisdom, and offered his own personal selections, Joshua if a boy, Amber if a girl.

“What’s so special about those names?” she spat back at him. “What, is Amber an old girlfriend’s name? It sure isn’t your mom’s. And Joshua. When did you get cozy with biblical names?”

If Richard Schlener had had more experience with hormonal pregnant women, he’d have realized this was a momentary fixation that would pass, like her taste for sour pickles. But he was as new to this as she was, and she wouldn’t stop crying and wouldn’t stop insisting
her
child was going to carry
her
parent’s name and if
he
didn’t like it,
he
could go to hell.

“Oh, so if we’re thinking of parents’ names, it’s only
your
parents? What about mine?” he asked in anger. “Ben and Magdalena. Yup, I could get to liking those for our kid.”

“Don’t be absurd,” she snapped. That did it.

“You know, I think I will just go to hell and hit Jerry’s Bar for a drink. Because you’re driving me to drink, lady. But I’ll tell you one thing. No child of
mine
is going to wear an old person’s name!”

He stormed out of the trailer on his dad’s farm and headed into town on a gravel road he’d driven a thousand times. He came to a rolling stop where the road met the paved highway and whipped a right. He went a little wide, straddling the white lane marker when a kid from Gwinner came barreling down the road and hit him at eighty miles an hour.

Nettie never told anyone that the last words she said to her husband were in anger during an idiotic fight. She never admitted to anyone, not even her sisters, that if she hadn’t been so ridiculous that night in picking a fight, her Richard would never have been on that road and wouldn’t have ended up in a casket. She never admitted anything was wrong that night because to tell would admit that she had caused her husband’s death. She couldn’t bear for people to know that.

That stain was Nettie’s life secret. Her baby girl was born two months later, drawing her out of grief enough to be present and function. She named the baby Amber Magdalena. She told everyone that was the name they’d decided together.

But there was no such reprieve now. Now that she’d lost both her husband and the baby they’d made. Now that there was nothing left for her. Nothing.

Her family worried she’d never come back from that ledge of agony. They’d have been sick to know Nettie didn’t want to.

As she looked at Amber in that pretty lavender casket, Nettie wished there were an embalming fluid for the living. Something to make everything look like it was alright. But there wasn’t. She was resolved that nothing would ever be alright again.

The “acceptance” stage of grief is often called “a gift not afforded to everyone.” Nettie was one of those left empty-handed.

Harley gave her a week off with pay from the hardware store after Amber’s death. Nettie wasn’t sure if she should be grateful or if she should despise him for thinking a week was enough. But she needed the paycheck and staying at home alone was unbearable, so she went back to work and pretended she was “recovering.”

She gained twenty pounds in the first month, because the only thing—the ONLY THING—that gave her any comfort was sugar. She’d stop at Alice’s Bakery on her way to work and buy a half-dozen donuts, claiming she was sharing with Harley and customers, but she’d secretly eat them all herself during the morning. At noon, she’d go to the corner bar for one of their hamburgers with fries and drink a couple Cokes. After she got off work at three p.m., she’d hit Alice’s again, hanging in the kitchen with a cup of coffee and cookies or a cupcake—Alice never kept track—and spend the only minutes of her day in anything resembling normalcy.

Nettie was two years behind Alice in high school and they’d had a casual friendship all these years. Nettie had always been most likely to hang with her sisters, but since Amber’s death, it was more painful to be with a blood relative than with a girl you’d known most of your life who had other interests beyond your loss and grief.

To her sisters, Nettie explained, “I like Alice because she knows all the town gossip—she’s like her own newspaper, radio, and TV all in one!”

Alice Peters knew everything about everybody, because so many people passed through her delicious bakery every day. When you’re a willing listener in a bakery that always smells of sweet treats, and you have an endless coffeepot at the ready, people naturally hang out and talk.

Gossip in a small town is like currency. Alice not only had a full till, she loved to spend it.

“You know my secret?” Alice asked Nettie one day, stretching to entertain the sad woman. “I understand the difference in how men and women gossip.”

Nettie had never considered such a thing, but welcomed the relief of listening to a secret.

“Women gossip like a doubles game of ping-pong, everybody talking at once and throwing an idea back and forth. They’ll chew on a thing until it’s shredded, and then they move on. But men parcel out their thoughts slowly—two, three trains of thought hanging there with everyone naturally keeping track. Like multiple lanes of bowling where everyone knows each score. And in the middle of one train, somebody will tell a joke, and when they pick up again, nobody has to be reminded where they left off. So if you want gossip from women, they hand it over neat and tidy. But if you want it from men, you’ve got to hang in there for hours to get the whole story. I can eavesdrop with the best of them.”

Nettie laughed and Alice congratulated herself that she’d gotten the grieving woman to laugh for the first time in a long time.

It was no surprise that Nettie hung out at the bakery—everyone assumed it was for the sugar, and that’s where it started, but she really was after the ever-growing gossip garden. Some days the harvest was abundant. Some days it was just weeds. But it was always something and when you’re hopeless and bereft, you hang on to anything.

Besides, Alice often needed help decorating cookies or frosting cupcakes, and Nettie offered her services. It was a few more dollars and she had nothing else to do, anyway. Alice always tried to get out of the bakery by six p.m.—she had to be back at four-thirty a.m. to get the bread in her Reed Oven—and sometimes she and Nettie would run out to Dakota Magic Casino for supper. Other nights, Nettie would go home alone. The trailer was long gone and she’d inherited the farmhouse when Richard’s folks died. She’d either defrost a pizza or grab a bag of chips and pour some Black Velvet over ice.

The next mindless, meaningless day would start at six a.m. and she’d go through the motions all over again.

Except on Wednesdays. Wednesdays she only worked half days and she never stopped at Alice’s. On Wednesdays, she picked up her standing order at Leona’s flower shop and took the two pink roses to Amber’s grave.

Nettie would lie on the ground next to her daughter’s headstone, even when there was snow, and talk to the girl who could never talk back.

This was the only place she ever felt any comfort. “Strange,” she once said to herself, “you’d think this was the last place I’d want to be. But this is where Amber is. And I have so much to tell her. All those things I never said. All those things she needs to know.”

Anyone overhearing her conversation would have been able to walk into a courtroom, put a hand on the Bible, and swear Nettie Schlener was nuts.

Nettie spoke to the grave as though she and Amber were sitting around the kitchen table having supper. She told the headstone the news in town and how the girls’ basketball team was doing. She told about beloved Aunt Gertie and the reports weren’t very good; the lady was failing fast. She’d hit a parked car last week and the family took away her keys. Poor thing cried all day. Nettie told about strange customers at the hardware and how Alice’s new cake recipe tasted. She even gave updates on Johnny.

“He’s still in a coma,” she’d report. “His mother is always with him. His father….well, you know his father. They don’t know if he’ll ever come out of it.”

There were regular news flashes on her cousins, aunts and uncles. “Your Uncle Dennis was so angry when you died,” Nettie told her. “I worried he might do something that would get him in trouble. But he’s calmed down. You know, they always do. Those men get so riled up and they’re like red hot pokers, but it doesn’t last. They say a woman holds a grudge a lot deeper than a man, and I think they’re right. Besides, Dennis has his kids to raise and they’re all active in sports and 4-H and his wife is into scrapbooking big-time, so she’s always going off to scrapbook conventions and leaving him to take care of everything at home. I’m betting sometimes he wishes he’d listened to Dad that Susie wasn’t the right woman for him.”

Nettie told her dead daughter that Maxine refused any of her clothes—even though Nettie was sure she and the other girls would want them. She ended up carting them to the Dakota Boy’s Ranch Thrift Shop in Fargo. “Remember how we liked shopping there?” After questions like that she’d pause, as though she expected an answer.

And then, in a voice just above a whisper, she’d tell Amber about Crabapple.

She’d end with her arms around the tombstone, kissing its cold surface.