Stranger (19 page)

He nodded and followed me to the door, where I paused to pull an envelope from my purse. “You didn’t ask for this in advance again.”

“Grace,” Jack said, taking it. “You told me to be naked and on my knees when you got here. Where would I have put it?”

“Good point.” Thinking about it now made my still-damp cunt clench.

“Besides. I trust you.”

We looked at each other. Jack’s smile teased one from me and for one moment we both leaned in a microscopic amount. I stopped first. Instead of kissing him, I cupped his cheek for a moment, and he turned his face to press his lips to my palm.

“Thanks again.”

“No problem,” Jack said. “I aim to please.”

“Your aim is good.”

He laughed. “Your jokes are bad.”

I had to go. Had business to take care of. A family to help. Yet, I lingered, and so did he, and though I wasn’t naive enough to think it had nothing to do with money, I couldn’t help thinking it might have something to do, instead, with me.

And it was that thought that made me push away at last, leaving him in the doorway of a cheap motel wearing nothing but a thin white towel.

I’d known the Johnsons for years. Though we’d never been close, Beth had been in my class at school. Her older brother, Jim, had been a friend of my brother Craig’s. Her parents, Peggy and Ron, had been active participants in the band boosters and had often given me a ride home from school after different activities. Today, though, only Beth, Jim and Peggy were there.

Ron had passed away after a long battle with cancer.

Peggy Johnson looked pale and thinner than the last time I’d seen her, but she wore bright lipstick and had fixed her hair. She smiled at me as she came in, and took the hand I offered before pulling me closer for a friendly hug that took me a little by surprise.

“Look at you,” she said. “My goodness, Grace, you’re so grown up.”

Beth frowned. “Mom. We’re the same age!”

“I know, I know, but…” Peggy turned to her daughter and tweaked her silky shell top.

“You’re my baby.”

Jim rolled his eyes. “What am I, chopped liver?”

“Of course not. You’re my baby, too.” Peggy tugged the knot of his tie and turned back to me. The too-bright gleam in her eyes was the only sign of her distress. “So. Let’s get to this, okay? I’ve got guests coming in from out of town and I have to go to the grocery store.”

Her children exchanged looks, and as they all took seats in front of my desk, I sat, too. I pulled Ron Johnson’s file from the small wire rack on top of my desk, blessing Shelly for remembering to pull it before the Johnsons arrived. Ron had made a lot of the arrangements in advance. All we had to do was go over them.

I set the folder down on top of the sheaf of pink slips Shelly had left on my desk. I’d had this conversation with so many families I didn’t need to think much about what to say, but as my eye caught the name written on the top slip, every word in my throat dried to dust.

Sam Stewart.

And on the one beneath it, and the one beneath that, too. Stuttering, I flipped through the stack of messages, trying to count and talk at the same time and not managing to do either successfully. He’d called at least four times.

Four times between the time I’d left this morning and the time I’d returned? The man was a stalker. He was insane.

“Ron, as you know, had already picked out the coffin and vault,” I managed to say without sounding too much like an idiot.

I covered up Sam’s messages with the folder and looked up at all three Johnsons, who were staring at me expectantly. I really needed to get myself in line. I pulled out the list Ron and I had gone over several months before. I’d gone to his house to make it. He’d been under hospice care and too ill to come to my office. Peggy had served us iced tea and sponge cake while we looked at brochures of caskets and talked about pricing.

I looked up at Beth and Jim. “Would you like to see the casket your dad picked out?”

“That’s not necessary.” Peggy spoke before her children could, and both of them looked as if they disagreed. Peggy lifted her chin. Her hands were clasped very tightly in her lap. “I’ve made some changes in the plans.”

I put my list back in the folder and linked my fingers on top of it to give her my full attention. “All right.”

Now Beth and Jim were doing more than exchanging subtle glances. Using the private language of siblings dumbfounded by their parents, they were mouthing words behind their mother’s head. Peggy, if she noticed, acted as if she didn’t. She stared me straight in the eyes.

“Forget the coffin he wanted, with those fancy corner pieces.”

An avid fly fisherman, Ron had picked out a popular-model casket that featured decorative, customized corners. “Did you have something else in mind?”

Peggy took a deep breath, and her gaze flared though her voice stayed calm and her hands never unclenched from her lap. “I want that plain cherry box you talked about that day. The cheaper one. No fancy lining inside, either. And instead of that pricey vault I want to go with the cheapest one you’ve got that the cemetery will accept.”

Most of the cemeteries I worked with refused to allow burials without a vault around the casket—not, as many people thought, to prevent decomposition, though they did. Vaults prevent graves from settling, which allows for easier maintenance of the grounds. Still, they range from simple concrete boxes to elaborate copper and galvanized steel tombs that will keep out moisture and delay decomposition for years. I hadn’t been to any disinterments, but my dad had been to a few where he said the corpse looked the same as it had when put into the ground.

“Mom—” Beth began, but her mother at last allowed one hand to ungrip from the other and she fell silent.

“Hush up,” said Peggy.

It wasn’t uncommon for people to change their minds about funeral arrangements even though they’d been decided in advance. I’d had everything from families who’d decided grandma really should be buried in the better casket and damn the expense, to those who looked at the amount of money that had been prepaid with dollar signs gleaming in their eyes and who downgraded everything in order to get a refund. Peggy would be entitled to a substantial return just with the changes she’d already requested, and she’d get one. It was a point of pride for Frawley and Sons that we provided exactly what the customer wanted, to the best of our abilities.

If that meant returning money, we did it, no arguments. I knew there were other funeral homes in the area that weren’t so generous.

Peggy hadn’t pulled her gaze from mine. “No guest book. No memorial cards. None of that fancy crap.”

“Mom!” Jim, this time, sounding shocked.

Beth’s eyes went red and filled with tears as her jaw dropped. And still, her mother didn’t turn her gaze from mine. Jim was making disgruntled noises, like he meant to speak, but Peggy stopped him as easily as she’d stopped her daughter previously.

“Hush,” she said. “I’m in charge of this. He was my husband.”

“He was our dad!” Jim had found his voice.

Peggy blinked, finally. “And I’m the one who had to clean him up when he threw up, or wet the bed. I’m the one who had to listen to him moan for hours on end when the pain got too bad. I’m the one who held his hand and read to him and woke in the night listening to be sure I could still hear his goddamn breath, so I am the one who will decide what happens to him now that he’s dead!”

She delivered this speech in nearly one breath, the final crescendo of her voice loud enough to make all of us wince. Beth burst into tears as Jim sat back in his seat, seemingly unable to speak.

“I will decide,” Peggy said in a much quieter but unbroken voice. “And I don’t want to spend all that money on the shell.”

“A shell? What’s that supposed to mean?” Beth had found her voice again, and it was indignant.

“It means he’s dead, Beth. He’s gone. All that’s left is a body that’s going to rot in the ground and be food for the worms! That’s what it means! Your dad’s gone, he’s just a shell, that’s all that’s left! And I’m not going to waste our money—my money! I’m not going to waste my money on a fancy package for what amounts to nothing more than a beetle’s dinner!”

With a strangled sound, Beth got up from her chair abruptly enough to send it sliding across the carpet. She grabbed up a handful of tissues from the box on my desk, and pressing them to her face, fled the room. Her brother stood too after a hesitation, but though he towered over his mother she didn’t even look up. Her gaze had gone to her hands folded so tightly in her lap.

“I’ll go see about her,” Jim said in a grinding voice. “Since you’ve got it all under control, Mom.”

Peggy nodded. Jim gave me an apologetic look I didn’t need but probably made him feel better about this bit of craziness. He left the room, closing the door behind him. I waited for Peggy to speak.

“He left me,” she said in a dead, dull voice, and when she looked at me again, her eyes were dead, doll eyes. “He left me.”

She didn’t dissolve into weeping. I think it might have helped her if she had, but Peggy Johnson kept her despair and pain locked up tight inside her. She drew in a long, shuddering breath and forced a smile to unwilling lips. She let out the breath and shook her head to let her hair fall over her shoulders. She was, I realized, about my mom’s age, as Ron had been my dad’s. She’d always seemed so old to me, the way my own parents always had and still did, but watching her now I saw the girl she must have been. The one who’d fallen in love with a boy and married him. Had his babies. Had made a life with him, until the end.

When he’d left her.

“I understand,” I told her, the words feeling empty though they sounded sincere.

“No. I don’t think you can. Seeing it isn’t the same as living it, Grace.”

“No. I guess it isn’t. But I am sorry for your loss, Mrs. Johnson. Mr. Johnson was a nice man. A really nice man.”

“Yes.” She paused. Her fingers twitched in her lap and her lips thinned into bloodless lines in the mask of her face. “He was.”

“I’ll be happy to change whatever arrangements you’d like. But…if I might make a suggestion?”

A dry laugh barked from her throat. “Go ahead. It’s all anyone’s done since he died. Offer suggestions. Well-meaning crap.”

I nodded slowly. “I’m happy to change to the less expensive casket and vault and return your payment. And if you don’t want the guest register, that’s fine, too. But about the memorial cards…” I paused. She looked at me. “They’re not for you. Or for him. I think you would regret not offering them to the other people who’d like to have one.”

Her lips parted to release a sigh, and after a few seconds, her shoulders slumped. “Fine.

Keep the damn memorial cards. And the viewing, though God knows why anyone wants to see him that way is beyond me.”

“I’ll do my best for him, Mrs. Johnson. You know that. And it helps people to say goodbye if they can see him one last time.”

Her second laugh was only slightly less bitter than the first. “Not me. I want to remember him the way he was before he got sick. Can you make him look that way, Grace? Put that sparkle back in his eyes? Make him smile at me the way he used to when he had a dirty joke to tell me?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Of course you can’t,” Peggy said. “Because he’s dead.”

I reached out my hand, palm faceup, across the desk, and she took it. She squeezed it so hard my knuckles cracked, but she still didn’t cry. “I’m sorry.”

She nodded and released my hand. The conversation turned to the time of the viewing and the graveside service, as well as who’d be riding in the lead car and where the flowers were to be sent afterward. Peggy stood at last, her eyes still dry but the stiffness taken away from her body.

“I’m going to go on a cruise,” she said from the doorway. “With the money. Ron always promised we’d go, but then he got sick and we couldn’t.”

“I think he’d understand,” I told her.

Peggy shrugged. “He doesn’t have to, does he?”

The click of my door shutting behind her sounded very loud.

I didn’t call Sam back right away. I wasn’t, in fact, sure I meant to call him back at all until I was curled up on my ugly sofa with my phone pressed to my ear and my photo album in my lap.

“Sam I am.”

When had his voice become so familiar? “I got your messages. All of them.”

“Your secretary’s good.”

“She’s my office manager,” I said. “And yes, she is.”

“Uh-oh.” Sam made a shuffling noise. “It’s a good thing I’m wearing a sweater, cuz I think you’re cutting me cold, darlin’.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Shit,” Sam said. “Grace, don’t be mad at me.”

“Why would I be mad at you?”

“Shit fritters,” Sam swore. “When girls ask that question, what they really mean to say is,

‘Why wouldn’t I be mad at you?’”

I refused to laugh with as much resolve as I’d made not to call him back, which is to say, not much. I did stifle it behind my hand, though. He must have heard me anyway.

“You want to know why I didn’t call you for two weeks?”

“I don’t, actually. I don’t care.”

“Oh, Grace,” Sam said. “Don’t break my heart.”

I thought of Jack’s face between my legs. I thought of coming from Jack’s tongue. I opened the album and touched a picture of Ben’s smile, and I thought of Peggy Johnson’s too-bright eyes and the slash of her wrong-shade lipstick.

“What do you want, Sam?”

A beat. “To talk to you.”

A pause. “About what?”

“Do I need a topic?”

“Why didn’t you call me for two weeks?” I flipped the pages of my album through pictures of the past.

“I had to go back home for a while. Settle some things.”

I laughed, but it wasn’t a nice sound. “Oh? Where’s home?”

“New York.”

“They don’t have phones in New York?” I sighed. “Forget it, Sam. Just forget it, okay?

This whole thing is just stupid.”

“Grace,” Sam said. “How could you miss me if I didn’t go away?”

I actually took the phone away from my ear and stared at it hard before putting it back to my ear. “You didn’t call me because you wanted me to miss you?”