The Funeral Makers (26 page)

“Sometimes,” Sicily thought, “I think what all of us want is our mamas. Men too. We want someone who loves us for who we are and doesn't judge us. Not even God can do that.”

Sicily squeezed some toothpaste onto her toothbrush and quickly brushed her teeth. As she put her yellow toothbrush back into the holder, she noticed that Ed's big red brush still hung there, an oversight on Pearl's part. Sicily touched the tip of one finger to the brush, just to see if it was real or if it would evaporate to the touch, the way things in TV commercials did when housewives least expected it. But it was solid. It was, after all, Ed Lawler's old toothbrush, the bristles half their original size from overuse. “His gums used to bleed, he used that brush so hard,” Sicily thought. “It seemed like he was always punishing himself for something.”

She rubbed some cold cream into her face and neck, then brushed her hair a few times. She put the hairbrush back on the shelf. Flicking the light out, she crossed the hall to her bedroom. When the bedroom light filled the room, Sicily blinked. It was so big. And chilly. She rubbed her arms to help the circulation. The extra blanket would have to come out of the closet. She opened the closet door. Pearl had taken Ed's clothing and scattered the hangers holding Sicily's dresses and blouses as best she could across the rod to make up for the empty spaces. Missing Ed, Sicily still had to smile at Pearl's thoroughness. It was more like Marge than Pearl, but in trying to protect her younger sister from unnecessary pain, Pearl had thought of almost everything.

Blankets turned down, Sicily said her prayers, ending with a special plea for God to forgive Ed and take him into his fold. She thought of all the McKinnon ancestors in heaven, including the indomitable Reverend Ralph. “They won't like each other.” Sicily thought of the two men in her life meeting for the first time. She prayed that God would intervene and see to it that the McKinnons accepted Ed as one of their own. Suicide probably didn't go over well in heaven.

“I hope they forgive him,” she thought and kicked off her slippers. She tossed her housecoat across the end of the bed and slipped beneath the covers. The bedside lamp turned out, the house was now in darkness. A stillness crept up to the sides of the bed. The autumn moon soon found its way about the room and brought a ghostly, bluish lighting to the interior.

Sicily lay back and listened to the night. Near her head the little clock Marge had given her for her birthday a few years back was beating quietly, like a tiny heart in the darkness. Like the heart of the house, bruised but still alive. She closed her eyes, but she was not sleepy. If she thought about it, she really wasn't alone. Now all the families were back from the harvest. She'd seen the last truck go by just that day, the Ryans', loaded down with their personal belongings. All over Mattagash her neighbors were asleep, or soon to be, with mothers and fathers awake and whispering in the dark about the kids' lunch money or a payment due at the bank. Or touching each other with warm bodies tired from the day. It hurt to think about husbands caressing their wives, because hers was not there to do the same. Would probably not touch her if he was there. Had stopped touching her when something in their relationship went terribly wrong. Something no one could make right again. So instead, she thought of her neighbors the way children do their dolls, as mamas and daddies who sleep in the big bed in the biggest room after they've put their children to bed. Mama dolls and daddy dolls who exist in a world where there is no sex or birth or death. She thought of all Mattagash as a huge dollhouse and her bedroom as just one of its rooms. They were a large, happy family, and if she listened quietly she could hear the rhythmic breathing up and down the road, the soft, almost inaudible coughs made by children tossing in their sleep, the dogs whining on all the porches, and she felt instantly safe. The bedroom door opened a crack.

“Mama?”

“Amy Joy, are you still awake at this hour?” Sicily asked as the door opened wider.

“I'm scared, Mama.”

“You come get in bed with me then,” said Sicily and lifted the blanket for Amy Joy to crawl under. She put her arms around her daughter and pulled her close.

“Do you remember when you were little and you'd crawl in between Daddy and me and he'd say, ‘Mama, I think there's a bedbug in this bed' and you'd say, ‘It's me, Daddy. I'm the bedbug.' Do you remember that, honey?”

“Uh-huh,” said Amy Joy. “Mama, next year can I go picking potatoes with Cindy's family and make my own money?”

“We'll see. Next year is a long way off,” Sicily said and smoothed Amy Joy's hair back. “What in the world has happened to your hair, Amy Joy? It's stiff as a board!”

“Cindy and me ironed it to straighten out the curls. It's too naturally curly.”

“You ironed it? Dear Lord, Amy Joy, one of these days I'll wake up to find you bald. Why can't you learn to accept yourself the way God created you?”

“I just don't like some of the things he did is why.”

“Don't say that, honey. It's blasphemy.”

“Are we gonna spend Christmas here?”

“What in the world made you bring that up? Christmas is three months off. We'll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

“What are you gonna get me this Christmas?”

“I saw your little red rocking chair down in the basement this morning. It was all covered with dust and old books. I'm gonna bring it up, put new padding on the seat, paint it, and put it in your room for one of your old dolls.”

“For Christmas? You're gonna give me my old rocking chair for
Christmas
?” said Amy Joy, prematurely disappointed.

“No. Just for fun. You used to sit in it every single morning when you were little and wait for your breakfast.”

“It had Little Bo Peep on the back.”

“You used to put your dolls in that little chair when you were playing nurse and give them strawberries you kept in an aspirin bottle. Those were your little pills.”

“I did real stupid stuff when I was a kid,” Amy Joy said and snuggled in closer to the warm body of her mother.

“Your tootsies are like ice!” said Sicily. “Here, put them next to mine and get them warm.”

“I didn't wear no socks.”

“I can feel that you didn't. You're gonna catch pneumonia. It ain't summer no more, you know. Before you know it there'll be snow on the ground.”

The two lay together in the quiet of the Lawler house, lay bonded more by their sex than their kinship. Women alone in the world were pioneers. They learned to stock the wood box before the heavy snows came. Learned to use the gun that would keep the coyote at the outskirts of the red firelight. Learned to balance checkbooks and change tires. Learned to sprawl alone in a bed made for two. Learned to utilize the empty spaces around the house where a man would have put his things.

“I'll help you shovel this winter,” said Amy Joy, as if reading Sicily's thoughts, which were of how Ed had always done the shoveling, complainingly maybe, but reliably.

“That'll be a big help,” she said. She held Amy Joy even tighter. They were the last of a long line in Mattagash. When Amy Joy married and left, she would be alone. She had always envisioned growing old as a settling in. The way an old house settles down on its foundation each spring, shaking the cold from its bones, a little tired maybe, but pleased that it had passed another winter and was still there. A kind of smugness, perhaps. She had always thought there would be summer evenings, long ones, shelling peas on Marge's front porch, while Marge rocked in the swing like the pendulum on an old clock. Thought there would always be Ed to eat breakfast with in the morning. Someone to turn and say, “I think the swallows have started south.” Someone to rub against in the night, like a bobbing boat rubbing against the pier. Had thought they would spend their old age together, as if it were something they
could
spend, like money. Something they had saved all their lives to squander in an instant. It was as if she were now forced to be the person she would have become if she hadn't married Ed. If she hadn't married anyone. Except that she was older and responsible for a child. Sicily smiled at the thought of Amy Joy in her life. She had been, after all, given to her by God to bless her old age. Amy Joy could keep the spark burning, could keep the indispensable fire aflame. Amy Joy would be her warm blanket on cold nights. Amy Joy would give her grandchildren to help fill in the empty spaces. She would never again see Marge point to the mountain across the river and say, “Look how them white birches stand out among them red and orange leaves. This is the prettiest autumn ever.” But she might turn some evening, after cleaning wild strawberries, might wipe her hands on her apron and turn to Amy Joy and say, “We ought to press some leaves and cover them with plastic so they'll keep. Just to save them a while longer. Like your Aunt Marge used to do. I swear they're prettier this year than they've ever been.” Or she could watch the happy faces of her grandchildren as she opened a box of Breeze detergent and announced, “The free dish towel is red and white. Which one of you guessed red and white?” That's what she would do. She would simply rewrite the scenario of her old age. She'd prepare herself the way kings do for battle. Sweep the cobwebs off the castle. Dig a new moat.

“Mama, do you think Aunt Marge got a room in heaven like she wanted?” Amy Joy asked.

“I'm sure she did,” said Sicily, thinking that Marge was probably redecorating that room that very minute.

There was no more talk from Amy Joy for several minutes and Sicily assumed that she was asleep. But then Amy Joy asked softly, “And Daddy too. Has he got a room?”

“Daddy too,” Sicily said and squeezed her daughter's hand. Moonlight came in the window and fell across the bed. Amy Joy lifted one foot as if to make it move. Like kicking at a dog to go someplace else and lie down. In Willie's old barn two cats snarled at each other. The first signs of frost lay on the hill and the fields, caught up in the moonlight. The land was shifting, heaving, settling down so that it could carry the tons of snow that would come. An occasional car passed on the road and went its way into the heart of town.

“That's Brian Hughes's old car,” said Amy Joy. “Listen to it. It ain't got a muffler.”

“Out drinking in Watertown at this hour,” Sicily said and lifted her head to look at the dock. It was twelve thirty.

“Amy Joy, we'll never get up in the morning. It's going for one o'clock.”

“Then let's just sleep all day if we want to.”

“Can you imagine such a thing! Sleeping all day? What would people say?” Sicily laughed. It felt good to laugh. The muscles in her stomach were sore from the tension of the past days and laughing stretched them out, loosened them up.

“I should have brought my sheets in off the line,” said Sicily. “There's gonna be a frost and that's not good on cotton.”

“I don't care what people say about me,” said Amy Joy, and picked at a hangnail with her teeth.

“That's because you're so young. When you get older you care. You have to face your neighbors every single day.”

“I ain't gonna get old here in Mattagash, so I won't never care.”

“Where are you going to grow old?”

“I'm saving my money,” said Amy Joy. “I'm gonna pick potatoes and save all my birthday and Christmas money, and from now on I just want money for Christmas. And when I get enough I'm taking the Greyhound out of Watertown, just like Aunt Pearl did.”

“You might end up over a funeral home in Portland, Amy Joy.” Sicily was teasing.

“I ain't stopping in no Portland, Maine. I'm going straight to Hollywood, California. I don't care if I have a job when I get there or not.”

“If you're going on a Greyhound bus from Watertown, Maine, to Hollywood, California, you won't need a job. You'll be able to draw Social Security by the time you get there,” said Sicily.

“In Hollywood they let you dye your hair,” said Amy Joy, who had settled down for the night and felt the heaviness of sleep coming to her eyelids. The last of the harvest moon climbed higher into the night sky that covered the town. The river that had brought the McKinnon brothers to its headwaters curled silently like a long, black tongue, flicked at the bushes along the shore, gossiped near the rocks that lay at the edge. Like a child whose bedtime story has finished, the whole town was ready for sleep, the last car home from Watertown, the last light turned off, the last clock wound and set. And the pulse of the town beat evenly, slowly, restfully. Like an insect queen, the town rested, her workers, her soldiers and her fighters, her dreamers and her lovers, all little pulses beating inside her.

“When you live in Hollywood, you can go by their rules, but while you're under my roof, Amy Joy, you'll live by mine. Is that understood?” Sicily asked, pulling the extra blanket up about them.

Half asleep, Amy Joy turned on her side, her back to her mother. “I guess,” she said, and as the moon floated higher, the old queen slept.

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Available August 2014 from Sourcebooks Landmark