Chapter 13

Even though we’ve texted and talked on the phone, I haven’t seen Vince in about a month, and I need to see him again. Lay my two eyes on him. Feel his smile. Because that’s what it’s like.

A feeling.

Warmth and sunshine and fresh air.

And if I am going to be self-reflective about my life up until this stage, it wasn’t going great. Raymond’s heart crapping the bed was the worst thing to ever happen to me—will probably ever happen to me. But before that, I hadn’t truly been living.

Somewhere along the line, I’d stopped putting myself out there for fear of getting hurt. Though, I now knew there was nothing that could hurt more than losing Ray, so what was the sense of hiding anymore?

If I want warmth and sunshine and fresh air, I should go after it. At least, that was the plan.

While I wait for Vince’s response to my text, I check the newest comments on my post with the picture of the missing foot I ate off the chocolate bunny. People are really responding to these new posts, much more than my previous ones, including those I wrote while in New York. I liked living in the city, mostly because I was invisible there, and my posts were written that way. Not much different from what other people are trying to do—claim some kind of space for themselves.

But my grief posts are not mere space, they’re a new universe, and they’re inspiring others to join me in exploring it. Some followers message me about their own grief and talk about people from their lives who have died, others comment about how relatable the content is. They like and share the posts, tag other people, building a much wider base than I had before. People of all ages, even other continents.

When I couldn’t get the type of job I wanted, I turned my journalism degree to social media, assuming it was the new frontier. I was right about that, but my career hadn’t taken off with my social commentary and witty one-liners. But with my several thousand new followers, my anger and loneliness seem to be the ticket. Who’d have thought?

Death, the ultimate unifier.

When Vince responds to my message, we skip the banter and get right to it.

You need a friend, and I’m stuck at work today. Why don’t you come over? His text reads.

And hang out while you work with dead people?

I have some paperwork to do. You can keep Gracie company.

I don’t really want to spend my time at a funeral home, especially this one, but if Gracie needs company… OK.

The parking lot at the funeral home is empty, but I notice the landscaping is clean and new. A few rosebushes have started to bloom by the front doors. The big building isn’t nearly as overwhelming when I’m not here to attend a funeral, but it’s still a funeral home.

I make my way down to Vince’s office, where he’s singing along to the Frank Sinatra coming from the speaker in the corner, barely loud enough for me to hear. I smile. “Hi.”

Vince lifts his focus from his computer, his hazel eyes doing a double take. It could be the lipstick or the lighthearted grin I’m wearing. I don’t know if he’s ever seen either one on me.

“Hey,” he says, and Gracie lopes over to me, licking my hand like an old friend. I cross my legs on the floor next to her, making myself right at home by her dog bed. “You’re in a good mood this morning.”

“Am I?”

He nods, watching me with squinted eyes like he’s examining me under a microscope. I am both pleased and unnerved by it, and I do the only obviously appropriate thing. I look away.

Rubbing Gracie’s side, I say, “I’ve got the day off, the sun’s out, and there’s a sale at Sephora.”

“I’ve been following you on Instagram. Your posts are really good. They’re honest and sad but kind of funny.”

“I’ll have to add that to my profile description…Cass St. George, honest and sad but kind of funny.” I venture a peek at him to find his chair turned to face me, his chin in his hand, and I ignore the tingles spreading from my belly, like champagne on an empty stomach.

“You know what I mean. You’ve got dark humor. I like it.”

I’m inordinately happy about that. “You’ve been reading all my posts lately?”

I sense him staring at the side of my face, and when I angle to him, he tips his chin up. “It’s amazing what some people are willing to say behind a screen.”

“By some people, you mean me?”

He flicks his gaze over me. “You’re not exactly an open book.”

My neck warms from his attention. Even though I’m not an open book, he’s able to read me perfectly fine.

I’m inordinately happy about that.

“I’m glad to hear you’re going to try to find happiness,” he says, quoting my post from last night.

“What can I say? Makeup makes me happy.”

“That’s all that makes you happy?” he asks, clearly daring me to tell him the truth. Not much has made me happy lately, but he does. In his graciousness of answering my midnight phone calls, his never-ending patience, not treating me as only Raymond’s little sister but as a woman who put on her favorite pair of skinny jeans, he’s shown me not everything in my life is shit.

And he makes me happy. He always did, even when I was a young girl, lost, trying to find my second-period class on the first day of high school. He had handed me a stick of gum and walked with me to Mr. Parker’s geometry class. But that’s ancient history, and I don’t have enough guts to tell him the truth today.

“Yeah,” I say in answer to his question. And then when I finally meet his gaze, his eyes call my bluff, but I refuse to answer him in any form. “Can I take Gracie for a walk?”

The dog’s ears perk up at the magic word, and Vince hands me her leash. We leave him to his paperwork and head outside for a refreshing stroll. I spend the time imagining what I want my life to look like, what moving on is for me. I’d like a good job, preferably one that involves writing and not kilts. I’d like to move out of my parents’ basement, have money to burn, maybe take a trip.

More importantly, I hope my mom will wake up one morning and want to be my mom. I hope Dad will recognize I’m his only child now and want to spend time with me. I hope I’ll stop calling my brother’s cell phone number to listen to his voice mail.

Then again, I’ve heard somewhere that hope is for fools and children. And I am neither a fool nor a child, so today, I’ll focus on something I can do. I can enjoy my day off.

When we return to the funeral home, we enter in through the back door like we do this all the time. I let Gracie off her leash as soon as we reach Vince’s office door, and I lean against his desk. “You know what I was thinking?”

He stares up at me with a soft smile and curious eyes. “Hm?”

“You’ve got this grown-up Eddie Munster thing going on, and I think we should work on it.”

“Eddie Munster?”

“Yeah. The kid from that old black-and-white TV show…? Maybe if we styled your hair differently and you grow a little stubble, you’d be less 1953, know what I’m saying?”

“You know what I was thinking?” he asks as his phone rings. “We work on your emotional defense mechanisms. How’s that sound?” His voice is a bit sharp, and I kind of like snippy Vince. He picks up his phone, his eyebrows raised at me in defiance. I can’t argue with him because he’s on the phone, but also because I don’t want to change my defense mechanisms. They’ve been working fine for me all these years. Although that’s the point, and he knows it.

With a resigned huff, I lounge in the chair across from his desk with Gracie at my feet. He’s talking about a flower delivery, and I survey his office. He’s got binders and a few pamphlets scattered on the shelves, but other than that, there’s nothing to show what he actually does all day. When he hangs up, I ask him, “What do you really do?”

He tilts his head, one eyebrow up.

“Ten-year-old Vince Mancini was like ‘I want to be an undertaker’?”

“Funeral director,” he corrects me, and I playfully roll my eyes.

He plays with a pen, flipping it from one end to the other on his desk. “We’re a family business, so I always knew this was what I was going to do. When you’re around it all the time, it’s not as weird as it is—” he gestures to me with the pen “—for someone like you.”

I shift forward and snag the pen from between his fingers. “You really wanted to dress up corpses all day?”

He leans his forearms on his desk. “Sensitivity’s not your strong suit, is it?”

I shrug. He already knows the answer.

“No, I didn’t want to necessarily work with the deceased, as those of us with empathy would put it—” he eyes me intentionally and steals the pen back “—but it’s part of the job sometimes. I don’t do it every day. Most of the time, it’s mundane stuff like phone calls, scheduling services, filling out paperwork, or meeting with family members.”

I shudder. “Still kinda creepy, though.”

He props his elbows up on the desk. “Yet you’re here.”

“I’m curious,” I say offhandedly as I stand to peruse a book of poems. “What would you be doing if you weren’t doing this?”

He takes his time to think. “I was good at math in school, maybe an engineer. I was offered a partial scholarship for baseball.”

I circle around. “You were?”

He nods, his attention on his computer screen as he types something.

“And you still chose this?”

“Like I said, it’s the family business. We’ve been doing this for generations. It was a given.”

“For what it’s worth, I think you would have been a good engineer.”

He turns to me with his gentle gaze. “What makes you say that?”

“I don’t know. You seem pretty good with putting puzzle pieces together.” Like me, I don’t say, but I think that part is understood. I go back to the book of poems, and he goes back to typing. We spend the next few hours together, him working, me reading. And it’s one of my best days in a long time.