Grounded (5 page)

Aunt Josie’s
Le Frenchie
hadn’t grown out even a smidgen, but she was back on my swivel stool the day after the ad appeared in the newspaper.

“What’s all this about
living funerals
?” she asked in her quietest voice, which was as loud as most people’s regular speaking voice. Mother was humming church hymns on the other side of the curtain.

“You’re the one who gave me the idea,” I whispered directly into her ear.

“
Me?
What do you mean?” Aunt Josie wanted to know. “You’re going to put my Clem out of business.”

“Your Clem?” I said, pretending to cut the back of her hair. There was nothing left to cut.

“We’re planning to get married after he gets the crematorium up and running,” Aunt Josie stated in a hushed voice. “But I’m afraid this living funeral business could ruin everything.”

“Sorry. I’m just trying to help Mother.”

“I know you are, child. Do you think it’s gonna work?”

“They’ve got one booked already,” I admitted.

“A living funeral?
Who?
”

“Uncle Waldo,” I said.

Aunt Josie spun around on the stool. “
My
brother’s having a living funeral?”

“He’s sending out invitations. I’m sure you’ll get one.”

“An invitation to a
funeral
,” she said, shaking her head.

I showed her the tasteful card I’d received in that morning’s mail.

“Well, I’ll be ding danged,” Aunt Josie declared.

Mother and I helped Mr. Danielson decorate the viewing room with streamers and balloons. We used one of the display caskets as a buffet table, setting plates of cucumber sandwiches on top of the polished wood. My job was ladling out limeade-sherbet punch from Mother’s cut-glass punch bowl.

At Uncle Waldo’s insistence, Mr. Danielson agreed to play dance records instead of the usual fake classical
music. And sure enough, a half hour into the living funeral, guests started pushing chairs to the side of the room. A dance floor was born.

“Never in all my days did I think I’d see people dancing in the viewing room,” Mr. Danielson told me.

Uncle Waldo wore a pressed brown suit. He greeted guests in his usual shy manner. I noticed the only person he wasn’t nervous around was his sister.

“I should’ve done this years ago,” he told Aunt Josie at the punch bowl. “I’ve talked to more people tonight than in all the years since I moved back here.”

“Goody gumdrops for you,” Aunt Josie said sarcastically.

Uncle Waldo laughed. “You’re just mad your new boyfriend wouldn’t come with you. Is that it?”

“No, that’s
not
it,” Aunt Josie protested. “If you must know, I’ve already been to one brother’s funeral. I wasn’t planning on going to another’s so soon.”

Uncle Waldo slung his arm around Aunt Josie’s shoulder. “Relax,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere. That’s the whole point of a living funeral. I’m celebrating the fact that I’m
alive
, not dead.”

“Oh,” Aunt Josie said, more quietly than before. “Well, okay then.”

Minutes later Aunt Josie was on the dance floor,
teaching everyone the steps to a new dance called the Hustle. Uncle Waldo was telling people he might die laughing.

Before the night was over, six people had spoken with Dan Danielson about booking living funerals. My idea had worked! Besides keeping Danielson Family Funeral Home afloat, living funerals would double the number of events on the Digginsville social calendar, meaning women would need to get their hair done twice as often as usual.

“I owe you,” Mother told me that night as we walked home from the funeral home. “Just tell me what you want, and I’ll get it for you.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I don’t really need anything.”

That was a lie. There was something I did need, but I didn’t know how to ask for it. It wasn’t exactly something you could buy in a store.

“Think of something,” Mother said. “I need to compensate you for your idea.” Then she laughed. “
That’ll
teach Josie to try to steal my business.”

“Aunt Josie wasn’t trying to steal anyone’s business,” I said.

“Of
course
she was,” Mother countered. “She and that ridiculous new boyfriend of hers.”

“Aunt Josie says she and Mr. Clem are getting
married,” I said. I felt a twinge of guilt for sharing this news without permission.

“Married?”
Mother snorted. “That’ll be the day.”

My mother had always been rough, tough, and hard to bluff. But now she was getting just plain mean. It wasn’t only the things she said. It was the hateful way she said them and the underlying assumptions, like doubting Mr. Clem would want to marry Aunt Josie.

As we walked in silence, I thought about what I really wanted. I wanted to talk about Lilac Rose, Wayne Junior, and Daddy. I wanted to remind Mother how funny we always thought it was when Daddy used to call home and say he and his flight crew were grounded by Mother Nature. I’d tell him that I was grounded by Mother. That was one of our favorite jokes in the days B.C., back when we had family jokes.

I remembered how we all used to listen to “Swap Line” and laugh every time Daddy threatened to call in and try to swap his three kids for a goat. I wanted to ask Mother if she remembered that. I wanted to ask if she thought Daddy and Wayne Junior and Lilac Rose would’ve liked having living funerals.

I bet Lilac Rose would’ve loved it. She would’ve invited the whole town and put on a fashion show,
complete with different hairdos to match her favorite outfits. Maybe she’d even do a little tap dancing if she could remember her routine from last year’s recital. And then she’d thank everybody in town for making her life possible, like she was a Hollywood actress winning an Academy Award.

Wayne Junior would’ve made a joke out of his living funeral. He’d have invited all the boys from his class. They’d wear ball caps and sit around making rude noises with their hands and armpits.

I tried to imagine what Daddy’s living funeral would’ve been like. It was hard to picture it. He wasn’t much for crowds, and he never talked about his feelings. The only time Daddy ever used the word
love
was when he sent us postcards. Anytime he was gone for more than two days, he sent us a postcard. Of course, he usually managed to beat his postcards home. (Mail delivery was notoriously slow in Digginsville.) But that didn’t matter. It was just fun to get something in the mail, especially something that said, “Love, Daddy.”

Maybe Daddy’s living funeral would’ve just been a quiet little ceremony with him giving everybody he loved a postcard with a note written especially for that person. Wouldn’t that be a nice thing to have?

I wanted to ask Mother if Daddy left her anything
sweet like that. Did he leave me anything? Did he really want to swap us all for a goat?

I could get lost in memories of my family. But then I realized it was all getting farther and farther away. Already I couldn’t remember the smell of Lilac Rose’s favorite bubble bath. I couldn’t even remember exactly what Wayne Junior’s trick pepper gum tasted like—except bad.

If I could forget these things, did it mean I could forget them? Earlier in the week when I’d been bored at the beauty shop, I’d tried to sketch Daddy’s face on the back of a magazine. I was shocked to discover I couldn’t remember what side he parted his hair on. I ran home and looked in the photo album, where the images were still clear—unlike my memory, which was getting fuzzier by the day.

I wanted to know if Mother was ever going to talk about them again. Or was she trying to forget them? Was that it? And then there were the darker questions that had been rattling around in my brain for the past eight months:
Did Mother wish she’d been killed in the plane crash so she wouldn’t have to be stuck here with me? Or did she wish I’d been killed along with the rest of them so she could start over from scratch?

That’s what I really wanted to know. Those were
the questions that had been bugging me like two rocks in my shoe since the funeral. But I couldn’t ask for those answers. So I asked for something easier.

“How ’bout a root beer float?” I said.

“All right,” Mother said. “That’s easy enough.”

But when we got home, we found we were out of both vanilla ice cream and root beer.

“That man they have driving for Schwan’s is a blithering
idiot
!” Mother yelled, slamming the freezer door with a solid
thwunk
.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. And the truth was, it really didn’t. It’s not what I wanted, anyway.

Two hours later I was lying in bed when I felt a low vibration coming from outside my window. I got up to look. It was Old Mary, gliding past our house toward Aunt Josie’s.

I stayed at the window long enough to see a man in a dark suit a few minutes later. He was walking by our house. He was alone. I couldn’t see his face in the darkness, but I knew who it was. He walked just like he sounded.

“Hey there, Mr. Clem!” I yelled out the window. He turned to look, but I chickened out and squatted to the floor.
What was I thinking?

I stayed crouched low for several minutes. When
I finally inched my head up again to look out the window, Mr. Clem was gone. But the night air had changed. I felt goose bumps on my arms. My heart began beating faster.

I rummaged under my bed and found the book Mrs. Staniss had given me on the last day of school. I wiped a thin layer of dust off the red leatherette cover and admired the official words:
PERTINENT FACTS
&
IMPORTANT INFORMATION.
Then I opened the book to the first page. With a thin black marker, I started writing:

That first letter I wrote was fourteen pages long. And I was just getting warmed up.

Mother almost spit out her coffee when she opened
The Digginsville Daily Quill
the next morning and saw the ad on page three:

“That contemptible woman!” Mother said, flinging the newspaper down on the kitchen table.

“What’s wrong?” asked Mamaw. She was in the living room, holding a tea party for a few of my dolls, which she’d found under the sofa.

“They stole our idea,” Mother said, standing up from the table. “It was
our
idea, and now they’ve stolen it.”

“Who?” I asked. I was scraping off the burnt portions from the toast Mother had made me.

“Josie and her
despicable
boyfriend, that devil!” Mother bellowed.

She started pacing the kitchen floor. Then she stopped, picked up the telephone book, and shuffled through the pages. She dialed a number.

“Hello, Avis?” she said. “Hattie Oakland here. Fine, thank you. I’m sorry to bother you at home on a Sunday morning, but I’ve just opened the morning paper and…Yes, it always arrives by seven o’clock. Thank you. But the reason I’m calling, Avis, is the advertisement you’ve placed on page three of the paper.”

She paused. I hadn’t eaten a bite of toast since Mother dialed. Even Mamaw stopped playing with the dolls to listen.

“It’s for living funerals at Clem’s Crematorium,”
Mother explained. “As you surely know, Avis, that’s something new and
unique
that we’re offering at Danielson Family Funeral Home. For you to take money from some
interloper
who’s not even
from
here, someone who just comes to town and
steals
our ideas
and
our business. Well, how would you like it if someone from another—”

Avis Brown—owner, publisher, editor, and only reporter for the local newspaper—was obviously trying to get a word in edgewise. Mother closed her eyes and listened briefly before exploding again.

“No, Avis, I
don’t
see your point,” she snarled. “Free enterprise? No, I do
not
look at it that way. What? No. I hadn’t heard that. Good-bye, Avis. You can cancel my subscription to
The Quill
.”

She hung up the phone and wiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. It wasn’t even eight o’clock and already the air was heavy. That was what summer felt like in the Ozarks.

“Did you know there’s already been one cremation in this town?” Mother asked grudgingly. She was plunking ice cubes in her coffee.

“Who?” I asked.

“We didn’t know her,” Mother replied. “She was from California. Killed in a car accident on Highway
60 a few nights ago. The family wanted her cremated. Avis said it was very ‘
ecological
.’”

Mother said the word
ecological
like it was a swear word. I didn’t have the nerve to remind her how often Daddy had talked about the importance of being mindful of our natural resources. He was always getting on Lilac Rose about wasting food and leaving lights on. He taught Wayne Junior how to measure the air pressure in the car tires so we’d get more miles out of a tank of gas. He even taught me how to measure the air in my bike tires so I could conserve my own energy.

I liked thinking back to the old days. But then I remembered the larger issue at hand. A cremation meant no viewing of the body, which meant no customer for Mother, which meant forty-five dollars down the drain.

“Get ready for church,” Mother said. “We leave in half an hour.”

All through church I thought about our new competition in the living funeral business. It was obvious that Aunt Josie was involved. But why? Couldn’t she see we needed the money? I knew Mother’s pride would never allow her to admit such a thing to Aunt Josie. It was up to me to save Mother’s business.

During Preacher Bradford’s sermon, I began to strategize how I’d go about doing it. I needed more information. Somehow I had to sneak down to Aunt Josie’s house and talk to her privately so I could find out who Mr. Clem was, and why Aunt Josie had fallen for him so fast.

“Mother,” I said, walking home from church in the sticky heat, “since we couldn’t make root beer floats last night, can I have something else?”

“Huhn,” she grunted. She was still spinning over that ad.

“Can I go fishing instead?” I asked.

Sunday afternoon fishing was something Daddy and I used to do. We’d start talking about it on the way home from church: deciding what kind of bait we’d use and what might be biting. Afternoons are never the best time for fishing, of course. If you want to catch fish, you go in the early morning or at dusk.

But fishing isn’t always about fish. Daddy and I never cared if we caught anything or not. We just liked being outside. Daddy always said he got his best thinking done when he fished. That’s when he said he solved all of life’s problems. I just liked getting out from under my mother’s thumb, which was exactly what I wanted to do right then.

“I haven’t been fishing in a long time,” I reminded Mother.

“Don’t be gone long,” she said, her mind clearly elsewhere. “And eat something before you go.”

I ran the rest of the way home and changed into my cutoff shorts and an old T-shirt. After stuffing a fistful of Ritz crackers in my mouth, I retrieved my fishing pole and Daddy’s tackle box from the basement. I assumed Daddy’s fishing gear belonged to me. Mother surely wouldn’t want it. Still, it felt a little funny to take it without his permission.

“Bye!” I yelled as I raced out the back door. The screen door screeched and slammed behind me.

“Looks like somebody’s going fishing.”

It was Uncle Waldo. He was standing in his backyard with a man in a pale yellow suit.

“Daralynn,” said Uncle Waldo, “have you met Mr. Clem Monroe?”