The Devil You Know (2 page)

“Most of our families do attend the interment and have a small service or say a few words at that time, Miss Black.” Michael was proving to be unflappable. Sam reminded herself to pronounce it “interment” instead of “internment.”

He showed her a photocopied map of the grounds and the locations of various plots. Sam thought the ground was a nicer place to be than a big marble mausoleum with everyone's boxes all jammed in together. “Would you like to take a walk around?” he asked. “It's very warm out, but it might give you a better idea of some of the available options.”

As they crossed the parking lot together, Sam resisted an unexpected desire to take Michael's hand. The last few days had brought unwieldy and confusing feelings to the surface. At first, she had had no appetite, and there was a shiver of delight that cut through her numbness. Could this grief burn its way through five or ten pounds? The answer came the next afternoon, when she ate half a jar of marshmallow fluff from her mother's fridge because it was one of the few things that hadn't expired. And now, all day, she'd been aching for physical contact with someone— no matter how stupid the circumstance—even this small-handed man in a suit. She had brushed against the hand of the gas-station attendant when he passed her her credit card slip that morning, and the urge to wrap herself around him had almost made her cry with longing.

As they walked, Michael gestured at a giant white Jesus with outstretched arms at the top of a slight incline. “That area there is our Garden of Grace,” he said, “and behind that is our Walk of Memory. Most of those spaces are pre-booked, however,” he said, meeting her eyes. “A very popular option nowadays.”

Sam just nodded, busy thinking of other good names. The Path of Righteousness? The Valley of the Shadow of Death? The Road to Nowhere?

They followed the winding pavement to a pond surrounded by benches and memorial columns. On the other side of the pond stood a decent-sized maple. Sam pointed at its base. “Over there,” she said. “Is that a spot?”

Michael consulted his laminated map. “Yes, Plot 256. It's very nice, but it's right beside the roadway. Some people like to be a little further away. If you've got elderly relatives, however, it's easy to find and there's not much walking to do…”

Sam walked towards it. The tree made a small blob of shade, and the grass looked a little thicker and less thirsty there. “She hated the sun,” she said. “She'd be pissed if I put her in direct sunlight.” She turned to Michael. “It gave her hives, that's why she hated it. I think this is the one.”

The plot chosen, they headed back towards the main building. A hot breeze ruffled Sam's hair and made strings of it stick to her face and chest. She pulled them away with her fingers and saw Michael looking at the wide vee of her shirt, her tan and freckled collarbones against the white of the cotton.

Back inside, Michael passed her a binder full of designs for the bronze plaque that would mark the gravesite. It was easy enough to choose something small and basic, with a border of roses. Her mother had liked flowers. It struck Sam as odd that she had been so against them in her note. Then Sam needed to choose a sentiment of some kind to put on the plaque, and Michael produced a helpful pamphlet with biblical phrases and snippets of poems. “Of course, you're welcome to come up with something on your own, if you prefer,” he said.

Thin at last?
she thought. Or how about
I told you I was sick
? She pinched the inside of her bottom lip with her incisor to keep from smirking. She pretended to be overwhelmed and asked to use the ladies' room.

The bathroom had its own aircon vent and was even cooler than the rest of the office. Sam looked in the mirror, running her hands over her white shirt. Even rumpled and sweaty, she looked too good to be pissing the day away in a funeral parlour, or whatever this place was supposed to be called. She leaned forward and rested her forehead against the cool of the mirror for a moment. It left a greasy print.

“I think I have to go,” she said to Michael when she returned.

He clucked sympathetically. “Of course. It can be a lot to take in all at once. Take this with you,” he said, handing her the pamphlet. He had already stapled his business card to its front. “When you've selected something, just give me a call.” He placed his hand on her shoulder and Sam nearly let a sob escape. She turned away to keep herself from collapsing into his arms.

Sam drove to the convenience store and loaded up on supplies: Diet Coke, chips, chocolate bars, Frosted Flakes, fashion magazines, and a carton of Belmont Milds. There was almost nothing to eat in her mother's house: the cancer took her hunger, something Sam never thought she'd see. It had been over a year since Sam had been in the house, but it looked like no new food had come in since then. The kitchen cupboards held only expired boxes and dusty cans: packets of instant diet pudding, cake mixes, low-fat soups, sugar-free iced tea mix. Sam mostly ate sushi and brown rice and lattes and fruit smoothies from the shops near the hair salon. But here in the aisles of the mini-mart, she surrendered to the lure of the child food in its shiny, rainbow packages. Even chips and pop were better than what she'd be purging from the old woman's cupboards.

Back at the house, Sam cracked a Diet Coke and was about to go out on the porch for a smoke when she realized that the house belonged to her now, and so she lit a cigarette sitting at the kitchen table. She read the pamphlet of quotes. Most of the passages were embarrassing and trite, or too religious, or sounded desperate, things that made Sam think of people draping their weeping selves over coffins. She finally decided to go with the last line of Browning's Sonnet 43, “I shall but love thee better after death.” Stripped of its context, the line was awkward, sounding almost like “I like you better now that you're dead,” which she understood. Her mother was definitely easier to get along with now. She rolled a joint on the placemat.

The thought of actually cleaning out the entire house was daunting. Every closet, cupboard, and drawer needed to be emptied, its contents evaluated and inevitably discarded. Clothes and furniture and accumulated piles of useless crap:
Reader's Digest
condensed books from the '60s, wornout orthopedic shoes, a man's overcoat that Sam didn't recognize, at least a garbage bag's worth of empty pill bottles, and a set of Funk and Wagnalls encyclopedias that her mother had collected using grocery-store stamps and had been so proud of…there would be carloads of stuff to take to Value Village. Sam reminded herself that it didn't have to happen at all once. Maybe she could recruit a couple of old high-school girlfriends who still lived in the area. She knew them from their Facebook pages, now wives and mothers, raising their own families in the neighbourhoods they used to prowl on drunken Saturday nights. She could call them, and they would help her out. It might even be fun to see them again.

Bolstered by her own pep talk and a few puffs of the joint, Sam decided to take another look around. The hallway closet seemed the least visibly packed; a relatively safe place to start. There were some old liquor bottles on the top shelf, and Sam pulled down a bottle of cherry whisky she recognized from childhood. It looked drinkable. Beside the bottles were stacks of photo albums, picture frames, and a few floral-print boxes meant for storing photographs. Sam ground the crusty lid from the whisky and carried the boxes into the living room. They did hold photos, mostly, along with clippings from newspapers and magazines: mostly comic strips, Ann Landers columns, and quasi-religious inspirational passages. On the top of the pile in the third box, Sam found a note addressed to her on a piece of kitten-bordered paper.

To Samantha

Remember, If you feel any guilt at all—try denial! It works for some
people!

You never made time for a meaningful conversation or had any
TIME
for me!! All I was to you was the slave who tried to make
home
a
home
.

I believed! And I cared! And you turned your back to me.

Sam turned the note over.

I have to admire greatly the strength of anyone who can turn their life
around after making ALL the wrong choices. When people start making
adult choices—supposedly they are an adult. We are all humans and not
perfect—there's no such thing.

I've since learned that if you start working with a young child and
their
choices,
not an adult's, they will learn by their mistakes and not be as devastated
by their errors or by adult choices pushed on them. Small child—
small choices, and by the time you're older the decisions made may not
be so traumatic even if they ARE wrong.

We were raised in the era where you went out and made your own way,
and your own place to sleep, and you didn't blame anyone else for your
lot in life.

The actress and the melodrama are all that come first for you and always
will be.

I'm just glad you didn't end up on a pig farm in B.C.

“Jesus Christ.” Sam took a long pull of the whisky. It tasted like cough syrup. “I cut hair, for fucksakes.”

Sam awoke on the couch with the detritus of the previous night all around her: the cherry whisky bottle on the coffee table, photos and bits of paper scattered around the carpet. She had been unable to face sleeping in her mother's bed.

Her loneliness felt like a garment around her, and Sam turned on the radio to try and shake it off, along with her headache. She craved good coffee and good music, but knew she'd find neither. She wished she'd thought more about what to pack; she could have brought some coffee beans, her iPod, and a blow dryer. As it was, she'd swept the contents of her bathroom counter into one suitcase, and into another she'd thrown shorts and T-shirts, along with a couple of black skirts and dresses, since she'd been fairly certain she'd need a funeral outfit eventually. She had been in the cab on the way to the airport, trying to imagine tearful, heartfelt goodbyes at the bedside, trying to picture all the things that she and her mother had never managed to pull off in life now coming naturally to both of them, when her cell phone rang, telling her she was already too late. She was two for two now, if anyone was keeping score on missing the death of parent. Sam hadn't made it to her father's passing either, when he was crushed between two train cars at the steel mill a month before her birth.

Sam ate a bag of ketchup chips for breakfast and called Michael. He suggested that she come in at ten-thirty, and although she had planned to just tell him the Browning line over the phone, she agreed. Sam thought about what to wear while she showered. She decided on her yellow sundress with the cap sleeves, even though she sometimes worried that it was too young for her. When she climbed into the Accord, she felt excited, as though she were going to meet a lover.

Sam pulled into the parking lot beside the silver Acura that must have belonged to Michael. Getting out, she bent down to check her lip gloss in the Acura's passenger window and noticed something hanging in the back window. She moved closer, shielding her eyes from the glare. It was a shirt or jacket in a drycleaning bag. The silky green fabric and big gold buttons reminded her of a Renaissance costume, or a pirate. The cuffs of matching knickers or pantaloons hung beneath the shirt's hem. Resting on the back seat was a long black nylon bag. Gun, sword, musical instrument? Sam stood and hastily buffed the window with the hem of her dress to remove her hand prints.

This time, a trim brunette sat at the reception desk. Her pretty eyes peered at Sam over the tops of glasses a decade out of fashion. “Michael is on the phone, but he'll be with you in a moment,” she said. Sam fussed with her ponytail, picked at her cuticles. When the brunette's phone beeped, she picked it up and gave Sam a nod. Sam walked in and sat in the same seat as she had before.

“How are you today, Sam?”

“Um, I think I've picked something out.” She released the sweaty pamphlet from her hand, smoothed it out on the desk, and pointed to the number she'd circled. To her surprise, Michael recited the last few lines of the sonnet in a buttery voice.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.

Sam nodded.

“Are you fond of poetry?” he asked.

“I'm a hair stylist.”

“The language of love,” he said, “is accessible to all of us.”

She nodded again, staring at his hair. She imagined standing behind him, fastening the vinyl hairstyling cape around his neck, reclining him at the shampoo sink, the water and suds flowing through her fingers.

Michael cleared his throat and moved his fingertips together. “Sam, I want to ask you something rather serious,” he said, leaning forward and looking into her eyes.

She didn't mean for the “yes” to escape as a whisper, but it did.

“Have you given any consideration,” he said, “to your own arrangements when the time comes?”

“Arrangements…sorry, what?” Sam tried to translate his words into what she'd expected to hear.

Michael waited, then spoke again. “It's just that, now that there's already a plot here for your mother, we can offer you quite a reasonable rate for your own, especially with our interest-free prepayment plans. Many of our clients find that this alleviates a lot of unnecessary worry. Of course,” he said, watching Sam's face, “if it's too soon to discuss these matters, I completely understand.”

She barked out a laugh. “I thought you were about to ask me out.” She looked down at herself, sitting in a budget office chair, her purse between her ankles, dressed like a girl going to a birthday party.