The Cold Call
The second day’s major correction is to attend William’s funeral, which Jennie avoided, overwhelmed with shame, in her previous life. On her drive to the church, Jennie feels a low rumbling against her left thigh. She has expected this call, yet somehow it still startles her when it comes. Shivering (the Civic takes an eternity to warm up), she struggles to dislodge her phone from its residence in her tight jean pocket.
When at last she extracts it, she stalls to check the screen—as if it could be anyone but the person she knows it is. It is no other person but that person. She taps the button to receive the call. “Hello?”
“Hi, Jennie.”
Even reduced to the thin strip of sound carried through her cell phone speaker, even as a memory of a call that has already transpired, Eliot’s voice twists her stomach. She does not find this twisting feeling enjoyable. “Eliot. Umm, hey.”
“How’ve you been, babe?” She knows from his practiced but paper-thin nonchalance that he has rehearsed this moment.
So has she. “I’m not your babe. Do need to talk to me about something?”
“Well, I, uh.” Eliot’s acting cannot match hers. The confidence is falls from his voice, and
his sentence crashes to the static floor of telephone call. He begins again. “Yes, actually. It’s something I’d like to speak to about in person, if you’d be willing to meet.”
If they were indeed to meet, she decided the first time she had received this call, it was to be on her turf. Her response this time, though planned in advance, is essentially the same. The meeting may as well be a very large vehicle approaching at a high rate of speed in the dead of night, with its headlights off and its driver drunk: by the time she sees it coming, the collision is inevitable. “Scallywags, Friday night at six. You’re buying me dinner.”
When she hangs up, she braces herself, and wonders whether to brace herself. She has heard it said that in a collision, the drunk often fare better than the sober precisely because they do not brace themselves. The relaxed body lets itself be moved by the force of impact; the tense body resists it and is torn apart.
“Peculiar, then,” Rupert remarks, “that you sustained a fatal injury in an automobile accident while drunk.”
Dear and Departed
The skin of William’s face is pulled tight like Saran wrap over a plate of uneaten spaghetti. Jennie has only seen such in her mother’s refrigerator; uneaten spaghetti at Mussolini’s is discarded. His arms are crossed over his chest. The tight triangle of American flag between them reminds Jennie that William was in the military at some point. She cannot recall which branch; now is probably not the best time to ask. Jennie keeps her distance from the coffin. Of everyone here, she should be most at ease with death. She isn’t.
She is wearing a black dress initially purchased for clubbing; it has seen many a deed that would make her deceased stepfather shudder. Rupert has donned a somber black suit for the occasion. “A figment of your imagination,” he explains, in answer to her unspoken gratitude.
As the service begins, Jennie is seated on the front-center pew beside Jennie’s mother, whose name is Jane, though Jennie mostly just thinks of her as Mother. Mother’s hair is pulled tightly back, and she wears a stern black skirt and jacket. Mother has hardly spoken to her this morning—but then, Mother has hardly spoken to anyone. Jennie hopes that, despite her having contributed to William’s heart attack, her presence here helps more than it hurts. She wonders whether any of these revisions are actually for the better.
“A difficult question,” Rupert chips in, “given that halfway through this evaluation, you remain uncommitted to any definition of ‘better.’ But never fear; there’s still time yet.”
Pastor Varkey, clad in a suit much like Rupert’s, slowly approaches the podium with a black leather Bible under his arm. The murmurs in the church draw to a silence soiled only by the occasional sniffling of quiet criers. Pastor Varkey’s dirty blonde hair is neatly combed and gelled; he will look resplendent if someone videos the service. He was William’s pastor, and more recently Jennie’s mother’s: formerly a Catholic, Mother began attending the Reformed Church upon their marriage. Setting the Bible carefully on the podium, he opens it and leans into the microphone.
“I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live even though he dies, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.” The pastor looks up from the page and continues. “We are gathered here today to celebrate the life of William Ehrman. We do not grieve for his death. William lived and believed in Jesus Christ, and we are confident that now his soul is secure in the arms of the Father. Let us not pity
William, who has at last been granted that peace those of us still here can only imagine. Let us not mourn him, for he now knows eternal bliss in the presence of Christ. This is a time to look after his family, those he has left behind. If anything, we should mourn for them, lingering here on earth while their husband, father, and brother bathes in the joys of heaven; abandoned to this lower plane of existence while…” he trails off. “It is a time for us to comfort them.”
But Jennie finds no comfort in the service; in fact, her discomfort only increases as the pastor speaks. His remarks about certainty only serve to remind Jennie and her lack of the same, and certainly, she could make more immediate use of certainty than anyone else present. Excepting William, perhaps. In all likelihood his soul is neatly sorted by now, en route to its Destination.
Where is he headed? Pastor Varkey seems confident he knows, but there is a difference between being confident one knows something and knowing that thing. Jennie has often observed this in her manager Frank, who sometimes insists with belligerent certainty that he has dispersed pay to his employees, while the checks rest neglected in the restaurant safe. She has found, in fact, almost no correlation between being certain and being correct.
Why don’t I get to see my funeral? she asks Rupert silently.
“Because,” he replies patiently, “you may only relive a moment in time you’ve already lived to begin with. At your funeral, you were, or are, or will be quite thoroughly deceased.”
I get that. But I mean, I think everyone should get to witness their own funerals. It would be a really nice feature in this whole death thing.
“For all you know, that very well might yet be the case. But of course, that depends upon where this evaluation places you.”
With assistance from the Town County Police Department, the procession to the cemetery is a brief one. At the gravesite, Pastor Varkey speaks again about assuredness of salvation, which by now he has repeated so many times that Jennie wonders if he is trying to convince himself. Funerals must be much happier occasions, knowing, or being certain one knows.
In the car on the way home, she calls James, who agrees to meet her after dinner. He has so much faith, Jennie figures maybe she can borrow some of his.