Page 35 of Love at a Funeral and Other Awkward Conversations

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.”

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