Page 36 of Love at a Funeral and Other Awkward Conversations

“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.

CHAPTER 14

With the days growing longer and longer, my patience for dealing with my parents is shrinking. Dad’s rarely home anymore, and when he is, he’s facedown in a bottle, while Mom can’t function without medication. She, at least, has a routine down of getting out of bed now, but she’s gone from one extreme of not eating to the other of eating everything. Unfortunately, she’s learned groceries can be delivered to the door, so she doesn’t need to leave the house. Aunt Joanie has made appointments for her to speak to someone, but she’s only gone to get new prescriptions, not actual help, which has only pissed off the one person who has been around through all of this—Aunt Joanie.

And for as much as I wanted to move out of the house before, I can’t now. I’m the only one left. Without any outside help, I struggle to keep the strings of my family tied together. I have to try, though, to keep some semblance of normalcy, because if I lose them, that’s it. I’ll truly have nothing left. So I stay in my parents’ house, hoping one day they’ll snap out of it.

I spend most of my free time with Vince at the funeral home and discover he does a lot more than hang out with dead people. With only him, his dad, uncle, and a cousin working there, Vince performs a lot of the grunt work. He does all the landscaping and cleaning of the building’s exterior. Last week, I ate a pint of Häagen-Dazs while he power-washed the white siding until it gleamed. I basically follow him around, asking questions all day. He says I’m becoming obsessed with the macabre. I say I merely want to learn more about him. Though, I never go down the back left hall, where the mortuary is. It’s where they prepare the bodies, and he offered to show it to me to prove it wasn’t as creepy as what I thought. I absolutely refused.

Instead, I repeated what he told me weeks ago. “I’m okay with not knowing for now.”

Today, I sit in the back of one of the service rooms drinking pomegranate juice while he prepares for a funeral, laying programs on each chair. “Do you know the story of Persephone?”

He pauses halfway to a chair with a program in his hand. “No, rando, I don’t.”

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