Page 11 of Four Weddings and a Funeral Director
The bell above the door tinkled as she let Mort in, ignoring the flop of her heart as she drank in the way his black shirt, which he wore with the sleeves rolled back, hung on his muscular arms, just so. Did Mort …work out? She couldn’t picture him skating on the spot on an elliptical or grunting over a barbell. Maybe lugging bodies around built muscles. Did funeral directors lug bodies?
If so, had he lugged the bodies of Derrick and Fran back down the hill last night? No, she couldn’t be thinking like that. The village’s dead were her new neighbours. And Mort was their mayor. In a manner of speaking. She had to get used to it, or she’d end up with bodies permanently on the brain, and that did not bode well for her wedding planning ambitions.
Squaring her shoulders, she mentally swept the bodies of Derrick and Fran under the rug. (A metaphorical rug, but a big metaphorical rug.)
‘What can I do for you, Lurch?’ she said cheerily to Mort.
‘You could update your mailing address.’ Mort handed over a small box. ‘These were misdelivered to me. Business cards. You should use Tink next time. She’s great, and will even hand-deliver them to the right address.’
‘Oh go on, Roddy’s doing his best. Ah, you opened them, I see.’ Lily pulled open the box, admiring the cards. The printer, one she’d used often back in La Jolla, had done a fabulous job – all that foiling and debossing, and the way the cards folded together in a kiss! Glorious. She demonstrated, and Mort nodded brusquely.
‘They were addressed to Eternal Elegance. Easy mistake to make. Although …’ Arms folded, he took in the very cheerful, very bright decor of Lily’s shop.
Lily grinned as she spun a quick circle, gesturing at thelibrary catalogue cabinets she’d repurposed for stationery, the balloon corner, and her favourite bit: the flower wall, which ran amok with a rainbow of gerberas and sunflowers and ranunculi. She hadn’t got around to painting the desk, but she had a hot pink tub of paint on standby. ‘Our businesses couldn’t be more different, could they?’
‘My clients are certainly easier to manage.’
‘Grim. But probably accurate,’ she agreed.
Mort browsed through the display of wedding favours adorning a bright yellow table: vintage-looking matchbooks, stained-glass granola jars, gold records, little bags of potpourri. Did he linger on the hacky sacks?
‘What on earth are these … doodads?’ he asked, appalled. He prodded a pyramid made from tiny jars of honey with decorative bees on top.
‘Wedding favours. The couple gives them to guests as gifts.’
‘Ah, because they’re doing said couple a favour by attending?’
Rude. So rude. But not entirely wrong.
Was there a touch of a smile there? Lily suspected he was teasing more than judging.
‘Sometimes they are indeed. It’s probably the same at your funerals, though.’ Lily accordioned the kissing business card in and out. ‘You should get Tink to make you some of these. The punters would come running.’
Mort shook his head. ‘And what do you propose the design would consist of? A body being plopped into a casket? A casket being lowered into the ground?’
‘You could get some nice texturing if you added grass,’ Lily said thoughtfully. ‘Maybe some hands, and a dove.’
‘I’ll let my marketing manager know,’ Mort noted wryly.
‘You should definitely have them reconsider your uniform. It’s very … Gomez Addams.’
‘Next time I’ll wear my orange boiler suit,’ said Mort, now peering through a disposable camera wrapped with a cardboard sleeve that could be personalised with a couple’s preferred design. (Even better, every photo came out watermarked with a bespoke romantic message.) ‘I bought it for an OSHA-related funeral.’
Lily folded her arms. ‘You didn’t.’
‘I didn’t. I look terrible in orange. Washes out my complexion.’
Lily could see how this could be true. Was he simply afraid of the sun, or had he not seen a steak in a solid ten years? He had the porcelain skin of, well, the porcelain dolls that Lily’s terrifying step-cousin Pomona collected. Oh well, for all her faults, Pomona and her dolls were keeping climate-controlled storage units in business. ‘At least you have the makeup for that. Hey, was everything … all right last night? With Fran and Derrick?’
Okay, so not mentioning Fran and Derrick wasn’t going so well. But she was a novice to this whole death thing. She was entitled to at least one question.
Mort sniffed a custom candle (tailorable to your unique couple’s scent). ‘As all right as it could be. They were definitely dead.’
Lily couldn’t imagine being so sanguine about multiple deaths. She’d spent the previous night staring at the pink chiffon canopy over her bed, wondering how it felt to have your partner die beside you. And at the good part of the movie, no less.
Thankfully Lily, who’d never dated anyone for more than three months, would presumably never be in that situation. (Unless something wentterriblywrong.)
‘At least it was a nice way to go, I suppose. An anniversary night, in their finest clothes, with a great movie playing …’
