Page 15 of Four Weddings and a Funeral Director
Meanwhile, Nate was on his knees scouring around in the muddy garden beds for the missing ring, the stilts-wearer joining him with an alacrity that suggested she might be the Amber whom Nate had mentioned in his proposal. Although,had it actually been a proposal when he hadn’t technically asked Veronica to marry him?
‘Damn, dude,’ said one of the surfer bros, pulling his T-shirt over his head to protect himself from the sheeting rain. ‘You shouldn’t have reused the ring.’
‘I mean, I couldn’treturnit, bro,’ said the saturated Nate, chucking away a beer can ring-pull that had tempted with its shininess. ‘You know how bad the deal is on returned engagement rings? It’s criminal.’
Thunder boomed again, rattling the wind chimes strung from a nearby tree – and Lily’s nerves as well. She half expected a witch to go zooming through the air, spilling purple exhaust from her broomstick. Was this normal? This couldn’t be how things went here. Unless Mirage-by-the-Sea had struck some sort of Faustian bargain where it enjoyed a perpetually idyllic existence so long as a freak storm could shake things up once a year or so? (Something which surely should have been mentioned in the fine print of the lease she’d signed.)
‘Here.’ Draping his suit jacket over Lily, Mort drew her back under their shops’ shared awning, the gentle touch of his hand on her arm sending a vibration through her. Lily couldn’t help but notice how the rain drenched his shirt, sculpting it to his skin and revealing the shape of the muscles that Lily had spent quite a bit of time hypothesising about since yesterday. Or how the rain plastered his hair messily to his face, giving him a drenched Mr Darcy look that made Lily wish for a daily deluge.
‘My weather app didn’t say a thing about this.’ Lily blinked as the rain poured off the awning in front of them, encasing them in their own private bubble. She was a frequent checker of the thirty-day forecast: volatile weather was not a friend of outdoor weddings, and outdoor weddings were so far basically her whole thing. Also fancy tents, but they were also not a friend of the rain.
Mort shook his head, sending water flying from the messy waves of his hair. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this.’
‘Well, it was worth getting drenched for the show, though,’ said Lily, with a rueful grin.
All right, so that was a lie. The Veronica–Nate situation had a sort of reality-TV appeal to it, but the real show was happening right here under the pink-and-white half of the awning that belonged to Lily’s shop. She was extremely aware of Mort’s damp, unfairly good-looking presence. Of the way his damp shirt clung to him, which was surely illegal in some parts of the country. Of the way his bare forearm grazed against hers as he squinted to watch Nate’s latest shenanigans. Of the way the spiced scent of his cologne – well, she hoped it was cologne, and not something funeral-related – emanated from the jacket she continued to hold around her shoulders, even though the rain couldn’t get to her here.
Mort’s dark eyes bored into hers. ‘Truly, although …’
He frowned, reaching out a hand to … to touch her face? Lily swallowed, knowing that she had to stop it – they worked next door to each other! And yet, she was simultaneously extremely okay with this. Ugh, of all the times to contain multitudes!
Lily closed her eyes, waiting. But when the anticipated skin-to-skin contact didn’t happen, she opened them again.
Mort was prodding at an inky raindrop in the palm of his hand.
‘Well, that’s not good,’ he said.
Death Becomes Her
Mort
Mort hurried inside the funeral parlour. Rain rattled through an apparent hole in the roof at a rate akin to a fire hose. Mort jumped as another clap of thunder shook the building. Oh joy. Something else to occupy the dwindling resources of his bank account. As if the bill from the fumigation wasn’t already haunting his dreams like the Ghosts of Termites Past.
As it turned out, the storm itself was the least of Mort’s problems. Something very strange was going on. The pelting water was dribbling down the walls and pooling on the fleur-de-lis carpets … but it wasn’t just making them wet. It wasbleachingthem somehow. The patterned wallpaper was turning from velvety black to grey to pale pink florals, taking the opposite journey of a kid’s paint palette.
With every flash of lightning and sodden squeak of Mort’s shoes, the parquetry transformed into white marble, and the rugs bloomed from a restrained Turkish pattern into rainbow shag monstrosities. As the thunder boomed overhead, the black ceiling roses and cornices lightened, becoming yellow with rose highlights, and the gloomy Victorian chandeliers transformed into something plucked straight from a glass flamingo. Andmost horrifically of all, the coffin display wall was somehow melding into a set of bunk beds.
No, no it wasn’t. Because that was not logical at all.
Mort clapped his hands over his eyes, then counted to ten. He opened them again, right as the room flashed white with lightning. He blinked, waiting for his vision to clear.
Nope. Everything was still fucked.
Boom!
Jesus Christ, was this a storm or the coming of the Four Horsemen? Four Horsemen who apparently had a thing for redecorating.
Come on, Mort, there has to be a rational explanation for this.A stroke! He was having a stroke! Thirty-year-olds could have strokes, after all – he’d called Dr Rubenstein’s emergency after-hours that time he’d smelt burnt toast, and she’d grudgingly admitted that a strokecouldbe a possibility, albeit an unlikely one. (It had turned out that Gramps had just burnt some toast.)
But no, Mort couldn’t smell toast, and his limbs were all working as they should. Not a stroke then.
Flash!It was like an apocalyptic nightclub in here. Mort closed his eyes again, trying to figure out why the walls (and everything else) were melting.
What else, what else? Could it be ergot hallucinations from his overnight oats? He’d purchased them from the farmers’ market, and therewasa stand there that did raw milk. Could the same anti-science principles have tainted his breakfast? But no, his muscles weren’t spasming, and there was no sign of gangrene.
Mort was running low on explanations. But at least the worst of the storm seemed to have passed: the thunder had softened, and the lightning could no longer be described as ‘strobing’.
‘Mort?’ came Lily’s voice from the other side of the ornategrille on the shared wall between their businesses – a grille that was now taking on hints of the pink paint she’d painstakingly lacquered her side with. ‘Did you lace my business cards with LSD or something?’
