Page 47 of Four Weddings and a Funeral Director
Desdemona reached for a fork, scooping off the offending buttercream skull and marvelling at it. ‘Nothing better encapsulates the eternity we’re embarking upon like maggots. They represent life. Death. Rebirth.Emptiness. It’s perfection. All of it, perfection.’
Well, Desdemona was the one paying the bills.
‘I’m so … glad you like it.’ Lily’s prior urge to retch had shifted abruptly to an urge to whoop. She’d done it! Her very first official wedding was a success! She couldn’t wait to tell Mom and Annika all about it. (Well, notallabout it.) ‘A wedding is all in the details. Well, there’s the love part, too. But mostly details.’
Desdemona’s expression almost crossed into smile territory. ‘The hearse, the coffins, the Thing cameo, and now this? I’m as ecstatic as a goth bride has the right to be. Now, if you’ll excuse me, we’re about to do the cake smash.’
Oh no, thought Lily. Oh no. No to that.
Briony took a step back and popped the lens cap back on her camera. ‘I think I have what I need.’
Lily nodded. ‘Let’s go wait by the hearse. I’ll do thejust marriedshaving foam.’
‘Deal.’
Say it with Funereal Flowers
Mort
Ah yes, the endless weepy hugs that came with being a funeral director. Mort was presently enveloped in a bosomy embrace that seemed to have gone on a solid minute too long. (Alas, not even a switcheroo thing, but a came-with-the-territory thing.) Over the sturdy shoulder of Aunt Agnes, he could see a line of similarly distraught women waiting for their turn at the hug dispenser.
There was entirely too much physical contact involved in this job. And none of it the good kind, like how Lily had gently reached for his hand last night …
No, no, Mort. Stop right there.Feelings were bad. They inevitably ended in pain. And there was a high possibility that said pain involved death.
Exhibit A: the funeral he was overseeing this very moment. This was what happened when you loved someone. They carked it and left you with endless decisions to make about caskets and flowers and liturgies. Not to mention the estate. Oh, the angsting over estates that Mort had endured throughout his youth, and now, especially now, as the de facto psychiatrist in the room. Estates were terrible things because they meant divvying up assets, or worse, debts. Given that he’d seen family membersfighting over lasagne apportionment, the prospect of dividing up a home was a thing to be feared.
There. Mort felt much more grounded after that. All thoughts of Lily were gone. It was just Mort and the corpse and the hugging women. And now a man.
‘I miss her,’ sobbed the man, unloading a set of false teeth on Mort’s lapel. Mort gingerly handed them back using his pocket square as a buffer. ‘She was my queen. Myqueen!’
‘Uncle Irv ,’ said a woman with a magnificent purple rinse through her hair. Ah, Cousin Domenica. ‘Beverley wasn’t your queen. She was Poppy Clive’s queen. Remember?’
‘No! Not Clive’s!’ Uncle Irv’s eyes were red-rimmed. (The potential cause of this seemed manifold.)
Mort suspected there might be some skeletons in the Alberi family closet, and not all of them in the casket at the front of the room.
‘How about we take our seats,’ Mort said gently. ‘We’ll begin the service shortly.’
‘Me first! Bags the shotgun seat,’ shouted Uncle Irv, muscling several aunties and a few kids out of the way.
Not trusting Uncle Irv to behave for the duration of the service, Mort ran to fetch a Rubik’s cube to keep him busy. Hopefully Irv wasn’t a pro at algorithmic problem solving. (He’d run into this issue before.)
Finally, the rowdy crowd settled down, and the pastor stepped forward to begin the eulogy. But the siblings weren’t having it. The purple-rinse woman pulled a knife from her purse and started banging it against a funeral urn from Mort’s display.
‘Toast time!’ bellowed a guy in a Seventies velvet suit with astonishingly expansive flares.
‘Roasttime,’ corrected Cousin Domenica.
Ah. Soherecame the switcheroo action. Mort desperatelywished he’d stocked up on distractions and diversions. There was a slinky somewhere in one of the back rooms, and from memory a game of Hungry, Hungry Hippos in one of the cabinets of the morgue. But they weren’t enough to distract from the fact that Purple Rinse was carefully working through sixty years of the deceased’s sexual exploits in strict chronological order.
‘And then there’s the horrible kids,’ howled Cousin Domenica. ‘I see you here, counting your inheritance on your little phones. That should’ve been mine. Poppy Clive, you’ve got some explaining to do!’
‘Don’t blame me,’ shouted Poppy Clive. ‘The kids are Uncle Irv’s doing.’
‘I told you she was my queen!’ Uncle Irv leapt up in his chair and flung his solved Rubik’s cube at Poppy Clive’s shiny head. He missed by a fraction. The cube bounced off the coffin, leaving a smudgy red dent. ‘How else do you think they all got into MIT? It certainly wasn’tyourbrains, Mr Unranked Two-Year Technical College.’
(Well, that explained the speed cubing and the terrible arm. Apparently a lot of temperamental MIT alumni retired to Mirage-by-the-Sea.)
