Page 62 of Four Weddings and a Funeral Director
‘I’ll get the white-out.’
Mort stalked over to his office to grab the pencil case he kept inside his desk drawer for stationery emergencies. But as he made his way back to the foyer, a scene at the viewing room caught his attention.
Mort stopped in his tracks. A group of suit-clad men were gathered around the coffin. Well, not around the coffin, precisely. They’d hauled Mr Georgiou out of said coffin and had propped him up against its side. This was, of course, against every single rule or regulation in the funeral director’s handbook, and several laws as well.
‘What’s going on in here?’ asked Mort, brandishing his pencil case.
The group of mourners – if mourners was the word given the upbeat mood in the room – stepped back. One held a squirt can of shaving cream, while another held a fancy, multi-bladed razor with a lovely ergonomic grip. All held guilty expressions on their faces.
‘We’re shaving the corpse,’ explained a guy Mort recognised from the local hardware store. Alex, from memory. He’d helped Mort pick out a safety ladder a few years back.
‘But … why?’ Mort had personally ensured that Mr Georgiou had been stubble-free during the embalming and makeup session. Speaking of makeup, the men had scraped half of it off with the razor. Poor Mr Georgiou looked like he’d been attacked by a bear. Several bears.
‘It symbolises his separation from his family,’ said another of the men. ‘And since I’m currently going through a divorce, I’m top choice for the blade.’
The man went in for another scrape with the razor – he clearly had some unfinished business with his divorce lawyer.
Mort had heard enough about Angela’s family’s escapades that he knew the tradition. And while he wasn’t an authority on Greek funerals, he was fairly certain that this was not a funeral tradition. The switcheroo was at it again.
‘Give me that,’ he said, snatching away the razor from the deceased’s ageing friends.
The divorced guy tried to grab the razor back. ‘Hey! That’s a good one! It’s got the fancy head and the built-in soap. Its native habitat is in a locked case at CVS.’
Mort was thankful – as he often was – for his great height. He’d been a childhood keep-away champion, and his prodigiousness in this area of life continued to bless him. If he’d been more of a joiner (and didn’t take issue with sand being in his bits) he might have been a volleyball champion.
‘Look, we can honour the deceased,’ he said. ‘And we should. But scraping at his skin with a rusty metal blade is not how it’s done.’
‘Boo,’ said one of the would-be shavers, swigging from a slender bottle of Ouzo. ‘Boo!’
Mort ushered them out of the viewing area and back to the eulogy room, where a group of mourners was clustered around the deceased’s widow, who had overdone it on the sugared almonds and was snoring like a champ. Were they … writing on her shoes?
‘It’s so we can see who’ll be next,’ whispered a pretty young woman he recognised as a regular from The Hot Pot. She crossed her fingers as she used a sparkly pink pen to write her name on the bottom of the widow’s best black pumps.
The switcheroo was really pushing its luck at this funeral, thought Mort. Maybe it was the scale of the thing – there werehundredsof mourners milling around, hurling rice and bopping along to Zorba’s dance. And those who weren’t inside the funeral home were cruising past the back of the building in their cars, honking cheery tunes on their car horns. The town’s Nextdoor group had plenty to keep them occupied.
But amidst the chaos, which Mort was doing his best to quell with his patented Placating Hands™ and Gentle Hushing Voice®, came a noise that caused horror to rise in his heart. Ahigh-pitchedsmashingsound. The sound of porcelain hitting the floor. Lots of porcelain. About a hundred and fifty pieces of it, in fact.
Mort’s eyes widened. He followed the source of the smashing to the kitchen, where he’d been storing Lily’s carefully curated stack of kitschy mismatching porcelain ahead of the toothpaste heiress’s wedding.
A half dozen aunties danced around, grabbing plates from the stack and hurling them to the floor. They cheered and twirled with each smash, clapping their hands with the kind of joy that made Mort wonder whether Christos’s death had in fact been due to suspicious circumstances. The women were giddily happy.
‘Not that one,’ he snapped, grabbing the rooster plate that Lily had wanted to claim for herself, and positioning it high up in the cabinets. ‘Everyone out! We’ll be heading to the cemetery soon enough, and I expect you to be on your most funereal behaviour until then.’
The women sauntered out, one of them giving him the evil eye. Mort gave her one right back – with all the ills that the switcheroo was raining upon him, he wasn’t scared of an extra curse or two. All right, perhaps a little.
‘You can ride up front,’ he called placatingly to her back.
He sighed, stooping to gather the shards of the hundreds of plates that carpeted the floor like a dusting of extremely sharp snow. Alas, he thought, sucking at a cut on his thumb and hoping it wouldn’t turn septic – 350,000 Americans died of sepsis every year – this was a job for the big broom and the big bucket.
‘There you are.’ Angela poked her head around the doorframe. ‘Wow, did we have an earthquake?’
‘Just some very intense mourning.’ Mort scraped a pile of plate shards into the bucket.
Angela picked her way across the floor towards the dessert table, which groaned aromatically with pistachio-topped pastries. ‘You’re going to need a bigger bucket.’
‘I think you’re right.’ Mort couldn’t see the carpet through all the shards. ‘The worst part about it is that these aren’t even my plates. They’re Lily’s.’
Angela paused, mid bite of baklava. ‘Lily has an extensive collection of plates she keeps at your place? Why not start small? Like a toothbrush.’
