Page 41 of Four Weddings and a Funeral Director
Mort
Mort was not having a good morning. He’d spent an hour on the phone sorting out a funeral plot double booking, Candice had asked if she could nap in each of his coffins to test them out ahead of her imminent demise, someone had yarn-bombed the greyhounds, and now Molly Lambshead was demanding a refund on her mother’s obituary. Mort was delicately trying to explain that the obituary was part of the package, and he’d submitted precisely what the family had signed off upon, but Molly was not having it.
‘Mort,’ she seethed – Molly was exceptional at seething, having presided over the town’s most expensive homeowners’ association with the pugnacious attitude of a bulldog. (She’d cut her teeth managing the town Facebook page, and before that, the local MMA page.) Her earrings swatted the air, almost whacking Mort as though he were an annoyingly large mosquito. ‘Read it aloud, and tell me that this obituary bears any resemblance to anything a sane person would have submitted.’
Mort cleared his throat. ‘Oh frabjous day, callooh callay …’ he began. ‘Nice “Jabberwocky” reference.’
‘Is it, though?’ seethed Molly, extra seethingly.
All right, so nice was relative where obituaries were concerned.
‘We are delighted to announce the passing of our mother, Calla Lambshead,’ he went on.
‘Delighted!It saysdelighted!’
Mort cleared his throat. ‘Well, families can be complicated.’
‘It gets worse!’ shrieked Molly (whose anger had broken the bounds of seethingness, and was now on another level entirely). ‘It ends with Monty Python lyrics!’
All right, so that was a hard one to explain. Especially since the lyrics were in question were from ‘The Lumberjack Song’ and not from, say, ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’. The switcheroo had struck, and in appalling fashion. But perhaps he could salvage this situation.
‘A bit of levity can help with the grieving process,’ Mort offered awkwardly.
‘Levity! More like indignity! This is grounds for a lawsuit! It’s … defamation! It’s … not how we want our mother to be remembered!’
Mort swallowed. ‘Black cat?’ he asked, offering Molly a candy from the bowl he kept on his desk. ‘Or black tissue?’
Molly recoiled, but then took one of each. Mort had learned from years of watching Gramps at work that comforting people via food and thin sheets of paper went a long way.
‘We’ll publish a correction,’ he said, stroking Esmeralda, who’d leapt into his lap and was unapologetically shedding white fur all over his black suit.
And then after that, figure out how to reverse this whole switcheroo situation so that he could get back to being yelled at for regular funeral things. Like why a funeral couldn’t be delayed to accommodate someone’s multi-stop flight itinerary or the quality of soil being shovelled over a casket or why even the most careful mortuary makeup application in the worldcouldn’t make Grandma Kelly look like she had on her wedding day.
‘It’d better be a full-page apology,’ snarked Molly, chewing as she blew her nose. (The multi-tasking energy was admirable.) ‘And there’d better not be a single iota of joyorcheer at the funeral. Doom! I want doom! Doom and gloom!Sturm und drang!’
‘The eighteenth-century German literary and musical movement?’ asked Mort, intrigued.
Molly slapped Mort’s desk hard enough to leave a handprint. ‘No! In the turmoil sense!’
The doorbell rang, crooning out The Three Degrees’ ‘When Will I See You Again’. Molly’s aghast expression suggested that she had mentally added a few items to her potential lawsuit.
‘Sorry,’ said Mort. ‘I’ve got the doorbell guy coming to look at that. It’s meant to play “Gloomy Tuesday”.’
Roddy wobbled in under the weight of a huge stack of boxes. His Lycra-clad legs strained, but then Lycra-clad legs always did, for the whole point of Lycra was to flex your muscles and show off your gams. Even if you were eighty. ‘Where would you like me to put the confetti cannons?’
Molly gulped like a restaurant aquarium fish with a disturbingly full view of the sushi counter. ‘Confetti cannons?’
‘Oh, they’re not for me,’ said Mort placatingly. ‘They’re for next door. Eternal Elegance, Wedding Edition.’
Roddy shook his head. He prodded at the delivery label. ‘No, says here they’re for you.’
Two switcheroo symptoms in one day. This was not a good sign.
Pretending to have a revelation, Mort took the box, squiggling a signature on the device that Roddy held out. ‘Right! They’re um … for personal use. Not funeral-related.’
Molly folded her arms. ‘I think that’s worse. Now, correct this obituary nonsenseanon, or I’ll take my business elsewhere.’
Mort sighed. ‘I can accommodate that, if you must. Assuming you have a chilled van.’
