Page 63 of Four Weddings and a Funeral Director
Mort spluttered. ‘No, no, it’s not like that.’
Although it was like that, after last night. Or could be. Mort could still feel Lily’s lips on his neck, could still see the delicious shape of her body right there in front of him, inviting him to explore it …
Mort! You’re at afuneral!Funerals and sexy thoughts were mutually incompatible, even with the switcheroo looming over everything.
‘The plates are for a wedding,’ he explained, mopping his forehead with his skull-patterned kerchief. When had it got so hot in here?
‘Well, at least they smashed the plates and not the baklava.’ Angela closed her eyes dreamily as she chewed on a mouthful of honeyed pastry. ‘I can’t resist it. It’s just so good. Pistachios. Filo pastry. It’s heaven on a plate. I sort of feel like Christos would want me to eat it. So, I hear you stopped by Whispering Waters. With Christos gone, you’ve got an extra residence to choose from. This one has ocean glimpses, and an original pink bathroom.’
‘I need to think about it,’ said Mort.
‘You’re bleeding, by the way.’ Angela pulled a Band-Aid from her giant handbag. (Realtors always came prepared.)
Mort wrapped the Band-Aid around his finger, then with a sigh went to fetch the broom and bucket he kept in the janitorialcloset. How was he going to explain this to Lily? She’d worked so hard on the weird hippie wedding, and now the fabulous plating styling she’d organised was a pile of shards that even the most diligent archaeologist would struggle to put back together.
He could imagine her lips turning down at the corners, and her chin doing that slightly walnutty, wobbly thing, like when she’d knocked on the door worried that Esmeralda had disappeared (but was just at a neighbour’s eating a second dinner. Third dinner, probably.)
He’d fix this. He’d come up with a way to fix this. Even if it meant individually gluing together every single plate in the stack until Lily had something to serve her uncooked retirement home food on.
Wait, there! A plate had survived the drop to the ground, courtesy of a well-placed napkin. Mort was reminded of the egg drops his class had done from the school roof in fifth grade. Mort picked up the plate and held it aloft. It was a sign that not everything was ruined. That something could be salvaged.
‘Opa!’ came the cry from behind Mort. ‘Opa!!!!’
Mort, who never responded well to people bellowing in his ear, dropped the plate, which shattered on the tiles.
Smashing, he thought.
Once Smitten, Twice Shy
Lily
It was perhaps for the best that Lily’s week had been so busy that she’d scarcely had time to think about the fact that she’d thrown herself at Mort, only to have him run off screaming into the night. No, instead of reflecting extensively on how they’d spent hours pressed up against each other just to wind up with that damned pink-and-black grille dividing their lives again, Lily had been corralling the various vendors for Venus’s wedding into a shared space ready for the rehearsal dinner ahead of the big day next weekend. And rather than fretting that Mort had reacted to her bare boobs with a flight response, she’d been calling around attempting to source a whiskey from every state for Amos and Bernard’s ‘bourbonniere’ (bonbonniere, but make it boozy). And rather than reliving the backwards Cinderella nightie situation again and again, she’d been bribing the middle school’s art students to make giant papier-mâché nutcrackers for her Christmas in July wedding.
All right, so shehadhad time to ruminate extensively on the whole disastrous debacle and about how her feelings for the funeral planner next door were rooted in something far deeper and more complicated than trauma bonding over the switcheroo. Plenty of time. But she hadn’t had time to blow upMort’s phone, which was good. Okay, so that was a lie as well, but she’d accidentally sent that stream of mortifying texts to Annika instead, so in practice she hadn’t made things worse.
Wow, Lily, this is messy even for you, Annika had texted back.I love it.
Annika had followed up with a few emojis and then some photos of a ramshackle stone house in the Italian countryside.
One euro! I bought two. I just have to fix them up in between gorging myself on pasta and finding love in Tuscany. I’m going to livestream the whole thing.
Annika had finally done it: she’d made good on all that cheap house scrolling.
Homeownership seemed so …adult. So long term. Even more long term than marriage. And definitely more long term than Lily’s year-long lease at the shop. Which she was now several months into, which meant that the prospect of giving up her shop to the next Instagram-scrolling entrepreneur was increasingly on her mind. Maybe she could take Mort’s advice and explain the switcheroo situation to the Chamber of Commerce, then beg for an extension given that the first few months of her lease hadn’t, as Mort had noted, strictly delivered the commercial premises she’d been promised.
‘Love, are we doing this?’ This was Reba, the effusively dressed tie-dye artist behind the decor of Venus’s manifold glamping tents. Reba had shown up in a rattly Kombi van last night, emerging from it in a profusion of colour, swearing, weed smoke and The Grateful Dead jangling away at full blast. She wore cat’s-eye glasses and a million rings and an expression of constant amusement, and fiddled with a tiny vessel around her neck.
‘My husband Frank, with a dash of my dog,’ she’d said by way of explanation (not a thoroughly comforting explanation, butLily had decided not to ask further questions). ‘Damn, Mirage-by-the-Sea. I haven’t been out here since Fire in the Grass back in, what, ’89? Good times, good drugs. Not like your poor generation gets.’
She gave Lily a sympathetic pat on the shoulder.
Reba, proprietor of a company called Dyer on the Mountain, was basically the Dale Chihuly of tie-dye (although she asked not to be described that way because apparently there’d been a whole fuss after she’d tried to repurpose one of Mr Chihuly’s sculptures into a bong at Tie-Dye Palooza a few years back). Honour Nivola’s sister, Gracie Nivola – Venus’s wedding photographer and a childhood friend of the bride’s, who should be here any moment – had recommended Reba wholeheartedly. Apparently the two had collaborated extensively in a hole-in-the-wall art gallery in Brooklyn. Something called Riffraff, which sounded very Brooklyn-y and legit.
Anyway, both were available, both were here (well, Gracie was almost here – GPS issues) and Reba was doing a good job of talking Venus off the emotional ledge she’d been hanging out on all morning, worrying in turn about her toothpaste empire and quarterly earnings and the worrying reading that her psychic had given her. And also distracting Lily from the whole Mort fiasco, which was sorely needed right now.
‘We are indeed doing this,’ Lily told Reba. Steeling herself, she flashed one of her sunny grins, then twirled in a circle, showing off the food truck that Jefferson from the nursing home had put together for Venus and what’s-his-name’s wedding rehearsal. Lily had never invented an entire business for a wedding before, but she did have a literal blank cheque to work with, and expectations were high.
‘Presenting … Premetheus,’ she exclaimed, with a clap of her hands.
