Stranger

Chapter 04

I didn’t have time to think of smiles or strangers for a few days. I had services to oversee and families to soothe. I know many people think what I do is morbid. Maybe even creepy. Few understand the purpose of a funeral director is not to take care of the dead, though that’s a part of it. My job is to care for those whose lives stutter in the face of their grief. To make the horrible task of saying goodbye as easy as it can never be.

I appreciated Jared more than ever as the week began with three funerals on the same day. My dad and uncle had always had assistants, but when I took over, the business had initially dipped and I’d had to let them go. I’d turned it around quickly enough, largely in part by doing most everything by myself. Running the home wasn’t impossible to do on my own, but it was pretty damn difficult. Having Jared there to help me organize and arrange services was a luxury I hadn’t wanted to get used to.

When a person dies in a hospital or nursing home, there are staff and gurneys available to make the transferal easy, but when a body needs to be picked up at a private residence, I never go alone. Most people don’t die conveniently by the nearest exit, and it can be too difficult to lift or transport a corpse down flights of stairs by myself.

We got a death call early Tuesday morning. The woman, in her early thirties, had died at home but had been taken to the hospital. Her husband would be coming in to make the arrangements with me while Jared went to pick up the body.

It’s easier with some than others. When the deceased passes after a long illness, or at an advanced age, for example. When it’s not a surprise.

“It was such a shock.” The man in the chair in front of me cradled an infant against his chest. He wasn’t weeping, but he looked as if he had been. A little girl played quietly at his feet with the set of blocks I kept for kids. “Nobody knew this was coming.”

“I’m sorry,” I told him, and waited.

I’ve heard horror stories about families being pressured into buying the best caskets and vaults, or being forced to make decisions hastily. Some other funeral homes operated like revolving doors, shuffling people in and out as fast as possible. Mr. Davis deserved my time, though, and he could have as much of it as he needed.

“She hated that van,” he said. The baby against him peeped and he shifted it. A boy. I could tell by the baseball bat on his outfit. “Why would she want to die in it?”

It wasn’t a question that needed an answer, but he looked at me like he thought I should have one. I tried hard not to gaze at the little girl on the floor, or the baby in his arms. I tried hard to just look at his face. “I don’t know, Mr. Davis.”

Mr. Davis glanced down at his children, then back up to me. “I don’t know, either.”

Together we planned a simple service. He gave me the clothes he wanted her to wear, and her favorite colors of lipstick and eye shadow. His son fussed and he pulled a bottle from a small cooler bag to feed him while we talked. I had Shelly take the little girl to give her some cookies and juice.

It was only routine to me, but for him it was the end of life as he’d known it. I did the best I could for him, but Mr. Davis left with the same blank gaze he’d had when he came in. When he’d gone, I went down to the embalming room to see if Jared had returned with Mrs. Davis. He had. Since he wasn’t yet licensed, he wasn’t able to actually do anything until I was there to supervise, but he’d set up the table and our supplies, and turned on some music.

He was quiet, though, when we uncovered her. Usually Jared’s full of humor and jokes. Nothing disrespectful toward the people we’re taking care of or anything. Just a generalized goofiness. Today he wasn’t joking, or even smiling.

He stared at her. “She’s so young.”

I looked at Mrs. Davis. Her eyes closed, her face serene, skin pale and no longer flushed with the rosy glow of carbon-monoxide poisoning she’d have had when they found her. “Yes. She’s my sister’s age.”

Jared looked startled. “Shit. That means she’s my sister’s age, too.”

He turned to the sink, where he washed his hands vigorously. His shoulders hunched for too long. I’d forgotten Jared hadn’t yet had to deal with anyone like Mrs. Davis. He’d been with me for six months, and though we’d had our share of deaths from disease and old age, and a few accidents, we hadn’t had any suicides. We hadn’t, in fact, had anyone younger than forty-five.

When he turned back to me, though, he looked under control. “Ready?”

“Are you?” I hadn’t done anything to get started. We weren’t in a hurry.

“Sure.” He nodded. “Yes.”

“Why don’t you tell me what we need to do first.” I offered this to remind him this was a job, no matter how disturbing it might be sometimes.

Jared did, rattling off the steps of the procedures we needed to follow. But his eyes lingered too long on Mrs. Davis’s face, and he had to turn away a few too many times as we worked. I put a hand on his arm, finally.

“Do you need to take a break?”

Jared let out a long, slow breath, and nodded. “Yes. Want a soda?”

“Sure.” I didn’t need a break, but I took one anyway.

We both had cans of soda from the ancient machine I kept stocked in the lounge just down the hall. With its battered furniture and scarred flooring, it wasn’t the lounge we used for clients. Just a place for staff to eat lunch or kick back for a bit.

Jared cracked open his can and stretched out on the worn sofa while I plopped onto a floral-print armchair with mismatched cushions. We drank in silence. From above I heard the faint pitter-pat of Shelly’s heels on the uncarpeted floor.

“I guess we need some new insulation.” I looked up at the drop ceiling, then at Jared.

He nodded, staring at his can. “Yeah.”

“It’s really bothering you, isn’t it.” I watched him study his can as if it was going to tell him something secret.

He looked at me. “Yeah. Damn. Grace, I know it shouldn’t—”

“It’s okay if it does, Jared. A big part of our job is compassion.”

“It doesn’t bother you,” he said. “I mean…does it?”

“Her being so young, you mean?” The cold bubbles tickled my throat and made me cough. Coffee would’ve been better, but that was all the way upstairs.

“Yeah. And…the kids. I saw the little girl when she was with Shelly and you were still talking to the husband. I came upstairs after I brought Mrs. Davis in and she was there. She was what, maybe three?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“It doesn’t bother you,” Jared repeated.

“It’s part of the job, Jared. My job is to make this as easy as possible for her husband and family, and to make sure she’s taken care of.”

He rubbed at his eyes and tossed back some soda. “Yeah. I know. You’re right. It’s just hard, sometimes. Isn’t it?”

I thought of the conversation I’d had so recently with Dan Stewart. “It’s sad, sure.”

Jared shook his head. “Not just sad.”

“Do you want me to finish her by myself?” I asked, generously, I thought.

“No. I need the hours and it’s not like I won’t ever have to face this again.” He looked up at me. “But…how do you do it, Grace? How do you not let it bother you so much you can’t do it, but keep that compassion?”

“I find a way to put it away at the end of the day,” I told him.

“Like…?”

“Like it’s a job,” I said. “Which it is. You have to find a way to be able to put it away at the end of the day.”

“Even if you get a death call two hours after the end of the day?” Jared grinned.

“Even then.” I finished my soda and tossed the can into the recycling bin.

“So, what do you do?” he asked on the way back to the embalming room.

What did I do? I went out and paid men to fulfill my fantasies. “I read a lot.”

Jared snorted under his breath. “Maybe I should take up knitting.”

“You could do that.” We worked together for a bit longer. He didn’t need a lot of instruction. “You’re going to make a really good funeral director, Jared. Did I tell you that?”

He looked up from what he was doing. “Thanks.”

We finished without any more philosophical discussion, but when he left that night, I thought more about what I’d said. My tumultuous relationship with Ben had ended with spectacular horrendousness. He wanted to get married. I didn’t, and not because I didn’t love him. Ben had been very easy to love. In fact, I’d assumed, as he had, that someday we’d get married and have some kids. Do the family thing.

I believed in love. Believed marriages worked. My parents were still happily married after forty-three years, and in my work I saw many families bound together by the strength of their devotion to one another.

I’d been around the dead my entire life, but it had never hit so close to home until I started my internship with my dad. I arranged memorials and talked with priests, ministers and rabbis in order to help the grieving families who came to us send off their loved ones in whatever way they deemed fit. Funerals weren’t for the dead, but the living, after all. I overheard arguments between warring family members who wanted different levels of religion in the service, and assisted with preparations for nondenominational services, too. I listened to the prayers of hundreds of mourners, and though the method in which they prayed might differ, or the specific deity they implored to care for the deceased, one thing was the same. People wanted to believe their loved one was heading off to someplace beyond this one.

But they were wrong. The dirt fell on the coffins the same way, every time, no matter if it was a plain pine box or a casket costing thousands of dollars. The body inside eventually became dust and even the memories of the person to whom it had belonged faded and became dust, too. I’d overseen hundreds of funerals and never once seen angels taking a soul to heaven, nor devils dragging it to hell.

You died, they put you in a box in the ground or burned you to bits to hasten the process, and that was it. Done. Fini. There was nothing after that.

No ever after, happily or otherwise.

Ben blamed me for breaking us up, but I pointed the finger at the summer I worked for my dad full-time for the first time. I blamed the women who came to us shattered by the loss of their spouses, women who’d spent their lives so enmeshed with their husbands they had no idea where their men left off and they began. I blamed the wives so battered by grief they couldn’t function, and the children who cried over losing their parents.

With Ben I’d been so tied up in the beginning of things, I hadn’t thought so much about the end. Dead was dead, there was nothing else. I wouldn’t know I was dead, so why be afraid of it? Everyone died. Everyone went.

I wasn’t afraid of going.

I was afraid of being left behind.

There was no question that the dates helped me put away my job. I could have a cop, a firefighter, a teacher. I could play naughty nurse, or secretary, or anything else I wanted, limited only by imagination and my budget.

I told Jack to meet me at the hotel I’d been using for months, a recently renovated strip motel on Harrisburg’s city limits. It had cheap rates and clean sheets, and was a good forty minutes’ drive from my home, which pretty much guaranteed I’d never accidentally bump into someone from town. Or someone’s aunt or uncle or brother, or someone I went to high school with who was home for a holiday, or someone whose brother or sister I’d gone to school with.

I never worried about bumping into someone for whom I’d done a funeral. Not just because most families I serviced were also from the local area, and in my town the local area meant a radius of no more than ten miles. It was simpler even than that. People who met me for the first time at a service didn’t see me. They saw a funeral director, if they saw anyone at all through their own haze of emotions. Out of the very limited element in which they’d met me, I was unrecognizable.

I’d been to that motel close to a dozen times in the past year, but the clerk behind the desk didn’t recognize me, either. It was the sort of place where the staff was paid to recognize anonymity.

I secured the room and left the small office with the key dangling from my hand. Renovations aside, the Dukum Inn hadn’t switched over to key cards. I liked the weight of the heavy black plastic key ring with the room number inscribed on it in faded white. I liked the way the key fit into the lock and turned. It was tactile in a way sliding a card into a slot wasn’t.

Jack, looking scrumptious in a battered black leather jacket, met me at the door as I opened it. Inside, the room was nothing spectacular. I couldn’t have said whether or not I’d ever been in that particular one, as a matter of fact, though after the visits I’d made you’d think I might have bothered to remember.

Jack looked around as he shrugged out of his coat and tossed it onto the chair. “Looks like they’ve done some upgrades.”

I closed the door and set the key on the dresser before I turned to him. “You’ve been here before?”

He shot me a sideways grin. “Couple times. Not for a while.”

“Is that so?” I stepped closer, reaching for the front of his shirt. “Don’t tell me. You’re used to classier accommodations?”

His low laugh tickled me in hidden places. He let me tug him closer by the shirtfront. He had to tilt his head only a little to look down at me. The wind had blown his hair back, but even the tangles looked soft.

“Nah.” He was smart enough not to elaborate, and I gave him credit for that.

Jack fit his hands onto my hips. Our bodies nudged. I leaned closer to take a breath, half expecting the smell of cigarettes and motorcycle exhaust. He smelled like spring-night air, the sort that can’t decide if it wants to be cold or not.

“Hey,” he murmured until I looked up at his face.

“Hey,” I replied.

Jack leaned in, slow to kiss me, giving me plenty of time to turn my face if I wanted. I didn’t. I wanted his mouth on me, all over, including mine. I like kissing. Sometimes that’s all I wanted to do. Kiss. Soft and slow, hard and fast. Long, lingering kisses or brief brushes of lip on lip.

I’d given him unspoken permission to kiss my mouth, and Jack took it without a second pause. His mouth slanted over mine as he pulled me closer with one smooth motion. Our mouths opened. I tasted mint. He didn’t use his tongue right away, but when he did, the sensation of his warm and wet flesh sliding against mine made me draw in a short, sharp breath that wasn’t quite a gasp.

He pulled away, just enough to ask, “Is this okay?”

I pulled him back to my mouth. “Less talking.”

Jack’s smile curved against my lips. “Yes, ma’am.”

I slid my hands beneath the hem of his buttoned shirt and found the soft cotton of a T-shirt beneath. I pushed that up, too, to give my fingers room to play on his bare skin. I slid my palm flat along his stomach, just above the waistband of his jeans. He pushed against my touch and left my lips to slide his mouth to my ear.

“Thanks for going out with me tonight.”

I turned my head so he could kiss my neck. “You’re welcome.”

“I don’t have to be home until midnight.”

I’d been specific about what I wanted, but I’ll blame the way his lips and tongue were painting a picture on my skin for how long it took for his words to click. “Midnight? But…oh.”

I got it. I fought my smile by biting down on my lower lip, hard, and heard Jack’s smile in his voice when he answered.

“Yeah. Mom and Dad said I could stay out a whole hour later because I made the honor society.”

I put a hand on his chest and twisted away from his mouth and hands. “Is that so?”

Jack nodded, glee glinting in his eyes but his face solemn. “Yes.”

I turned my back, part of the game, but also to gather my composure. I’d told Jack to do his homework and he had.

Good boy.

“You must have studied hard.” I made my voice casual and didn’t turn around.

“Yeah, I did. Really hard.”

This was a game I’d never had the chance to play before, and my heart stepped up its thumping as I contemplated how it should happen, exactly.

I turned to face Jack. “So, I guess you think you deserve a reward.”

He gave me a perfect, puppyish look. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

“I don’t know.” I feigned skepticism. “I’m not so sure it’s a good idea. Your parents—”

Jack looked indignant. “I’m a freshman in college! They can’t tell me what to do forever!”

I fought back a giggle at his grand gesture. It was my game, and if I didn’t hold it in, how could I expect him to?

“This is serious!” I shook my finger, as much a warning to myself as it was part of the role playing.

Jack crossed his arms over his chest. “I might not even be home by midnight, so there.”

“Well, then,” I answered. “You know what that would make you.”

One corner of his mouth twitched. “Bad.”

My hips swayed a bit more than usual when I moved closer to run a fingertip up the line of his buttons to stop just below his chin. “Is that what you want to be, Jack? A bad boy?”

He shook his head. “No.” He put his hand over mine and pulled it away from his chin. “So don’t make me be one.”

He’d improvised, surprising me. I looked at his hand circling my wrist, and to the way his face had shaded from eager to intent. Yet unlike at the Pharmacy or even the first time he’d kissed me, Jack wasn’t hesitating now. He was going for it the way I’d advised.

It was working.

There is always a part of me that can’t get lost in the game. No matter how thoroughly I’ve imagined the scenario or how good the players, something inside me refuses to cooperate. Refuses to allow myself to be convinced, even for an hour, that I’m someone else. It was why I’d never played this game before, the older woman giving the younger man his First Time.

Except here and now, I was older. Jack was younger. And this was our first time.

I tugged my hand, but not hard enough to break free of his grip. “What makes you think I shouldn’t?”

His fingers closed tighter. “Because you want to.”

And I did, a fact the heat rising in my throat and cheeks couldn’t hide, nor the way my nipples poked at the front of my shirt. Or the way my mouth parted to allow the swipe of my tongue along my bottom lip. Jack looked at all of these signs, so blatant, but he kept the role in which I’d cast him.

“Do you want to touch me?” The words came out scratchy and hoarse, but I didn’t clear my throat.

He nodded. We stayed that way, him holding my wrist and staring into each other’s eyes for as long as it took for my heart to stutter-thump a few times. Jack’s fingers opened, freeing me. I put my hands out to my sides.

“Then go ahead.”

His gaze fell to my body. For a minute I wished I’d worn something sexier, a short skirt and garters, maybe. Yet when he put his hands on my waist, pushing up my shirt to do so, I was glad I wore jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. It was less of a cliché…which made it feel more real.

Jack’s thumbs pressed my belly while his fingers curled around to each side of my spine. He waited, taking a deep breath and staring hard at the place his hands disappeared beneath my shirt.

I was supposed to believe he’d never touched a woman before, at least not like this. Watching the set of his mouth and his steady stare and feeling the skid of his hands along my sides, it wasn’t so hard for him to convince me.

We had no script. Nothing had been agreed upon. Only a few words checked off a list and a few scribbled sentences in the comments section of an almost-forgotten questionnaire from a while ago.

It was enough.

Jack pushed my shirt up and I raised my arms so he could pull it off over my head. He tossed it away and put his hands back on my waist at once. His gaze followed every curve before going to my face.

“Are you sure?” His already deep voice had gone even lower. “I can touch you?”

I took his right hand and slid it upward to just below my breast. We were both breathing hard by now. My nipples felt like iron pegs. Between my legs, my pulse throbbed and thrummed.

He touched me. I drew in a breath that had no trouble becoming a gasp. Jack cupped my breast in his hand and let out a slow hiss of his own breath. We stayed that way for a moment, until he slid his left hand up to do the same. Then he bent his head to brush his lips over the exposed curves. He straightened and looked into my eyes.

“Come to bed,” I said. I turned and didn’t watch to see if he would follow. There was no question that he wouldn’t.

“Take off your shirt,” I said when we got there.

He did. I stared for a second, then reached to touch the silver barbell through his left nipple. It wasn’t exactly in keeping with the image of an honor-society nerd. It was also pretty hot.

Jack’s skin humped into goose bumps at my touch, though I knew he couldn’t be cold. I smiled. My finger traced his nipple, then the other one, and finally right down the center of his chest. I stopped just above his navel.

“Take off your pants.”

His hands went at once to the button and zipper and in moments he’d pushed his pants down to step out of them. He kicked them to the side. Neither of us bothered to look where they landed.

Jack’s black boxer briefs rode low on his hips, exposing a hint of dark hair. The front bulged impressively, but he wasn’t quite hard. Not yet.

“Those, too.” I watched his face.

He was good at this, much better than I, who had to think carefully about my reactions to make them authentic. Emotions drifted across Jack’s face and got trapped in his eyes. Pride. Excitement. A hint of anxiety.

He hooked his thumbs into his waistband, but before he could push them down, I put my hands on his. Remembering, suddenly.

“Wait.”

He gave me a curious look.

“Is there…anything I should know?”