Mella started crying.
I’m not sure what kind of so-called qualified town wants to have a funeral home as the first business after the “Welcome To” sign, but I eased into the parking lot of the Glymph Funeral Home and put it in park. I said to Mella, “This is not sad. This is one of those things. Do not make a scene, please. We’re all right.”
I got out and opened the hood, as if I knew what I was doing. Well, I did know that every damn belt shouldn’t be snapped and dangling from its water pump, alternator, power steering, and A/C compressor pulleys. I looked down into the mysterious cavern of my car’s innards, saw what seemed to have sprang, and yelled out to Mella, “Look what we did at our age! We’re fifty! We killed us some rubber gaskets and whatnot, is what I’m saying. Goddamn. You and I were humping so hard we broke everything.”
The front end steamed and pinged and tick-tick-tick-tick-ticked to the point where I could do nothing but close down the hood for fear of getting shot in the head by a rod. Mella nodded inside the car, then patted the driver’s seat. She said, “I’ve seen this happen on TV. It’ll be all right. I saw this happen one time in a movie that involved these two guys having to drive through the desert.”
I remembered the time she’d watched that movie — a lizard died, and Mella started crying, and the next thing you know I had her backed up against the bookcase. I remember it well, because Mella was the reader in the family, what with her English teacher background, and while I had her there I got to looking over the titles and thought, I really ought to read Of Human Bondage, and Wuthering Heights, and Ethan Frome. That’s what I thought back then. But here I said, “We need to call Triple A.”
She said, “If I call them, and they come out here to help us, the next thing you know our rates will go up.”
There were no clouds in the sky. I reached down at my slightly wet balls and jerked my khakis left and right a few times. I said, “Don’t do this again, honey. Please don’t do this.”
One time we had a hailstorm that damaged our roof and cars mercilessly, but Mella wouldn’t call the insurance agent seeing as it would jack our bill.
She cried. She got out her cell phone, though, and flipped it open. “I don’t know Triple A’s number,” she said. “Here.”
What did I know? I punched up my buddy Aaron the actuary, seeing as I knew his number, but I learned that we were in a place with no bars. We were stuck in a “fuck you for trying to contact the outside world” kind of place.
“Man, we need to find a payphone or something.” I thought, when’s the last time I saw a payphone? I thought, Mella ought to buy up payphones and sell them on eBay. I said, “Please don’t cry. I’ll go inside.”
“I’m not going to wait out here in the parking lot of the dead. The parking lot of people who wait to go see the dead. The parking lot.”
I doubt I have to go into much detail or speculation about what might happen to an orgasmic-by-sadness woman walk ing into an institution of embalmment. I’d learned to live by the “we probably won’t see these people again” dictum long before. I said, “Let’s go see if they got a landline.”
Funeral homes in the South, for the most part, do not vary. This was a big antebellum structure with a foyer and four viewing areas that had one time been parlors of sorts. The family lived upstairs, I supposed, and the bodies first showed up downstairs, just like in the movies that caused my wife to cry. I said, “Anyone home?” like people do.
My wife and I held hands.
Listen, the stereotypical mortician didn’t come out from behind some curtains there at the Glymph Funeral Home. I don’t know where he’d been standing before, but he plain appeared. He said, “Are you here for the Munson services?” And like that, I jumped. And Mella began laughing. Laughing! What kind of weird dyslexia is that? Right away I thought back about to how she and I had never been to a funeral service together — both our parents seemed needful to crank onward to the age of 140 or thereabouts, something I’d never have predicted as an actuary, and was glad that they all had different supplemental health insurance policies than the one offered by my company.
I said, “No,” after making a noise that might’ve sounded like “Muhhh!” according to Mella. “No, it seems that every belt under my hood popped at the same time and our cell phones aren’t working for some reason.”
The funeral home director said, in that quiet voice always used by funeral home directors — what did their college football team’s cheerleaders sound like? — “You’re early for the Munson viewing. His family’s receiving friends at two o’clock.”
Mella shook her head. She laughed again, but she said, “I was so sorry to hear about Mr. Munson. Tragic, really.”
I said, “My name’s Tenry,” and stuck out my hand. I’d never shaken hands with a funeral home director, and I wanted to see if his hand felt dry and scaly from all the embalming fluid. It didn’t. “No, we’re not here for the Munson thing. I was wondering if we could use your phone.” I looked at my wristwatch. We had an hour.
“Harold Glymph,” he said. “I see. I’m sorry. I was preoccupied. There’s some talk that there might be a little bit of a brouhaha at the viewing. Nelroy Munson’s widow has reason to believe that…well, you know, seeing as where Nelroy had his heart attack.”
Mella said, “Who could blame her?!” and I understood that she’d ventured into some kind of role-playing improv game. She said, “You know, I’ve always wanted to ask a funeral director one question, and that question is, ‘Why?’ I mean, I know most of the time a son takes over for his father. I wonder what percentage of morticians come from a family of morticians.” She looked at me. I shrugged. “It’s like sourdough bread starter.”
I said, “I guess I don’t really need to use your phone if you can just give me the name of a decent mechanic. Place this small, I can probably just walk over there.” I looked past Mr. Glymph into the next room and saw a white-white man laid out in a casket, or at least his head. He parted his hair in the middle in such a way that made him look like he’d just broken a lake’s surface.
“I think it’s quite a percentage,” Mr. Glymph said to my wife. He pointed to the left, toward Calloustown’s couple blocks, I think to show me where a mechanic worked. “I don’t know for sure.” He started smiling and shook his head. He touched my wife’s upper arm. “A lot of young men become lawyers in order to work in their daddy’s law office. Dentists seem to have dentist sons. But it can’t be anywhere near what it is in my line of work. I might be one of the exceptions. You know why I got interested in running a funeral home? I got picked on bad as a kid here. I wasn’t one of the Munsons or Harrells. About ninety percent of the population here in Calloustown’s made up of Munsons and Harrells, and they’re all still ticked off that General Sherman swerved away from their ancestors’ town because he didn’t see it fit to waste fire on. I don’t know when exactly I realized that my best bet for retribution came in seeing my classmates naked. I’d be the only one in town to say I’ve seen everyone who ever made fun of me naked. Harold Glymph,” he said, and stuck out his hand to shake again.