Well of course Mella started crying when he finished the story. She said, “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” which was hyperbolic, seeing as the saddest thing she’d ever heard had to do with Tom Hanks walking away from Meg Ryan without knowing the truth of the situation.
“I might be the richest man in Calloustown,” Harold Glymph said. “It ain’t all that sad. Listen,” he turned to me, “there’s one real mechanic in town. I’d rather not send business to this old boy named Mink, if you know what I mean. He’ll more than likely fix your fan belt and puncture your radiator. So you can borrow my car and drive out to an AutoZone about ten miles away. If you ain’t comfortable driving my car, we can take the belts off mine — if they fit — put them on yours, and then you can drive back here and we’ll swap everything back to normal.”
Listen, understand that the first thing I thought went something like, what a great, generous man. How lucky were we to have car trouble right by the Glymph Funeral Home?
I said, “Oh, I don’t want to bother you any. It would probably be faster and safer just to deal with that Mink fellow.”
Mella walked right off from us. She started sniffling, and then she let out one of her loud blurts. She wandered into the viewing room of Mr. Munson, draped herself on the closed-up end of his casket, and started having orgasms. Harold Glymph said, “Is she all right?”
“No,” I said. “She has some kind of weird thing about crying.”
“I’ve seen it before,” the mortician said. “Some women have a nerve that goes directly between their tear ducts and nookie. I’ve talked to doctors about it before, but they say it’s a medical impossibility. Who would know better? I’ll tell you who: the man who drains a woman and looks around, and a husband, that’s who.”
Before we could get back on track concerning my automotive predicament, the door opened and a middle-aged woman came inside wearing a lavender hat with four-inch black netting in the front. Harold Glymph said, “Ms. Harrell.”
She looked like she used the same make-up as dead Mr. Munson. She said, “We know how everyone’s talking. We thought I’d come early and get out of here so’s they’s no trouble.”
“This is Mr. Tenry,” the mortician said. I didn’t correct him. What would it matter? It wasn’t like I’d see these people again.
Mella let out a giant moan in the other room. One of those oh-god-oh-god-oh-god-yes-yes-yes moans. “Mr. Tenry’s wife,” Harold Glymph said, jerking his head once to the back. “Let me go make that call about your car.”
“We had car trouble,” I said to Ms. Harrell. “We’re not from around here.”
The woman looked at me for about five beats too long, the same way I look at people with vertical wrinkles lined up like hatch marks between their noses and upper lips when they tell me they’ve never smoked. The woman stared at me, then moved her head toward Mella in the next room. “Well, welcome to Calloustown, Mr. Tenry,” she said. “Is that a French name, Tenry?”
I couldn’t help myself but to say, “Oui, madame,” only because I realized that no other actuary in America, at that particular time, spoke French. Or at least the likelihood of it was miniscule.
Ms. Harrell curtsied, I swear to God. My wife blurted out from the viewing room, “Right there, right there!” like that.
“I better go check on Mella.”
Ms. Harrell grabbed my arm. “Are you okay with this?”
I said, “She’s got a problem. She has an undiagnosed problem.”
She walked two steps forward and craned her neck into the other room. “Well I guess I can say that I have a problem with it. I thought I was Nelroy’s only mistress.”
I thought, the chances of Nelroy’s parents being named Nelta and Roy were one hundred percent. Ms. Harrell started walking into the other room with some conviction. I said, “No, wait,” but evidently she didn’t hear me. Mr. Harold Glymph floated back into the room and said, “Mink will be at the viewing today. He said he’d be more than happy to work on your car after he pays his respects to the deceased.”
Mella walked back in without Ms. Harrell and said, “Let’s go sit in the car and wait.” I knew what that meant — she’d been interrupted, and she needed to “complete” her little “chore.”
I said to Harold Glymph, “Um.”
Ms. Harrell started making noises there next to Nelroy’s casket, noises that sounded like the blubbery sobs my wife had made earlier, but without the additional outcome. The last thing I heard was her yelling, “We were supposed to be together, Nelroy. You know that for a fact. You and I and God knew it. And the fellow who checked us into the room.”
I wanted to be home, looking at meaningless paperwork.
We sat in our car with the ignition turned on, the windows cracked, the radio turned to the only station we could find in Calloustown, an AM selection that on this particular Saturday morning ran one of those doctor call-in shows. People called up this guy and asked questions about snake bites and numbness, about temporary blindness and bleeding pores. I couldn’t tell if it was a local doctor or one of those syndicated shows. As an actuary I guess I’m supposed to love doctors who do call-in shows — I need people to live a long time so they keep paying off monthly premiums but don’t get sick enough to go see a specialist — but nowadays I feel as though too many doctors won’t let people plain die when they should. And it all goes back to the insurance companies, which makes me sad. It doesn’t make me so sad that I cry and soil my underwear in half-zygote, but it makes me feel as though everything’s doomed and hopeless.
“I’d like to have those wrought-iron wall sconces inside the funeral home,” Mella said. “I could sell those things for some good money on eBay. There’s a whole wrought-iron sconce-collecting community out there.”
From where we sat in our car we would be able to see everyone who came in to look at dead Nelroy Munson. I could tell already that it was going to be similar to sitting at a drive-in B movie horror show, or like standing off to the side of a fair’s freak tent. I said, “I just want to get the car fixed and get out of here.”
A woman called in to the radio program and said, “Long time listener, first time caller, Dr. Ubinger,” which made me realize that we listened to a syndicated show, seeing as there was no one named Ubinger within four hundred miles of where we, minute by minute, succumbed. “I have been passing out for no reason over the last year or so. My blood pressure’s fine. I’m thirty-six years old. I’m five foot six and weigh 145 pounds. I work out four times a week at the gym and take yoga classes twice a week. I lift weights, do aerobics, swim, and I ran a marathon last year! I rode my bike in the P-to-P road race on Groundhog Day! But I’ll be walking out to get the mail, and the next thing you know my neighbor’s throwing water on my head trying to revive me.”
Dr. Ubinger said, of course, “P-to-P?”
“Pittsburgh to Punxsutawney. It’s a big thing around here — for cyclists, at least. Which means it’s a big thing!”
I said, “She’s passing out all the time because she doesn’t have any oxygen going to her brain.”
Mella said, “You remember that time?” which I knew she would say. If I’d’ve turned on the radio to a hard rock station and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “What’s Your Name?” or “That Smell” came on, she’d find a reason to tell this story, too.
A carload of mourners drove up and parked. The women looked like Ms. Harrell and the men like dead Nelroy Mun-son. I said, “Go on.”
“Man, you’d think none of those men had ever seen a prone woman.”
We’d been at the mall. It wasn’t my idea. I went off somewhere to buy Mella some overpriced Le Creuset cast-iron pots, because she thought she couldn’t pour a can of Campbell’s soup in anything less. She went wandering around, as far as I could piece together later, and saw a sad kid sitting on Santa’s lap who asked for a bottle of hand sanitizer only so that when her daddy hit her momma on the face she no longer got infections from his germ-ridden fingernails. Mella cried, she got all orgasmic, and she crumpled to the floor. Someone yelled out, “Is there a doctor in the house?” just like on the TV shows.