I check my watch.
Take a seat.
Pray this doesn’t take all night.
The woman, whose name tag reads CLAUDETTE PAULLEY, DIRECTOR, squeezes into her chair on the other side of the desk and retrieves a small booklet from a stack to her left. The cover showcases a glossy white casket surrounded by floral arrangements too perfect to be real.
“When we spoke on the phone earlier,” she says, “you had mentioned cremation. Is that still—”
“—yes.” I don’t have time for her imprudent, time-wasting questions.
Once my mind is made up, there’s never any changing it.
“All right then.” She gives me a soft smile. Her bright pink lipstick bleeds into the lines around her mouth.
“Why don’t we discuss the service.” She glances up at me then down at her wringing hands. I must make her nervous. “And then I can show you some lovely urn options …”
“There won’t be a service.” I shift in this impossibly uncomfortable chair. “And you can choose the urn. Surprise me.”
Her lips form a wrinkled ‘o’ and she blinks before reanimating. “I see then.”
“Larissa didn’t have a lot of friends.” At least none that I would presently allow within a hundred yards of this place. “And as far as family goes, we’re rather private. A small memorial should suffice. An hour or two this Saturday if you can fit us in.”
Claudette searches my face for what I assume are emotions, but her time would be better spent hammering out the final details of Larissa’s memorial.
Reaching for a black, leather-bound planner, she flips it open to today’s date before licking her index finger and flicking to Saturday.
“We could do ten to noon.” She reaches for a logo-emblazoned pencil in a logo-emblazoned mug full of other logo-emblazoned pencils.
Classy.
“You don’t have anything earlier?”
She squints. “Well, we could certainly move it up. The timing is typically more of a convenience thing. If we hold it too early, it could be difficult for some people to get here, especially if they’re coming from out of town.”
“I can assure you that won’t be an issue.” I check my watch again, not because I have somewhere else to be, but because this woman needs to get on with this shit show already.
She scratches a few words into her planner with messy, shaky handwriting. “Eight to ten it is. Now, as far as the obituary, I have a form you could fill out or I could go over everything with you personally.”
“The form is fine.”
Her yellow-oak chair creaks as she reaches to open a desk drawer, and then she fishes out a chipped plastic clipboard and a piece of paper before handing them over.
This place is all kinds of fancy and formal.
My couture-loving mother certainly spared no expense when she had them ship Larissa’s lifeless corpse here.
The questions are endless and I don’t know the answer to half of them.
The answers to the other half of them are extraneous and unnecessary.
I don’t have time to write a fucking biography.
I scribble her birthdate into the first line—February 22.
They already have her death date.
Everything else is irrelevant.
Three
Astaire
* * *
“Can I ask you something?” Back at Ophelia’s, I slide my empty water glass toward Eduardo. I’ve been sitting here for over an hour now, waiting to sober up enough to go home. “It’s kind of random …”
That isn’t true.
My question isn’t random at all—I don’t know why I said that.
“Sure.” He shrugs, eyeing a couple as they stumble out the door.
“Who was that guy?” I point to the empty bar stool at the end. “The one in here earlier?”
“The one you chased out of here?” He sniffs. I can’t tell if he’s annoyed, amused, or something else.
“He forgot his umbrella …,” I’m quick to defend my actions, “but yeah. Who was that?”
“Shane Bock.” He wipes a speck of condensation from the bar top with his rag.
“Is he from around here?”
“He is.” Eduardo lifts his hands. “But look, whatever you two had going on earlier, I don’t want any part in that. Looked pretty intense.”
“To say the least.” I shake my head, our conversation still fresh in my spinning head. “I was supposed to meet someone here tonight and I thought that was the guy. Didn’t even get a chance to ask him if he was Garrett before he started accusing me of hitting on him. Who does that?”
“Garrett, you said? Some guy was in here earlier by the name of Garrett. He was looking to meet up with someone, but he didn’t wait that long. Think it was around six-ish? Didn’t stay but ten minutes is all.”
My stomach plunges.
It must have been when I was in the bathroom trying to salvage my date-night look.
“Dark hair? Tall?”
“Something like that,” he confirms.
This day can screw itself. Truly.
I check the time on my phone. I could swear I’ve been here all night, but it’s only been a couple of hours at the most.
To be safe, I decide to drink one more glass of water and wait one more hour—because that’s what decent people do, and I’m a decent person.
I’m also decently curious.
“That Shane guy,” I say to Eduardo when he comes by to check on me a while later.
A melancholic Muse song plays over the speakers, and outside a man lights a cigarette for a woman in a red dress. The place grows emptier by the minute.
“Ah. We back to that?” He rests his fist against the bar, feigning annoyance. Or maybe he truly is annoyed.
At this point, it doesn’t matter.
Curiosity’s steering the ship and there’s no turning back.
“You said he’s from around here?”
“Ever heard of Shane Bock Corporation?”
“Nope.” I rest my elbow on the bar top and my chin on my hand, all ears.
“You’re not from here, are you?”
I sip my water. “Moved here a couple of years ago. Took a job teaching kindergarten at Starwood.”
“Adorable,” he says, though I believe he’s being sarcastic. “Two years here and you’ve never once seen a Shane Bock Bridge? Never driven past the Shane Bock Park? Hiked the Shane Bock trail?”
I rack my brain and can’t think of a single instance when I’ve come across a Shane Bock anything. And what kind of man names all those things after himself? Unless it’s a family name? Maybe his grandfather was a Shane, though I can’t imagine that was a common name seventy-odd years ago.
“His family,” Eduardo continues, “is practically Chicago royalty. You sure you’ve never heard of Shane Bock Corporation?”
I shake my head.
“They own that factory on the west side,” he continues, pointing, “the one that makes plastic products. And they own those furniture stores that are all over the state. A national insurance agency, a major league baseball team …”