“Uh, what?” Calder asked.
“If the body has been cremated, they’re called cremains,” she clarified, tone bored.
“Oh. Okay, then. Cremains. Her name was Jennifer.”
“Last name?”
“Seton. Jennifer Seton.”
“Oh, it’s you,” she said. “We wondered what you looked like. Who you were. We even had a bet going that you wouldn’t ever come pick her up. She your dead wife or something?”
Calder gaped at the girl before shaking his head. “What? Do you talk like this to all of your customers? Clients? Whatever?”
“I’m the makeup artist here. Daddy doesn’t really let me talk to the customers-clients-whatevers. He says I lack…people skills. Luckily, I don’t need them for my job. My clients don’t tend to be super chatty. Usually,” she added with a smirk.
Calder felt like he’d entered the twilight zone. “Who are you?”
“Evermore Rollins. Who are you?”
“That isnotyour real name,” Calder said.
“No, it totes is. My parents run a funeral home and crematorium. Big fans of Poe. Most people just call me Ever. You didn’t answer my question,” she said, taking another sip of her drink.
“Calder Seton,” he said.
The girl nodded, her green hair falling into her overly-lined eyes. “So, was she? Your dead wife, I mean?”
“No. She’s my…” He hesitated. She’d never been anything to him before Elizer had found her—his informant, his snitch? But he’d given her his last name when none could be found for her. “She was my sister,” he finally said. It felt right, even if it wasn’t true.
“Did you guys have a fight or something. Before she kicked it, I mean.”
Calder laughed in spite of himself. “You are very direct.”
“So they tell me. Aspergers, what are you going to do? It’s why my parents don’t like me up front.”
“Yet, here you are,” Calder mused. “Can I get my sister’s ashes, please? I’m on a bit of a time crunch.”
She rolled her eyes. “You wait like months to pick her up and now, suddenly, it’s an emergency. Typical.”
He laughed. “Please?”
Megan would have found this entire exchange hilarious. She was always blunt, kind of like Robby. Calder suddenly felt like he’d been mule-kicked, the pain pulling the air from his lungs and causing him to drop into his seat. He’d give anything to see his sister again, to hear her voice, to listen to her do impressions of the muppets as she read to him. Why was he losing it again? He’d cried all his tears the other night.
“It’s normal, you know,” Ever said before clarifying, “To be all over the place, emotionally. Like, sometimes, even if you didn’t like the person, you cry because you’ll never have the opportunity to fix it. You cry because maybe you had the opportunity and you didn’t do anything, or maybe somebody stole that opportunity from you. But none of that matters to the dead, you know. No matter what you believe, their troubles are over. Whether it's because they are just gone or whether you think they’re chilling on some white fluffy cloud in heaven, the only one whose feelings matter are yours.”
He hadn’t thought about God or heaven or any of that bible school stuff since his family had stopped going to church all those years ago, but he believed that his parents had found peace, that they’d found Megan and maybe, somehow, they’d even stumbled upon Jennifer up there somewhere. The thought brought him some measure of comfort. He nodded at the girl. “I suppose you’re right.”
“Yeah, I know. I gotta go downstairs to where we keep the…leftovers. I’ll bring them right out since you’re in such a hurry and all.”
Calder shook his head. Would anybody believe this story if he told it? He doubted it. Jennifer’s remains were in fact in a cardboard box. It was heavier than Calder had thought and it was stamped ‘temporary.’ It would be nice if that were true. He signed the papers and paid the bill before tucking the box under his arm.
As he was leaving, Ever took another sip of her drink. “See ya, Calder Seton.”
“Maybe so, Evermore Rollins.”
Once in his truck, he seatbelted the remains into the passenger seat, shaking his head at the thought of possibly being pulled over. He tugged his phone from his pocket to text Robby that he was on his way back when he saw he had ten missed calls and half a dozen voicemails, all from Robby.
Calder’s heart dropped into his shoes as he dialed his voicemail. His blood whirred in his ears, deafening him to the recording prompts, but somehow, he managed to get the message to play, stomach lurching at Robby’s frantic voice.
