CHAPTER 64
Maggie
Papa is bent over a dead man, shaving the enormous pale face with a steady hand. He’s doing my job. He looks up when I step inside the embalming room.
“You don’t need to be in here right now, Mags. I can handle this.”
But I do. I do need to be in this room where the terrible things that can kill a person are covered up, plastered down, brushed away.
“I don’t want to be wandering around the house today, looking for something to do,” I tell him. I don’t need to add that Alex’s absence is everywhere inside the house, along with Willa’s ever-accusing eyes when she’s not in school.
He slides the straightedge down the man’s face. It makes the same scraping sound that Papa’s razor makes when he shaves. The dead man is huge. He barely fits on the table. “Wouldn’t you rather be planning your wedding?” Papa asks.
“No.”
He tips his head in my direction. “No?”
I shake my head.
“It might take your mind off all this.”
“No, it won’t.”
“Have you talked to Palmer?”
I’m not sure how to answer this question. Palmer and I have spoken on the phone, but he did most of the talking. Was I all right? Yes. Was I going to be arrested? No, I wasn’t. Was Alex all right? We don’t know. Either they haven’t allowed him to call or he doesn’t want to, and there have been no invitations yet to come visit him. Probably too soon, Palmer said. It’s only been five days. I had no response to this. He went on to describe his new job and the little apartment he’d found for us on the Upper West Side. He told me he’d be home in a week for a visit, and then he’d take me out and spoil me and kiss my woes away.
“Don’t worry, my sweet. I am very fond of Alex, but we’ll soon have our own children,” he’d said. And I knew he meant well. But I wanted to slam the telephone down on its cradle.
“We’ve talked,” I reply to Papa. “Let me finish with this fellow. Please? I need to stay busy.”
Papa regards me for a moment and then sets the straightedge down on a tray. “All right. Don’t try to change him into the suit. He’s too heavy. I’ll take care of it.”
I look at the dead man. There isn’t a hint of injury anywhere. “What happened to him?” I ask as I put on my apron.
“Alcohol poisoning. He drank some bad bootleg. A lot of it. It’s a shame. He’s younger than me.”
Yes, it’s a shame.
Papa pulls off his own apron as I tie the strings on mine. “I’ve got some telephone calls to make. I’ll be back in a little bit.” He leaves me to it.
I finish shaving the man and then groom his mustache and wax it into place. The family provided no photo, so I decide to part his hair down the middle and tame his stubborn curls into place with pomade. I add a little stage makeup to his face to brighten the pallor and a little rouge to his cheeks. One eye has popped open, and I am easing it back into the closed position when I hear movement behind me.
I look up. Jamie is standing at the doorway. “Good morning, Maggie.”
I haven’t seen him since Alex was taken away, and I haven’t talked to him since he and I were alone in his father’s accounting office. I should return his greeting, but I’m bewildered by his presence. I don’t know that he’s ever been in the embalming room. He seems to read my thoughts.
“Your father asked me to come over this morning to help him move this man. I knocked at the back door, but I guess he couldn’t hear me.”
“Oh. Papa’s making some phone calls in the other part of the house. I’m sure he’ll be finishing up soon.”
Jamie nods and steps in all the way. He looks at the cadaver. “You did a nice job,” he says. “He looks like he’s sleeping.”
“You couldn’t tell what killed him,” I reply, downplaying my restorative work. “I’ve worked on far worse.”
He smiles a gentle grin. “You always did like to fix things.”
I’m sure Jamie intends for it to be a compliment, but it feels like some kind of indictment. “Is that a bad thing?”
