And then I hung up and walked away from Quaker school without a coat on a cool early spring morning in Iowa. It had been weeks since the last frost, and the cornwas just beginning to come up in the fields around me. I walked along the highway, following a line of barbed wire as it sliced across the pegs of a wooden fence.
There were tire ruts in the shoulder of the highway from ATVs, and I walked in their grooves. I walked for hours, blinking away hot tears and wiping my nose with my shirtsleeve. My only nice pair of boots soaked up the wet mud. Eventually I came across a sign for Model Train Land, a hokey roadside stop a few miles in the distance.
I first saw the signs when my dad drove me to Quaker school in the fall. We’d joked about stopping, about it being a cultural embassy for my new state.THE LARGEST MODELTRAIN RAILROAD EVERBUILT! ONLY 2MILES! YOU’REJUST 1 MILE AWAYFROM MODELTRAIN LAND! ALL ABOARD!
I walked until I reached it: the smallest museum in the world. It was just a ranch house, painted red, fifty feet from the freeway. The place was open, but it was a weekday, so it was empty when I stepped inside. I scraped together the entrance fee from a wad of small bills and coins in my pocket and I paid a red-nosed old man in a striped conductor’s hat. He smiled a gummy smile and handed me a wooden whistle. Then I stepped inside the cramped space and stood in front of the glass enclosed train world.
The track was bright silver and it crisscrossed an elaborate diorama of scenery from all over the country. Snowcapped mountains. A calm ocean. Winding rivers banked by flowering trees, their leaves made from green toothbrush bristles. There were old-fashioned telephone poles and farm windmills with tiny spinning blades. The trains zipped in and out of tunnels, making their way over the entirety of their circular world again and again.
At first I was soothed by it. Everything was so carefully placed; there was nothing disorderly about this toy universe. The small homes next to the rows of shops on Main Street reminded me of places I’d stopped on the way to visit grandparents when I was a girl. Places I’d imagine living in for the time it took to drink a creamy milk shake at an old-fashioned soda fountain.
Train Land was a peaceful, easy land. But, the longer I stayed there, the less comforted I felt. Something about it was bothering me. It took me another minute or two to realize what it was. Although, it was a flawless place, there were no people in it.
It was emptied of souls.
I got up from my knees in the bathroom now and flushed the toilet. I splashed handfuls of cool water on my face, and swished some mouthwash that made my gums burn.I heard my father coming up the stairs behind me, and as I wiped off my face with a towel, I was already trying to look normal again. I took a few deep breaths. And when he knocked on the bathroom door, I opened it with a look on my face that I hoped betrayed nothing. He stepped back from the door, his hands in his pockets. Then he cleared his throat and looked me in the eyes.
“I made some dinner,” he said. “And I want to talk to you about something.”
16
It was true. My dad actually cooked dinner that night.
It felt like the first time in years. Back when my parents were still together, he was head chef of the household. He’d spend his idle mornings (which was most of them) at the farmers’ market downtown, picking out the perfect deep purple eggplants for his parmigiana. After the divorce, though, it was all Lean Cuisines and Lean Pockets. If it didn’t have Lean in the title, he wouldn’t eat it. Yet, he was still a couple pounds overweight. Go figure.
Tonight, he made a roast chicken with potatoes. It was simple, but after a week and a half of takeout, it tasted like a revelation. We ate in silence for a while before he set his fork down, brushed the hair away from his face, and rested his hands on the table.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said.
For a second, I thought he really did.
“What?” I said.
“I know you’re thinking this funeral planning business is just another bad idea of mine. I have a track record. I understand that. And some of my other... projects haven’t exactly worked out, at least by conventional standards. But, I want you to understand. This one is different.”
I stabbed a potato and avoided eye contact. I should have known that dinner wasn’t going to be free. It came with a lecture. When he spoke again, the tone of his voice had shifted.
“Do you remember when Grandma died?” he asked.
“Of course,” I said.
My dad’s mom had died two years ago of a rare degenerative lung disease, and Dad spent most of the last days with her in hospice. I visited a couple times, but the place was too sad. By the end, we just sat in silence, listening to the hiss of her breathing machine.
“I let your aunt Ruby handle most of the arrangements for the funeral,” he said. “I don’t know why I did that. I was unnerved, I guess. All the coffins sounded like luxury cars, and every step of the way people were trying to upsell me. I couldn’t make all those decisions while I was grieving. It was too much.”
He took a sip of water.
“But I knew everything was wrong when we showed upto that huge church for her funeral. Remember that place? It was like the Taj Mahal. And they put that fancy purple cloth over her coffin. Grandma was never very religious. In the hospice she told me to stop the priest from coming around. She said he looked like ‘death in a nightgown.’ Then, at her funeral, she got a priest whether she wanted one or not.”
“He was awful,” I said.
“And that service was so self-righteous and boring! My mom wasn’t like that. I heard most of my dirty jokes from her. She liked to sing in the car, remember? That old Chrysler? And she loved those kids at the school cafeteria where she worked. She had life! That place. The tone. None of it was right.”
His eyes were widening now.
“And so I started thinking that day. Why do funerals have to be this way? Where is the real sense of the person you knew? Where is the joy along with the sadness? Would it kill someone to make a joke? The worst has already happened, right? I couldn’t stop worrying over these problems. I was obsessed. And I wanted to make a change.”
“So you started cremating dogs?”
