Page 4 of Cherry Picking

In Las Vegas, it’s a chilly fifty-four degrees. I have on a warm coat—an oversized mint-green one with a broken zipper—and my steel-toed boots, because I’m standing in a cemetery about to do something that very much requires them.

My dad holds the opening-and-closing contract at three of the cemeteries in the valley, so the digging often falls to us.

Tomás has already run the machine. The excavator sits parked off the path with its bucket down, and what’s left is a rough rectangle in the lawn with the dirt piled up at one end. The machine gets you most of the way, but it doesn’t get you square.

“I just want to say,” Tomás mutters from three feet to my left, “that I had other plans today.”

“So did I.” I sink my spade into the wall and shave a strip of caliche off the north side. It is, at least, good digging weather—dry and cool, the ground cooperative. In July, this same task has a whole different quality to it. July is penance. “What were your plans?”

“I was going to make focaccia.”

I huff a laugh. “That’s a hell of a plan.”

“I had the dough proofing all night.”

I place a hand on my chest. “A moment of silence for the focaccia.”

“Thank you.” He works his blade down the corner, checking it against the string line. “Who’s this for, again?”

“Zigmund Maxwell.” I pull the work order from my coat pocket, where I’ve been keeping it folded. “Twenty-four. Car accident.”

Twenty-four is exactly my age, a fact that landed hard when I scanned the paperwork at my kitchen table this morning, nursing a coffee and not yet conscious enough to deploy the necessary professional armor.

I’ve been working this gig, in one version or another, since I was sixteen and my dad started dragging me along on weekends. That’s eight years of defense against the steady static of death and grief.

I’ve got a whole stockpile of it by now. A real inventory of indifference.

Twenty-four, though. In this line of work, that’s the kind of number that still manages to find a way in.

“You want to know a secret?” Tomás asks, his gaze fixed on the work order as I fold it back into my pocket.

“I’m almost certain I don’t.”

“I actually enjoy this part,” he says, undeterred.

I scrunch my nose. You get the occasional outlier who enters this trade for some dark, performative thrill, but they’re a rare breed in my experience. The rest of us just sort of drift into the industry because it’s the family trade or because someone has to do it.

“Not—” He waves his spade. “—not in a creepy way. It’s just honest work. The wall is either square, or it isn’t. There’s no room for ambiguity.”

“Unlike the rest of it,” I say with a raised brow.

“Unlike the rest of it, where everybody wants something and nobody can say what.”

“The deceased are so greedy. I’ve always said that.”

He shakes his head. “You know what I mean.”

Tomás is twenty-eight years old, tall and thin, with pale skin covered in his own linework from the wrists up. He has a mortuary license he’s three exams away from completing, and a small moth tattooed on his cheekbone that he did himself at age nineteen.

Beautiful work, but a little intense.

“My dough is probably overproofed by now,” he says solemnly.

I give him a sympathetic smile. “It might be okay.”

He scoffs. “It’s not going to be okay, Evie.”

Tomás is being a bit of a melodramatic asshole. Not that I’m surprised; it’s pretty much the baseline for the specific breed of little weirdos we keep on the payroll at Sutton & Sons.