Grave Concern, page 31
She surfaced to loud voices outside the door. Not the front door, the bathroom door.
“What the hell?” Kate mumbled.
Leonard and Mary were half-laughing, half-fighting, a few feet from Kate’s sacred tub!
“A hair’s-breadth from common decency,” Kate muttered to herself.
“I got here first!”
“Yeah, well, I called first!”
“How do you know?”
“I know, all right?”
“Yeah well, buddy, just get in line!”
“Get outta my way, you old — ”
Kate jumped out of the tub, wrapped a towel around herself, and yanked open the bathroom door. Both friends fell inside, clutching each other for support.
“Excuse me. Last I heard, this was my house. My bathroom, in fact, where I was simply trying to have a nice, quiet, civilized bath.”
“Well, you should lock your doors, then,” said Mary.
“You’re kidding me, right? No one’s locked a door in this house since ’62, when the bear tried to get in.”
“Speaking of which — ” Mary and Leonard looked meaningfully at each other, then altogether too probingly at her.
“Did you notice your phone ringing at all?” Leonard asked nonchalantly.
“Yeah. Once, maybe twice. Why?”
“Your ears must be full of water, dear,” said Mary. “We’ve been calling you pretty much non-stop for the last half-hour. You realize your house is surrounded.”
“By what, trees?” At her own joke, Kate doubled over and very nearly lost the towel.
“By police.”
“Whaaat?” Was this what her grave-robbing hath wrought?
“They think there might be a cub, maybe two — cougars, we’re talking — moved into your garage,” Mary said. “Seems there’s a virtual Eldorado of old pet kibble in giant bags in there.”
Kate groaned. Oh my. Her parents’ two cats had been taken on by a friend after the accident. Kate had completely forgotten the ever-present bargain bags of kibble tucked away in the back of the garage, whose door of course no longer closed. Every time she went inside the tipsy structure — which was nearly never, considering its imminent collapse — she vowed to clear all the junk out. But it had never happened.
Mary went on, “Nicholas, apparently, is screaming up all the way from Toronto as we speak. But he won’t be here for an hour yet. And by the way, that overgrown crow is making a hell of racket up in your poplar.”
“And they said small-town life was boring,” said Kate, to anyone listening.
But no one was. And so when she added, “Watch the wineglass,” it had little effect. The glass shattered, and her precious Carmenère ran like blood across the floor.
Kate dressed quickly and joined Leonard and Mary, curious neighbours, police, firemen, and a couple of town officials out on her driveway. Someone from MNR up in Sturgeon Bay was doing his best to contain the terrified cats in the ancient Smithers garage with the dirt floor, while a paramedic (a paramedic?) was on human crowd control at the foot of the driveway. While a couple of cops manned a makeshift barrier of chicken wire at the garage entrance, other bystanders were helping the MNR guy extract two live traps from his truck and bait them.
“What’re they planning to do with the little buggers?” Kate said to no one in particular. Receiving no answer, she marched up to the MNR guy and repeated the question.
“Take ’em to the park facility. See if they’re healthy. Then I’m not sure.”
Seemed like a plan. Kate rolled her eyes. Surely someone somewhere had a more comprehensive strategy. After all, these creatures were making a comeback after how many years? Hopefully, Nicholas would sort it out.
The traps were lowered into the garage over the chicken wire, and everyone waited to see what would happen. It soon became clear that the frightened kittens were not going to budge from wherever they were hiding. So the cops moved anyone not absolutely necessary to the operation off the property, right back to the street. They let Kate stay, seeing as it was her garage.
After a long while, during which the cops and Kate and the MNR guy held their breath and their tongues and Raw-Raw made a constant racket overhead, some movement was apparent in the dark interior, near an old leaky hose that had been coiled up awaiting repair or disposal for at least thirty years. Kate cupped her hands around her eyes to block out the ambient light. Yes, there it was, the cutest thing with little teddy-bear ears, placing a tentative toe in the direction of the tempting meat.
By the time Link arrived, two cougar cubs were locked up in their little jails, screaming. Nicholas lifted them one by one into the flatbed. By the way he peered in at the cubs as he closed up the tailgate, Kate could see they were in good hands. The onlookers began to disperse. As Link drove off, Kate waved. Whether he saw her or not, she couldn’t tell.
A sudden swift shadow, a rush of wind, made Kate duck — Raw-Raw swooping down from the poplar, nearly taking her head off.
Hille Hatter sat in Kate’s office, tears spurting from her huge baby blues.
“Oh, Kate, I know it’s so stupid, but what am I going to do?”
“So Neville’s serious? He wants you back? He realizes you’re married, right?”
“Yeah, he knows. I don’t know what he wants, really. He just keeps pestering me, won’t leave me alone.”
“Has he always been this sleazy?”
Hille was taken aback. “Maybe, and I just never realized.” She began to laugh and cry at once. “I guess I was just a small-town girl in the big city.”
“Hille, you must have been well into your forties!”
Hille ignored this and went on, “I thought he wanted me for my mind.”
At this Kate had to chomp on her own lip very hard. “And then you thought he wanted your silicone.”
Hille began choking on her own coughed-up spit. For the life of her, Kate could not tell if Hille was laughing to split a gut or weeping the last drop of moisture from her sorrow-wracked body. Kate rose from her chair, gave Hille a pound on the back and went into the “back office” to make a pot of tea. She set it down, along with two cups, milk, and sugar, on the desk between them, hoping this simple homey distraction would return some normalcy to the meeting.
“So how can we get him to stop whatever this game is he’s playing?” Kate said.
Between hiccups and other involuntary spasmodic motions, Hille said, “Well, I got rid of the silicone, as you call it, and that helped some. At least it helped me. The only other thing I can think of is to pay him for the stupid things.”
“So you think clearing the debt would help.”
“At least it would give me some peace of mind.”
“And Neville wouldn’t have any kind of hold on you anymore.”
“Yeah.”
“Sounds reasonable. But, Hille, you have to promise no more shenanigans with the guy. He has to know you mean business, or it’s all going to be for naught.”
Hille nodded. “I know, I know. It’s just that he was so sweet.”
“Sweet?” said Kate.
“He used to polish my shoes before work.”
“Polish your shoes?”
“I worked in a medical clinic — well, laser hair-removal front desk, filing and stuff. Anyways, I had to wear these ugly white leather shoes, and they always got dirty and scuffed. He used to polish them up really nice for me once a week.”
What could one say to that?
But meanwhile Kate had an idea. “Hille, I’ve been in some discussions, around the business, y’know, Grave Concern. There’re going to be some changes coming down the pipe, as they say, and I was wondering if you’d be interested in some office work. Part-time at first, more if the business takes off. It wouldn’t start for a while, maybe a couple of months.”
“Here?” said Hille.
“More or less. The office itself will likely be moving over to the plaza. But yeah, the same business, Kate Smithers CEO, and all that. Whaddya say? That way, in no time, well maybe a little longer than that, you can clear your debt with Neville, Ron need be none the wiser, and I get some help. It’s a win-win-win.”
Hille’s mouth, as Kate was speaking, had fallen open in an O.
“Oh my God,” said Kate, “I can’t believe I just said that.”
Hille’s capital O became a small n. “You mean you don’t want me?”
“Oh! No, no, I do want you! It’s the ‘win-win-win’ bullshit I can’t stand. I can’t believe I actually said that.” Kate began pinching her cheeks and arms. “What’s happening to me?”
Hille lifted the teapot and poured Kate’s cup first. “Did you forget the teabag?” she said. Kate leaned forward and looked. Not a hint of colour in the hot water. There was a pause, and quietly Hille said, “I think it just proves you’re human.” She slipped a quick glance down her recently reno-ed chest. “Like the rest of us.”
Kate and Leonard sat facing each other in the bottom of the Smithers family canoe, floating down the river, backs propped against the wooden seats, bare feet flung over the gunwales. The autumn sky had achieved that perfect cerulean balance between robin’s egg and indigo blue. The leaves — poplar, aspen, hazelnut, maple — were afire.
Every once in a while one of the lovers would dip a paddle in to correct their meandering course between the banks. For lovers they were, making plans for a future together. Kate had plucked up the nerve to ask Leonard about children. Didn’t he want them? And now that he was attaching himself to a barren old hag like herself, would he, sometime in the future, come to regret their absence? All he would need to do is find someone a decade younger, rather than older, in order to ensure a fertile future of bouncing babies.
“My sister’s kids are enough for me,” Leonard said. “I love to see them, but I love to see them go home again. The perfect arrangement. And you?”
“Well, unless there’s some kind of second coming of my monthly cycle, upon which I would be seriously alarmed, I’d say conception is highly improbable.”
“You didn’t answer the question.”
“Which was?”
“Don’t you want them?”
Kate twisted her mouth, and shrugged.
“There’s always adoption,” Leonard said, with less than wholehearted enthusiasm.
“Yeah, but I’m not all that keen. At this age, frankly, I just don’t have the jam. Besides, think of the poor kid. A mom old enough to be a grandmother.”
“Yeah, but a ripped and charismatic Bogart of a dad.”
Kate suppressed a laugh. Leonard was anything but ripped. Not soft, mind you, but lean and quick. “Yuck. Bogart was such a chauvinist. At least in the films.”
“Yeah, but tough and manly, right? Not so sure about good-looking, though,” Leonard admitted. “Okay, so it’s decided. No kids. Next item on the agenda.”
“What about this business arrangement?” probed Kate. “How exactly is this going to work?”
“You tell me,” Leonard said, tugging down his ball cap and closing his eyes.
“Okay. Here’s my idea. Some kind of mixing and melding, like Krebs and Krebs — sorry, Krebs Life Passage Services — did. But more tasteful, if that’s possible. I showed you those graves, right?”
“Yeah. They were awful. You’re gonna make me do that? And I thought fixing computers was bad.”
“Not like those exactly. Something in the same vein, minus the tacky. You got a better plan?”
Leonard pushed his ball cap back and ran his hand over his face. He looked over the gunwale, momentarily looked surprised, then sat back again, satisfied. “Okay,” he said. “Here’s the plan. We do full audiovisual slide shows of the person’s life, with tasteful music and some discreet commentary on the high points of their career-slash-family life.”
“Yeah, but where? You’re gonna do this on the gravestones? Besides, no one has gravestones anymore, they’re all getting compressed and made into benches.”
“Huh?” Leonard said.
“Never mind,” Kate said.
They said no more, and the canoe drifted on. Kate’s head lolled back on the seat, and she stared up at the sky. Puffy clouds sat here and there like white cowboy hats. Kate thought of her former prairie city and how when VIPs came to town, they were ceremonially “white hatted,” given a custom-made, high-quality white cowboy hat. Next, her thoughts drifted to her parents’ funeral, herself sitting in the pew, unable to conceive what was clearly unfolding before her eyes. There, in the church she had come to as a little girl, in her hometown, surrounded by people familiar to her as family, she’d felt more disoriented than she ever had in her years away. Cut adrift, sans anchor, roots yanked up.
In the few days before the service, even as she grieved, hardly feeling creative, she’d scrambled to cobble together a visual record of her parents’ lives for a display in the church vestibule, to satisfy what she felt was an expectation. In the end, she had created a poster with photos and bits of poetry. People said it was lovely, but to Kate it had seemed ridiculously puny in the face of two whole lives lost.
“I’ve got it,” Kate said suddenly. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”
Something in her tone made Leonard sit up straighter.
“We’re going to shift focus,” she said, “from the grave to the funeral. We’re going to direct movies — you are, anyway — and I’m going to develop and structure the scenes and do background research. In fact we could customize the whole ceremony, pre-plan with the family before the actual, uh, event.”
“Movies?” Leonard said. “Uh, Kate, this is Pine Rapids we’re talking, not Hollywood.”
“These are going to be custom-made funeral movies — short, high-quality audiovisual presentations shown as part of the funeral service. People hire us to take the stress off right when they’re grieving most, or preferably, months or even years before the loved one dies. People could have input into their own funeral planning, even — photos, music, stuff like that. Our job is to put it all together, not some lame PowerPoint but using proper video techniques. It’ll be creative, tasteful, understated. With real feeling. Like a compressed reliving of the person’s life. Those who knew the deceased can cry and laugh over the memories, and those who didn’t — uh, well, they get to see what he or she was all about. And then, oh Leonard, I’ve got it. You know how people set up websites for people who died? They could hire us to do little videos for the site.”
Leonard said nothing as he took all this in. “What about Grave Concern? What’ll happen to the grave-tending? You still going to do that?”
“Of course,” said Kate, “but I’ll need some help.”
“Not me,” Leonard said. “I’m going to have my hands full with selling cameras and computers, and going out on house calls. And, by the sounds of it, directing movies and making videos for websites.”
“Hey, when did you add the cameras?”
“Just now.”
“But isn’t it what you’ve always loved? The whole movie thing — the acting, the directing, the process?”
“I guess I could produce something half-decent, given a chance.”
“So I’ve been thinking,” said Kate. “I’ll keep doing graves, but there may be times when I’m too busy with funeral research and planning. So that’s where Hank Dixon comes in.”
“Hank Dixon?”
“You know, the shy guy up the highway at the RV place?”
“Oh yeah.”
“He loves hanging out at the graveyard, talking to his ghosts. He’s a real sweetie, and he could probably use the cash.”
“What cash?” Leonard groaned. “Paying someone else is a scary prospect, Kate.”
“I know. We’re just going to have to grow up. And by the way, we may have a second employee.”
“What? Kate, you’re going to give me a heart attack.”
“I figure we’re going to need someone in the office, at least part-time. What if both you and I are gone? ’Cuz we will be, for long stretches. Someone’s got to man the phones and the front desk.”
“And you’ve got someone in mind. You’ve already asked them, in fact.”
“Right.”
“I knew it. Who, may I ask?”
Kate took a sudden interest in a large bird swinging around the top of a large pine. “I know it’s maybe not your first choice, but I promise you’ll get to like her in time.”
“Her. Well, we’ve established the gender.”
“Hille Hatter.”
“Kate!” Leonard smacked his forehead and groaned.
“Please, Leonard. She’s really not as dizzy as she looks. She even had her, you know, implants out.”
“What’ll she do for brains now?”
“I’ll overlook that sexist comment, Leonard. Pretend I never heard. We’ll hire her on a probationary basis. I promise she’ll be great. She does have redeeming qualities.”
“Such as?”
“You’ll see when the time comes.”
“She got any experience?”
“Worked in a laser hair removal office, as far as I know.”
“That’s comforting.”
“So what’re we going to call it?”
“Call what?”
“Our new business. Business needs a name.”
“How about Ditzy Death and Digital?” Leonard suggested.
Kate gave him The Look.
They finally settled on PLAY IT AGAIN, HO LAM! despite Leonard’s misgivings about perpetuating a misquotation. “It was ‘Play it, Sam,’ not ‘Play it again’,” he pouted. “Well, until Woody Allen got hold of it.”
