It was a box, and who had three thousand bucks to spend on a box? Her daddy would have said, just wrap me in a bedsheet and drop me in a hole. All the same, Julie let herself be led around the burgundy-carpeted showroom, pretending to consider all the choices and options. The Oxford, the Wellington, the Legacy, the Elite. Stainless steel and bronze, fine hardwoods in oak, mahogany, and cherry, overhead lights positioned to make the polished wood glow. It was a box. Yet the lock and rubber gasket seal of the Oxford caught her eye. She thought of a coffin she’d seen unearthed after Katrina—so small, it must have held a child, perched sad and surreal on a pile of debris not far from what was once the Biloxi Beach Arcade. Half-open and rusted through in that mess of lumber and moldy insulation and raw poultry strewn from shipping containers tossed around like Coke cans by the thirty-foot wall of water.
“Did you have anything in particular in mind for your dad?” The tone of the funeral director’s assistant was practiced, reverential. There were more questions—full couch or half couch, meaning a one-piece or two-piece lid.
“Half,” Julie said. She glanced down at the FTC-mandated casket price list she’d been given in advance. “But I was thinking of something, you know,” she paused, “simpler.”
“Oh sure, sure. Absolutely. No problem at all. Why don’t we take a look at our, um, particleboard line?” The gray-suited man indicated a small, adjoining space, off the main showroom floor. “Less expensive but just as elegant. Any one of them would make a fine resting place for Mr. Malavich.”
“Maravich.”
“Maravich, sorry. Slip of the tongue.”
That slip of the tongue irritated Julie, maybe more than it should. But then she’d pulled an overnight shift at the casino. Her eyes burned, and her head was starting to throb. For eight hours, she’d stared at a video monitor—not to catch gamblers cheating but employees thieving. Kitchen help and servers, mainly women, wrapping a muffaletta or calzone in a napkin and stuffing it in their bag for hungry kids at home, a violation of policy she could never bring herself to report. She was hungry herself, and the background muzak was a little too loud, a melody she recognized from a cheesy eighties song her Aunt Becky used to like, “The Wind Beneath My Wings.” Suddenly, fiercely, she wanted to get it over with and leave.
They took one step down to the smaller room, with a lower ceiling and tan carpet. On a platform in the center of the room sat one casket, two others racked against the back wall.
“Now, the Hampton,” said the man, running his hand along the beige quilted lining, “is our most popular model in this price range. Real strong, real sturdy.” But after the word sturdy, he seemed to run out of things to say and stepped back, waiting, his palms together in a gesture that seemed vaguely spiritual.
Randomly, Julie wondered if anybody ever asked to lie down in them, try them out. Not that she planned to be the first. She walked all around the platformed box, if only to make it seem as though price were not the only consideration. The dark wood veneer, lifting at one corner, reminded her of a folding card table she’d bought years ago at Dollar General. The thing wobbled like it was knee-walking drunk if you so much as rested an elbow on it. And the Hampton emitted a faint odor—a gluey, chemical, headachy smell like the FEMA trailer the two of them had lived in for months after the hurricane. No matter how they aired the place out, they never did get rid of that smell. The handles, three on each side, were shiny and gold-colored, like a cheap bathroom faucet.
Still, it was the obvious choice. The small life insurance policy would only cover about half the expenses. Cremation would have been the cheapest option, but her daddy was old-school Catholic and believed in the bodily resurrection, unswayed by arguments about early saints drawn and quartered, boiled in oil, devoured by lions, baptized believers pulverized on fields of battle.
She scanned the price list sheet, which listed the Hampton at $650. “$650’s the total cost for this one?”
“Yes ma’am, that’s the total, tax included. But without the commemorative head panel.”
By which Julie assumed he must mean the praying hands and “In God’s Care” inscription on the inside of the lid.
“And with a polyester overlay, not satin, like the display model. And no memory drawer, but of course, you can put whatever you want in the bed with your dad. Pictures, letters, fishing rods, pool cues. Just yesterday we buried a lady with a po boy and a Bud Lite.”
She walked all around the thing once more. She opened her mouth to say she would take it, that it would work just fine, because of course, it would. But in the same instant, she pictured her daddy lying right there in the casket, not three feet from where she stood. In one of the prized black or navy tailored suits, the only luxuries the man had ever allowed himself. She saw the beaklike nose and age-cratered face, the hands stiffly folded. The worn brown rosary beads draped over those permanently gnarled fingers from all the years of shrimping and trawl repair and odd jobs in the off-season. She saw the smile-shaped scar on his right jaw, a souvenir from the time he’d had one too many and hurled a flowerpot through the living room window in a fit of rage at Julie’s stepmom.
And the leg, of course. She saw that, too. Amputated above the right knee because nobody at the nursing home cared enough, or had time enough, to keep up with the blood sugar checks. They were easy to do and required no medical training. You could buy a kit over the counter at Walgreens, prick the pointer finger with a pen-shaped reader that displayed a number in seconds on a small digital screen. She could have helped with that, could have bugged the nurses about it, or gone there and checked it herself.
But not from the TV room of the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility, 12 months of her life wasted on a charge of simple possession. The day they released her, she’d had her cousin drive her straight down to the nursing home. Stopping at the front desk for her visitor’s badge, walking down the polished tile corridor, pausing outside the door to his room, she’d tried to steel herself. But it was all she could do not to weep when he saw the stump outlined under the sheet.
I’ll take this one. The words were on her lips. But there was a place inside her, one she had no name for, somewhere between her heart and stomach. And in this place she had no name for, she felt a twisting, an actual physical sensation, like hands wringing out a dishrag, and goddamn it. She couldn’t do it.
Instead, she raised her arm and pointed. She heard herself say, “I’ll take that one,” meaning the most beautiful box she’d ever seen. A gleaming, sky-blue limo of a box. A stainless-steel casket with brushed nickel hardware, a plush velvet lining so white it hurt her eyes, and a lock and seal—the Oxford.
The man raised his eyebrows in surprise but quickly complimented Julie’s taste. The Oxford was his personal favorite, he said, and what a wonderful tribute to her dad. Now, if Julie would just follow him to the office, they’d enter the order so warehouse could get the ball rolling.
In the office, she sank into a soft wing chair and sipped complimentary coffee while the man sat behind a massive desk, tapping a laptop keyboard and peering through his bifocals at the screen. When he was done, Julie pulled out her wallet and credit card, only hesitating a moment, running the pad of her thumb back and forth over the raised numbers. Then she handed it over.
Walking out through the parking lot, she smelled the rain that was forecast, coming in from the Gulf. The wind was starting to pick up, and she knew there’d be whitecaps dotting the Sound. She slid into the Cavalier, turned the key in the ignition, and the engine caught on the second try.
Bzzzzz. Bzzzzz. Her phone vibrated in her purse, and she silenced it, knowing it was Heather, calling on her break to check in. She’d wanted to come but hadn’t been able to take off work. It would be a problem for Heather, spending money they didn’t have on a casket they didn’t need. Already she could feel her disapproval, hear her voice saying they’d never get out of debt at this rate and they might as well forget either of them going back to school anytime soon. And she was right. Julie could never justify the foolish purchase. What could she possibly say? She didn’t know. But maybe the simplest explanation was the best. A Dollar General casket wouldn’t go with the suit. In death, as in life, her daddy was a sharp-dressed man.
Bittersweet and all too real. I love the names of the caskets!