She sighed and closed her eyes, squeezing them shut against some mental image I could only guess at. "Fine. But let's finish the pizza first."
My sister Lauren left home six years ago, two years after Dad did. She was only seventeen at the time, and goodness knows what she'd gotten into while she was gone. The house had a lot less screaming now, which was nice, but what screaming remained was usually focused on me. About six months ago, Lauren came back to Clayton, hitchhiking in from who knows where, and contritely asked my mom for a job. They still barely spoke to each other, and she never visited us or invited us to visit her apartment, but she worked as the mortuary receptionist and got along well enough with Margaret.
We all got along well enough with Margaret. She was the rubber insulation that kept our family from sparking and shorting out.
Mom called Margaret while we finished our pizza, and apparently Margaret called Lauren because they were both there when we finally went downstairs to the mortuary—Margaret in her sweats and Lauren tarted up for a Saturday night on the town. I wondered if we'd interrupted anything in particular.
"Hey, John," said Lauren, looking wildly out of place behind the classy desk in the front office. She wore a shiny black-vinyl jacket over a bright red tank top, and her hair was up in an eighties-style fountain on top of her head. Maybe there was a theme night at the club.
"Hey Lauren," I said.
"Is that the paperwork?" Mom asked, looking over my shoulder at her.
"I'm almost done," said Lauren, and Mom went into the back.
"Is it here already?" I asked.
"They just dropped him off," she said, scanning the sheaf of papers one last time. "Margaret has him in the back."
I turned to go.
"You surviving?" she asked. I was anxious to see the body, but turned back to her.
"Well enough. You?"
"I'm not the one who lives with Mom," she said. We stood in silence a moment longer. "You heard from Dad?"
"Not since May," I said. "You?"
"Not since Christmas." Silence. "The first two years he sent me valentines in February."
"He knew where you were?"
"I asked him for money sometimes." She put down her pen and stood up. Her skirt matched her jacket, shiny black vinyl.
Mom would hate it, which was probably why Lauren bought it. She gathered the papers into a uniform stack and we walked into the back room.
Mom and Margaret were already there, chatting idly with Ron, the coroner. A pale-blue body bag filled the embalming table, and it was all I could do not to run over and zip it open.
Lauren handed the papers to Mom, who glanced at them briefly before signing a few sheets and handing the whole stack to Ron.
"Thanks, Ron. Have a good night."
"I'm sorry to drop this on you this time of night," he said, talking to Mom but looking at Lauren. He was tall, with slicked-back black hair.
"It's no problem," said Mom. Ron took the papers and left out the back.
"That's all you need me for," said Lauren, smiling at Margaret and me and nodding politely to Mom. "Have fun." She walked back to the front office, and a moment later I heard the front door swing shut and lock.
The suspense was killing me, but I didn't dare say anything. Mom was barely tolerating my presence here as it was, and to appear overeager now would probably get me kicked out.
Mom looked at Margaret. Given time to prepare themselves, they looked fairly different from each other, but on the spur of the moment like this—in drab housework clothes with their makeup left undone—you could barely tell them apart.
"Let's do it."
Margaret switched on the ventilator. "I hope this fan doesn't give out on us tonight."
We put on our aprons and scrubbed up, and Mom unzipped the bag. Whereas Mrs. Anderson had barely been handled, Jeb Jolley had been scrubbed and washed and picked over so many times by Ron and by the state forensic agents that he smelled almost entirely of disinfectant. The stench of rot seeped out more slowly as we rolled the body out of the bag and arranged it on the table. He had an enormous "Y" incision cutting from shoulder to shoulder and down the center of his chest; in most autopsies this line would continue down to the groin, but here it degenerated just below the ribs into a jagged web of rips and tears over most of his midsection. The edges were puckered and partially stitched, though many sections of skin were missing.
The corners of a plastic bag peeked out through the holes in his abdomen.