“I want to plant it right now,” she said to her mother.
I drained the last of my coffee and stood. “I’ll let you two do that. I have to get on the road. I’m going to visit my mom’s best friend, near Kansas City.”
Karen shot me a look. “That doesn’t sound very loca, either,” she said.
I hugged her and resisted the urge to touch her belly. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Don’t let another six years go by, okay?” she said.
“I won’t,” I promised. “I’m coming back to meet those—” I stopped and mouthed the word babies.
“Good. And you ought to make one of your own one of these days, you know,” Karen said. She always was bossy like that.
“Maybe,” I said, though it seemed just as likely that I’d make a spaceship and fly to the rings of Saturn. “Who knows. But I’m going to make a book first.” I held up my camera and snapped her picture. “And you’re going to be in it.”
Chapter 15
I HADN’T seen Pauline, my mom’s best friend, for almost two decades. But she sent cards every Christmas, which was how I knew that she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer—just like my mom.
They’d had the same disease, and it had even been caught at the same stage. But only Pauline’s story had a happy ending: She’d been cancer-free for five years now.
My mom, on the other hand, had been dead for nearly twenty.
But I didn’t want to think dark thoughts on this late-August afternoon, with the sun shining bright and golden over the small town of Bonner Springs, Missouri. So I decided to park on the main drag, buy myself an iced mocha, and walk the quiet streets to Pauline’s house while pondering happier subjects.
I passed modest but immaculate houses, roses spilling over white fences, joggers and dog walkers, and even a stand of kids selling lemonade. It was like strolling along through a Norman Rockwell painting—which was charming, but also so perfect it was weird.
If I lived in a quaint Midwestern town like this, a palm tree wouldn’t fall on my darkroom—but otherwise, would my life be so very different? As my dad used to say, Wherever you go, there you are.
But maybe he just used that as an excuse not to go to new places or, toward the end of his life, to move much beyond his favorite easy chair. He’d been in a lot of pain by then—he’d broken a hip, and it hadn’t healed right—so it must have been better to stay still. To wait for death to find him in the living room.
I shook my head: I was doing a terrible job of thinking happier thoughts. So I picked up my pace, hoping speed would clear my mind a little.
Up ahead, I heard the shrieking whine of a power saw, and soon after that I smelled the sweet sawdust of freshly cut wood. As I drew closer, I could see an old man building something in his garage woodshop.
Normally I would have kept on going, but I was eager to be distracted. And even from the sidewalk I could see his confidence in handling the wood, like he’d been doing it his whole long life. His movements were so smooth, they almost looked like dance.
When he stopped and lifted his safety glasses to wipe the sweat from his face, I took a few steps up his driveway.
“Hi there,” I called. “I’m sorry for interrupting—but I just wanted to ask what it is you’re making.”
He squinted at me for a second, like he was deciding whether to answer. “What I’m making?” he eventually repeated. Then he shook his head and smiled slow and wide. “Well, miss, if you’d really like to know, I am making my own casket.”
Chapter 16
I TOOK a big step back down the driveway. “Oh dear,” I said. “I’m so—”
The old man started to laugh. “It’s nothing to be afraid of, young lady,” he said. “You can’t catch what I’ve got.”
“That’s not why—,” I began. “I’m not—”
But I was so flummoxed I couldn’t finish a sentence.
The old man stopped chuckling and beckoned to me, his face softer now. “Come here,” he said. “I might as well show you what it looks like.”
I couldn’t be rude to a dying person, and so I did what he told me to. I walked into his garage workshop, looked down at the box he was building for his own dead body, and shivered.
You can try to stop thinking about death—but death might not want you to.
He pointed to the nearest corner, where the long side of the casket joined the shorter top end. “See this here? Not a single nail keeping these pieces of oak together. That’s what you call a dovetail joint, and it’s older than the pharaohs.” He ran his hand along the smooth grain and nodded to himself. “I figure what’s good enough for Tutankhamen is good enough for me.”
“Sure,” I said, a little hesitantly. “That seems reasonable.”
“Go on,” he said. “You can touch it.”
I didn’t exactly want to. But I did, and the wood felt warm, almost alive, under my fingertips.
Then a door at the back of the garage opened, and a slender white-haired woman poked her head out. “Bob, did you take that casserole out of the deep freeze?” the woman asked. Then she saw me. “Oh, hello there,” she said.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m just… um, admiring your husband’s woodworking.”
She gave him a sharp look, then turned back to me. “He’s scaring you, isn’t he, with his I might die while you’re standing here talk.”
“Actually we hadn’t gotten that far,” I said. Thankfully.
“Bad ticker,” Bob said, patting the pocket of his denim work shirt, right over his heart.
His wife pretended to snap a tea towel at him. “Not that bad,” she assured me. “He got kicked out of hospice last month.”
“Wasn’t dying fast enough. Not that I complained, mind you,” he said.
She smiled at both of us. “My name’s Kit. And you are?”
“Anne,” I said. “I’m, uh, visiting the Londons up the street.”
“Well, Anne, my husband has obviously unnerved you, and I think you need a fortifying cupcake. I made them for my grandson’s birthday tomorrow, but I have extras. Hang on.” She retreated into the house and came out a moment later with a cupcake for each of us. “I always double the recipe,” she said, winking.
“Thank you,” I said, feeling grateful but still slightly unsettled.
Bob brushed the sawdust from his hands and took one, too. “Tutankhamen died of gangrene from a fractured leg,” he said, between bites. “Gangrene is your body decomposing while you’re still alive, you know, and so the pain is unimaginable. He was only nineteen years old.”
“Honestly, darling, hush,” Kit said. She turned to me. “So you’re here to see Pauline London? She’s lovely. We’re in a book club together.”
“She was my mom’s best friend,” I said. I took a bite of the cupcake, which was rich and chocolaty, with a cream center like a homemade Ho Ho.
Kit’s eyes widened. “Was your mother Mary Lynch?”
“Before she was married, yes.”
“Oh, I heard all about her! Pauline adored her. She likes to tell how they toured Europe after they graduated—and how they didn’t know a thing about the world, and so they stumbled around the continent, innocent as ducklings.”
I laughed. “Yeah, I was going to ask her about that. I’m sort of… collecting people’s stories.”
Kit’s face lit up. “I’ve got one,” she said. “Would you like to hear it?”
“Yes, please,” I said.
“I know exactly where this is going,” Bob mumbled.
“Of course you do. I tell it all the time,” she said to him. “It’s about Bob and me. How we weren’t supposed to meet.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’d been set up on a blind date—but not with each other.” Kit rested her hand on the coffin as she spoke. “I was supposed to meet my date at this little Italian place. I’d told him I’d be wearing a dress with a flower pinned to it, and that I had black hair. He said he’d be in a blue jacket and a red tie.”
“A maroon tie,” Bob said. “I had a maroon tie.”