Anthony Patrick Sardino, who now called himself Michael James Vincent, was half Irish, half Italian, and 100 percent son of a bitch. But he was handsome, and he had charm and drive. He was now living in Boston and working at an advertising firm there.
He’d studied preppy boys—how they walked, how they dressed. It wasn’t so hard. He knew how to work people. And today he had wangled his way into a fraternity party where he had a friend. He liked college girls. He was standing looking around the room when he spotted her. He turned to someone and asked who the deaf girl was. The boy glanced over. “Oh, that’s the Swensen girl. Her father owns a huge dairy farm somewhere in the Midwest. Missouri, I think.”
He knew a little about cows. His father and uncles had worked in the Chicago stockyards. It was a dirty, smelly, filthy job that he would never do. But he wouldn’t mind owning a nice, big, clean dairy farm. He looked again. The girl was not bad looking at all. Kind of pretty really, in a wide-eyed innocent sort of way. So what if she was deaf? It might be nice to be married to a woman who didn’t talk. He nodded and smiled at her from across the room. He could see she was shy. She had even blushed. No, the girl was not bad looking at all. He put down his beer and walked over to her.
Up at Still Meadows, everyone was in a good mood. Spring was always a favorite time of year. First came Easter, which meant lots of visitors, and usually by noon, the entire hill was filled with baskets of Easter lilies.
Now it was Mother’s Day. And even if you weren’t a mother, everybody there had a mother, and they were thinking about her today. Ted Nordstrom was able to wish his mother Happy Mother’s Day in person.
Katrina said, “I’m so happy to have my son with me. This is the best Mother’s Day I could have wished for.”
That morning, Macky and Norma drove over and picked up Aunt Elner to take her to the cemetery. Aunt Elner had brought roses for her mother as she had for the past sixty-something years. Macky and Norma both brought roses for their mothers, as well.
That night, the fragrance of roses covered the entire hill. Before she went to sleep, Ida said, “Isn’t it nice to be remembered?”
“Oh, yes,” answered Katrina. “And you were so lucky to have such a sweet daughter.”
Ida smiled. “Yes, she was always a sweet girl. Nervous, but sweet.”
—
AT TOT WHOOTEN’S HOUSE, Mother’s Day had come and gone without much notice. It had never been a particularly happy day for her. Tot’s daughter, Darlene, had worked in the beauty shop with Tot for a while, until she’d dyed the preacher’s wife’s hair bright orange. Darlene couldn’t read a label if it killed her. And then she left a lit cigarette on the shelf with the end papers and set fire to the back room. She was a liability, and Tot’d had to let her go. And then Darlene had the nerve to demand a month’s severance pay. From her own mother.
Neither Darlene nor her brother, Dwayne Jr., finished high school. It had been so discouraging when Tot would see cars with bumper stickers that read MY CHILD IS AN HONOR STUDENT AT ELMWOOD HIGH. Her children had been mostly high at Elmwood High. But she guessed it was to be expected. She and their father had not set good examples for them. Looking back now (too late), she would have left James much earlier and not subjected them to seeing all those terrible fights. And she really shouldn’t have broken the phone over James’s head. The doctor said that if he hadn’t been so drunk, it would have killed him. But then there were a lot of things she would have done differently.
First of all, she wouldn’t have been born who she was and where she was. She had just read an article claiming that you picked out the parents you needed, to learn what life lessons you had to learn in this life, but she didn’t believe it for a minute. If that were true, who in their right mind would pick a drunk father and an insane mother? Her father had been so drunk at her wedding he’d passed out in the vestibule, and she’d had to walk down the aisle by herself, and when the minister asked, “Who giveth this woman?” nobody answered. Her mother had gone around the bend a few years after that. Early dementia, they said, but Tot figured she’d just checked out on purpose, and who could blame her? But still, it was no fun to have to take care of her, a poor old lady who kept wandering off.
The last time it happened, they’d been at the mall. Tot had turned her back for five seconds, and her mother had disappeared into thin air. When she told Grady, the security guard, she had lost her mother, he had said, “Oh, Tot, I’m so sorry, when did she die?” She had to tell him that she wasn’t dead—she had really lost her mother somewhere in the mall. Two hours later, and after a long search, she finally showed up. She had wandered into the movie theater, taken a seat, and watched the movie to the end.
After that, Tot put a tag on her that read, “If found, please return to Mrs. Tot Whooten at the beauty shop.”
Poor Tot was part of the sandwich generation, long before it had been named that. She had been caught between her kids and her mother. She knew people felt sorry for her, and she also knew a lot of her customers were loyal because of it. She didn’t want to be a victim, but she needed the money. Between caring for her mother and the kids, she had never been able to save a dime. At night, when everyone was asleep, she sat in the living room in the dark, smoked cigarettes, and dreamed of being single and childless.
After Ida Jenkins passed away, the Garden Club sort of disbanded, which was not good news for Still Meadows. For a while, Norma and her friends volunteered one day a month to do cleanup, but, eventually, a lot of people moved away or dropped out, and people wound up just tending their own families’ graves.
When the local bank closed down, Arvis Oberg, who owned the Rest Assured Funeral Home, had been put in charge of the Still Meadows corporation account, and after twelve years, was tired of fooling with it. It was a lot of paperwork, and most of his customers were now going to the new cemetery. He talked it over with his wife, and they decided to just sell off the remaining plots and be done with it.
When Cathy Calvert came into the newspaper office the next morning, she read the ad Arvis wanted to run in the Friday edition.
WHERE WILL YOU SPEND ETERNITY?
Wondering what to get Dad on Father’s Day?
Mom on her special day?
Stuck with what to buy the spouse for that anniversary?
Diamonds are forever, but a burial plot is for eternity.
Last call for the cemetery plots at Still Meadows.
Hurry…Hurry…Hurry…only 54 left!
This week only, we are offering a his-and-hers two-for-one sale.
Call or stop by Rest Assured Funeral Home today!
Cathy did not agree with Arvis’s assumption that a cemetery plot would make a good gift, but Arvis was one of her regular advertisers, so what could she do?