Grave Expectations

Chapter 1: The Wrong Dead Guy

The chapel smelled like carnations and regret, which Birdie Roberts found oddly comforting for a Tuesday.

She'd arrived eleven minutes late, which was actually early by her standards, and slid into the last pew with the practiced silence of someone who'd been sneaking into places she didn't belong since childhood. The program was already tucked into the hymnal slot—cream cardstock, tasteful font, a photograph of a man she did not recognize.

This should have been her first clue.

Birdie squinted at the photo. The deceased appeared to be a white man in his sixties with a handlebar mustache and the kind of deeply tanned skin that suggested either a lifetime of outdoor hobbies or a catastrophic misunderstanding of how tanning beds worked. His name, printed beneath the photo in elegant serif, was Gerald Raymond Musgrave.

Birdie did not know a Gerald Raymond Musgrave.

She was supposed to be at the memorial for Patty Ngo, her landlord's mother, a woman she'd met exactly twice but who had once given her a Tupperware of spring rolls and told her she had "good bones for a funny girl." Patty's service was at the Greenfield-Marsh Funeral Home on South Tacoma Way. Birdie was at the Greenfield-Marsh Funeral Home on South Tacoma Way. Therefore, through the transitive property of grief, she was in the right place.

Except she was not.

The Greenfield-Marsh Funeral Home, as Birdie would discover approximately fourteen minutes too late, had two chapels: Chapel A, which hosted Patty Ngo's celebration of life complete with her famous spring rolls and a slideshow set to ABBA, and Chapel B, which hosted the considerably less festive memorial for Gerald Raymond Musgrave, a man whose life choices, it would emerge, had been uniformly terrible.

Birdie was in Chapel B.

So was the man sitting three feet to her left.

She noticed him the way you notice someone at a funeral—peripherally, reluctantly, with the vague social awareness that you should look somber and not make eye contact. He was tall even while sitting, with dark brown skin, wire-rimmed glasses, and the kind of carefully maintained beard that suggested either a therapist or a craft beer enthusiast. He wore a charcoal suit that fit him properly, which was unusual for a funeral. Most men at funerals looked like they'd borrowed their suits from a slightly different-shaped cousin.

He was also frowning at his program.

The officiant—a broad-shouldered priest with silver hair and the weary charisma of someone who'd been professionally dealing with death for decades—stepped to the podium and adjusted the microphone.

"We gather today to celebrate the life of Gerald Raymond Musgrave," he began, in a voice that managed to be both sonorous and slightly exhausted. "Beloved... well. Gerald was many things to many people."

The pause after "beloved" was the second clue.

Birdie glanced sideways at the man with the good suit. He glanced sideways at her. They shared the brief, electric eye contact of two people who were both beginning to suspect something was wrong.

The priest—Father Gregory, according to the program—continued with the careful diplomacy of a man trying to eulogize someone whose life had not provided much material. Gerald, it emerged, had been a three-time divorcee, a recreational litigant, and the former owner of a taxidermy business called "Stuff It" that had been shut down for reasons the priest described only as "regulatory."

"Gerald had a passion for life," Father Gregory said, in the tone of someone selecting words the way a bomb technician selects wires. "He pursued his interests with... vigor."

Birdie pressed her lips together. The man beside her made a small sound, something between a cough and a swallowed laugh.

"Gerald's first wife, Tammy, remembers him as a man who always knew what he wanted," Father Gregory continued, reading from a card. "His second wife, also Tammy, echoes that sentiment. His third wife, Lorraine—"

A woman in the second row stood up. "It's Lorraine-with-an-I," she announced. "And I'd like the record to show I'm only here because he still owed me a boat."

Father Gregory absorbed this with the placid grace of a man who had seen everything. "Thank you, Lorraine-with-an-I."

Birdie bit the inside of her cheek so hard she tasted copper. The man beside her had removed his glasses and was polishing them with his tie, which Birdie recognized as the universal gesture for "I am experiencing an emotion I cannot publicly display."

She should leave. She should absolutely leave. She was at the wrong funeral for a man she'd never met, and the real service—Patty's service—was presumably happening in another room with spring rolls and ABBA, and she was missing it.

But Gerald's funeral was, objectively, incredible.

The eulogies continued. Gerald's brother spoke about the time Gerald had tried to start a pyramid scheme involving exotic mushrooms. Gerald's neighbor spoke about the time Gerald had built an unlicensed addition to his house that partially extended over the property line and into the neighbor's yard. Gerald's business partner spoke about the time Gerald had accidentally taxidermied someone's living cat. ("It was fine," the partner clarified. "The cat survived. Gerald did not survive the lawsuit.")

Birdie was dying. Not literally—that was Gerald's department—but she was experiencing the kind of suppressed laughter that felt like an internal organ was trying to escape through her ribcage.

The man beside her leaned over. His voice was low, warm, and slightly strangled.

"Did he say living cat?"

"He did," Birdie whispered back.

"I don't know this man."

"Neither do I."

They stared at each other. The priest was now reading a passage from Ecclesiastes with the determination of a man trying to find spiritual meaning in the life of someone who had taxidermied a living cat.

"Are you—" the man started.

"Wrong chapel," Birdie confirmed.

"Me too."

"Patty Ngo?"

"No, Henderson. Room A?"

"I think they're both in Room A."

He looked toward the door. She looked toward the door. They both looked back at the front of the chapel, where Gerald's brother was now holding up a photograph of what appeared to be Gerald standing proudly beside the world's worst taxidermy job—a deer with its legs attached at angles that suggested the animal had been reassembled by someone working from memory.

"We can't leave now," Birdie said. "We're invested."

"We're at a stranger's funeral."

"We're at the best stranger's funeral. This man lived. Badly, but he lived."

The man stared at her for a long moment. Then his face did something complicated—a series of micro-expressions that traveled from alarm to amusement to something dangerously close to delight—and he settled back into the pew.

"I'm Jonah," he said.

"Birdie."

"Is that short for something?"

"Elizabeth, technically. But my grandmother said I came out of the womb making a sound like a startled wren, so."

"Your grandmother sounds like a character."

"My grandmother is a menace. You'll love her."

She said it without thinking—you'll love her—as if this stranger she'd known for six minutes was someone she'd be introducing to her family. She felt her face heat and turned back to the service, where Father Gregory was now attempting to lead the congregation in "Amazing Grace" while Lorraine-with-an-I loudly asked the brother about the boat.

They stayed for the whole thing.

They stayed for the reception, too, which was held in the funeral home's modest gathering room and featured a surprising spread that Birdie suspected had been catered by someone who felt guilty about Gerald's life. There were deviled eggs. There were tiny sandwiches with the crusts cut off. There was a punch bowl that smelled aggressively of something that was not punch.

Birdie and Jonah stood in the corner with paper plates, eating deviled eggs and reconstructing Gerald's life from the fragments they'd gathered.

"Okay, so the timeline," Birdie said, ticking off fingers. "He marries Tammy One in what, the eighties? Starts the taxidermy business. Marries Tammy Two—"

"How do you marry two Tammys?"

"You find what works and you commit to it. Marries Tammy Two, loses the business over the cat incident, pivots to the mushroom scheme—"

"Which was definitely drugs."

"Which was almost certainly drugs, correct. Marries Lorraine-with-an-I, builds the illegal addition, and then—" She gestured vaguely at the room. "This."

"Heart attack," Jonah supplied. "I heard the brother mention it."

"At least it was quick."

"How do you know it was quick?"

"Because if it wasn't, someone would have mentioned it in excruciating detail. People love a prolonged death narrative. No offense."

Jonah raised an eyebrow. "Why would I be offended?"

"I don't know. You look like someone who might have feelings about death."

He laughed—a real laugh, sudden and surprised, like he hadn't expected it. "I'm a grief counselor."

Birdie nearly choked on her deviled egg. "You're kidding."

"I am not kidding."

"A grief counselor at the wrong funeral. That's like a lifeguard falling into the wrong pool."

"What do you do?"

"Stand-up comedy."

It was Jonah's turn to nearly choke. "A comedian at a funeral."

"A comedian at the wrong funeral. There's a distinction."

"Is there?"

"The distinction is that I'm not being paid."

He laughed again. Birdie felt something shift in her chest, tectonic and alarming, like a foundation settling in a direction it wasn't supposed to settle. She ate another deviled egg to cover it.

They talked for two hours. They talked through the reception line, where they shook hands with Gerald's relatives and offered condolences with the confident vagueness of people who had no idea who Gerald was. ("He was really something," Birdie told Tammy One, which was technically true.) They talked through the cleanup, when the funeral home staff began pointedly stacking chairs around them. They talked in the parking lot, standing beside Birdie's ancient Honda Civic with its bumper sticker that read "HONK IF YOU'RE EXISTENTIALLY UNCERTAIN," until the November drizzle turned into actual rain and they were both soaked.

"I should go," Jonah said, not going.

"You should," Birdie agreed, not moving.

The rain fell. A car alarm went off somewhere in the distance. Inside the funeral home, someone was vacuuming.

"Here's the thing," Birdie said, and she could feel the joke forming, the way she always could, the way jokes were her first language and sincerity was a foreign country she'd lost her passport to. "I've had a lot of bad dates. A lot. I once went on a date with a man who brought his own salad dressing to a restaurant in a Ziploc bag. I once went on a date with a woman who told me, mid-appetizer, that she was pretty sure she was a reincarnated Egyptian pharaoh. But this—" She gestured between them. "This is the most fun I've had with another human being in maybe two years, and it happened at the funeral of a man who taxidermied a living cat."

Jonah looked at her through rain-spotted glasses. "What are you proposing?"

"I'm proposing a pact."

"A pact."

"When either of us gets the worst news—the really bad stuff, the stuff that makes you want to crawl into a hole—we call each other. No matter what. No matter how long it's been. Because you, Jonah the Grief Counselor, are the only person who has ever made a viewing tolerable, and I think that's worth preserving."

He studied her. The rain was flattening his beard. His glasses were essentially useless. He looked like a man standing at a crossroads in a romantic comedy, except the crossroads was a funeral home parking lot and the romantic comedy was about death.

"That's the most morbid friendship proposal I've ever received," he said.

"Is that a yes?"

"It's a yes."

They exchanged numbers. Birdie typed his name into her phone as "Jonah (Funeral)." He typed hers as "Birdie (Wrong Chapel)." They shook hands, which felt absurd given that they'd just spent two hours sharing deviled eggs and reconstructing the life of a stranger, and then Birdie got into her car and drove home through the rain, grinning so hard her face hurt.

She called her grandmother from the car.

"Mavis," she said, because she'd never called her grandmother anything else. "I met someone."

"At Patty's funeral?" Mavis's voice was gravelly and delighted, the voice of a woman who smoked until she was sixty and then quit cold turkey because, she said, she wanted to die of something more interesting.

"At a different funeral. The wrong funeral."

"The wrong funeral."

"It's a long story. His name is Jonah. He's a grief counselor."

There was a pause. Birdie could hear Mavis processing this, could practically hear the gears turning in her grandmother's magnificent, scheming brain.

"Elizabeth Ann Roberts," Mavis said, using her full name with the gravity of a judge passing sentence, "if you don't marry that man, I will haunt you from the grave."

"You're not dead yet, Mavis."

"I'm working on it. My cardiologist says my heart is a ticking time bomb. I told him that's the most exciting thing anyone's ever said about me."

"Please don't die before I can introduce you."

"I'll do my best, but I make no promises. The heart wants what it wants, and apparently what mine wants is to stop working."

Birdie laughed, and it only hurt a little, the way it always did when Mavis talked about dying, which was constantly, because Mavis had been dying for as long as Birdie could remember. Mavis's heart had been failing since Birdie was nineteen—a slow, stubborn decline that the doctors kept expecting to accelerate and that Mavis kept refusing to take seriously.

"I'm planning the funeral again," Mavis added, as if discussing a dinner party. "I've changed the flowers. I want peonies now, not lilies. Lilies are so predictable. And I want that priest—the one from the television, the handsome one—"

"You can't request a specific priest, Mavis."

"I can request whatever I want. It's my funeral. Also, I need you to promise me something."

"What."

"The eulogy. You're doing it."

Birdie's hands tightened on the steering wheel. "Mavis—"

"Don't 'Mavis' me. You're a professional talker. You talk for a living. You're going to stand up in front of everyone I've ever loved and you're going to say something true about me. Not something funny. Something true. For once in your life, Elizabeth, say something true."

The rain was coming down harder now. The windshield wipers were losing their battle.

"I'll think about it," Birdie said.

"You'll do it," Mavis corrected. "That's not a request. That's a condition of your inheritance."

"What inheritance? You have a condo and a cat."

"The cat is very valuable. Emotionally. Promise me."

Birdie swallowed. "I promise."

"Good. Now tell me more about the funeral man. Is he handsome?"

"He's—" Birdie thought about Jonah's face, the way his laugh had sounded like a door opening. "Yeah. He's handsome."

"Bring him to my next cardiology appointment. I want to vet him before I die."

"You're impossible."

"I'm dying, sweetheart. I'm allowed to be impossible."

Birdie drove home through the rain, thinking about deviled eggs and handlebar mustaches and the sound of Jonah's laugh, and she felt, for the first time in a long time, like something was beginning.

Something that had started at a funeral, which was either poetic or deeply concerning, and Birdie chose to believe it was both.