What We All Want Read online

  “Yes, of course. Mr. Mortimer is waiting for you in the conference room. Let me just page him.”

  Billy and Hilary stand together awkwardly. They look at the heavy oak furniture, intricately carved, at the thick pile carpet overlain with Persian carpets, at the mottled glass windows. There are floor-length burgundy velvet drapes over all the windows. Hilary feels as if she’s in a womb, the place is throbbing, soft and warm. A soothing luxury.

  “Hilary Mount.” Dick Mortimer stands suddenly before them. His shoes make no sound on the thick carpet. “It’s great to see you.”

  “Hello,” Hilary says. She holds out her hand and Dick takes it and a spark of static leaps between them.

  “Sorry about that.”

  Hilary rubs her hand.

  “Hey,” Billy says. “Hi there, Dick.” They shake hands. “We’re waiting for your father. Our mother died.”

  “I think we want to take her somewhere else,” Hilary says. “Why?” Billy asks.

  “If you are waiting for my father,” Dick says, “you’ll have a long wait. My father died about ten years ago.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Hilary says.

  “Why would we want to take her anywhere else?” Billy asks. “I run the business now.”

  “You do?” Hilary says. “Then we won’t need to move her. She can stay right here.”

  Billy scratches his head.

  “I went to school,” Dick says. “I’m a funeral director now.” “Business good?” Billy asks.

  “Fine. Thanks for asking. How are you two doing?”

  “A funeral director,” Hilary says.

  “I should get into that,” Billy says. “Funerals are a sure thing. They’re all about fear. Put that together with making money and you’ve got it made.”

  Hilary pulls her fur coat tight around her body.

  “Come with me,” Dick says. “It’s good to see you two again. I’m sorry about your mother. Let me take that.” Dick takes the bag from Hilary and gives it to the receptionist. She places it behind the counter, out of sight. Dick is a large man. He holds his hands before his belly, clutches them together. He looks down at Hilary. “It’s been a long time, Hilary.”

  Hilary nods but Dick doesn’t see her head bob. He is walking ahead of her.

  Dick was in Billy’s class in school but they weren’t friends. He was Hilary’s friend. She remembers the smell of him, the chemical smell of the funeral home. It lingered in his clothes, his hair. He was always sweating and he breathed heavily when he walked. Dick was smart in school. Especially in biology. He would help her with her homework, sitting together at the kitchen table in his parents’ apartment above the funeral home.

  “Things have changed here, Hilary. I should show you around. I’ve renovated a bit since my Dad died,” Dick says. “I’ve added a few new things. A new wing. A new office. But you probably don’t remember this place anyway. Do you?” Dick talks fast. Several drops of spit fly out of his mouth. He wipes his hand on his lips. He points out the rooms they are passing. Then he stops and turns towards Hilary. “Your mother arrived a couple of hours ago. Again, I’m really sorry about your loss.”

  Silence. The two men stare at Hilary. She looks down at the fur coat wrapped around her and then farther down at her shoes.

  Once Dick’s mother asked them to find Dick’s father. She wanted him to open a jar or fix something. Dick and Hilary wandered the funeral home. Dick lay down in a casket, squeezed his large body in, and said, “Look at me, look at me.” The wood creaked around him. He was sure-footed in the funeral home, moving quickly around in the darkness of the basement, in a world he was comfortable with. And they came upon his father in the embalming room. They entered the room without knocking. There was a body, a young woman, hooked up to a machine, a tube draining blood from near her neck. Hilary gasped. The woman was naked. Her breasts lay flat against her ribs, the nipples erect. Her pubic hair black and dark against her white skin. Her hands draped over her belly. Richard Mortimer turned away from his work towards the children. His face was tired and sad. His eyes were anxious. He stopped the machine and his arms moved up and down as he waved them out of the room. “Get out. Get out.”

  “Well, we need to plan her funeral,” Billy says.

  “Yes, of course. We’re heading in that direction.” Dick starts walking again and leads them down a corridor and into a small room with a large oak table surrounded by covered red-velvet chairs pushed tightly together.

  “Have a seat. I’ll get coffee.” Dick leaves the room. As he idles by the coffee machine, watching the brown liquid pour out, he thinks about Hilary, about how much she has changed since they were kids. Her hair is tangled, she’s so thin, and she has raw marks on her cheeks. He wonders what he ever saw in her but then he thinks about his life now, how lonely he is, and he wishes they had never stopped being friends.

  Things didn’t work out for Dick quite the way he planned. He wanted to be a forensic scientist. But Dick’s father, the first Richard Mortimer, left him the funeral home, a small business, ten years ago when he choked on a hot dog at a family picnic. It surprised Dick (and surprised his mother even more) that the home was willed to him. But after finishing an embalming course at the local community college, Dick sat down and thought it all out. Something entrepreneurial clicked when his father died, something about the trust his father had in him to run the home, and to everyone’s surprise, in the short span of ten years, Dick has made a killing. Dick found that he had a knack for running a business. Slowly the money came in. He doesn’t know what to do with it half of the time. He renovated extensively. He bought himself a new car and a new Cadillac for the home. He gave his mother the burial of a Queen. But still the money keeps coming.

  Dick Mortimer advertises. He persuades folks to buy their plots early, to prepay for caskets, vaults, urns, to come tour Mortimer’s, to register their wishes in a Family Preference Guide. “Prepare early” is his motto. Preplan. You never know when death will come knocking. You never know when it’ll strike. Like a tornado or a flood. At Christmas Dick sends turkeys to all the doctors who work at the geriatric hospital in the city. A little card stuffed inside the bird with his name and phone number. And cut flowers to all the nursing homes.

  There isn’t a person in a forty-mile radius who would go anywhere else to buy a casket or have a service. And Dick, a shy man, with his new wealth, has become expansive, loud, and even mildly generous. Once every six months he takes a dozen cans of beans with pork to the food bank in the back of the fire hall. At New Year’s Dick sends each of his employees home with a ham and a cheque for fifty dollars.

  But Dick has no family any more. His mother died shortly after his father, and his brother, Steve, moved to New York and disappeared somewhere into his high-powered-business job. Dick hasn’t talked to him in years.And he doesn’t have many friends. Really, he doesn’t have any friends. And now that his mother is gone he doesn’t have anyone to love. Dick thinks about getting a dog or a cat or a hamster. Something that would move a little when he walked in the front door after work every night. But he usually works so late he would forget to walk it or feed it and then he would come home at night, after a hard day, and there would be another damn thing he’d have to bury.

  The coffee stops and the smell is lovely. Dick pours several large mugs and makes up a tray with cream and sugar and spoons.

  “He’ll probably put formaldehyde in the coffee,” Billy whispers to Hilary in the conference room. “Preserve us now so he won’t have to work so hard when we’re dead.”

  “I can’t believe he’s a mortician. I can’t believe how tall he is.” “He was always pretty short, wasn’t he? Looks like he sprung up after high school.”

  Hilary touches the soft chair below her.

  “What I really want is a cold beer,” Billy calls out to Dick. “Forget about the coffee.”

  “I can’t believe Mother is dead,” Hilary says.

  Billy looks closely at Hilary. The whites
of her eyes are red. “She was really sick, Hilary”

  “In pain,” Hilary says. “The pain needed to stop.”

  “In pain,” Billy echoes. He shakes his head.

  Hilary rests her head in her hands on the table. Her long hair hangs around her like a curtain. She is tired.

  “You must feel a bit relieved? I mean, it’s over. She’s dead. At least she’s not in pain any more.You’ve spent your whole life taking care of her. Now you can move on.”

  Hilary presses against the table until there is an ache on her forehead and in her nose. She thought her mother’s death would make her feel better, she thought she would feel relieved, but all she feels now is a big empty chasm in her stomach and a pain in her head that won’t go away. She feels abandoned and scared.

  Dick comes into the room carrying a tray of mugs. “Here you go.” Dick hands out the mugs, giving Hilary one of his favourites, a blue mug with a picture of a cow standing on its hind legs putting several farmers out into a field to graze. The caption reads, “I’m the boss around here.” Dick was given the mug by one of his employees in the Christmas gift exchange several years ago. Dick still smiles every time he sees that mug.

  “A beer would have been nice,” Billy says. “Something cold.”

  “We have water,” Dick says. “Or juice, or coffee. That’s it. Let’s get to work, shall we?” He clears his throat and sits at the table across from the Mounts.

  Hilary is sitting on the edge of her seat. Billy is picking at his cuticles. He sits with his long legs wide open. Dick can see a rip in Billy’s jeans. He pulls a list out of a filing cabinet behind him. “You’ll be needing a casket, a coach, a burial site, a vault, and everything else, I take it. That includes embalming, dressing, and an open-casket service for the memory picture, right?”

  “Memory picture?”

  “The last glimpse of your loved one.”

  “What?” Billy’s mouth is open.

  “A viewing. It’s sometimes called a viewing.”

  “Why do you need a vault?” Hilary asks.

  “Oh, it prevents the ground from caving in,” Dick says. “It protects your loved one’s remains for all eternity.”

  Billy snorts. “She’s still going to rot, isn’t she? Isn’t she going to rot, Hilary?”

  Hilary’s face pales.

  Dick ignores Billy. He rattles off his list and then passes out a photocopied piece of paper with “Eighty-seven Things That Must Be Done by the Survivor” typed at the top. It starts with securing vital statistics and ends with notification of family members, attorney, and newspapers.

  “You’ll have to notify these people yourself,” Dick says. “I can help, I can advise, but I can’t call them for you. I’m sorry but that’s not part of the service.”

  “Did she have an attorney?” Billy asks.

  Hilary sits still in her chair, staring at the coffee before her. “First we have to fill out a vital statistics sheet. Name, occupa-tion, age, et cetera.”

  Dick takes out a pen and reaches for a form from the filing cabinet. He sits and begins to write down the information Hilary and Billy supply.

  “Okay, any suggestions? Any ideas on the service?” Dick asks. “Where shall we start?”

  “We have to discuss money,” Billy says. “I haven’t got much right now.”

  “Mother had nothing,” Hilary whispers. “I have nothing.”

  Dick says, “Don’t worry about the money. Just decide what you would like, later we can pare it down, simplify it, shall we say, to fit your financial position.”

  “Don’t worry about money?” Hilary says. “I always worry about money.”

  “Hilary,” Billy says. “Thomas is loaded. He’ll pay.”

  Hilary looks at Billy. She suddenly wants to get back home. “I’m tired,” she says. “I’m really very tired. I need to go home.”

  Dick clears his throat. “I’m sure you’d like to discuss your finances in private,” he says.

  “Did Becka say anything about what she wanted?” Billy asks.

  “We didn’t talk about it,” Hilary says. She rubs her eyes. “It’s not something you talk about.You don’t just talk about death to a dying woman You talk about when she gets better, what the two of you will do.” Hilary covers her eyes. “Besides, there were too many other things to do. Change diapers and bedpans, feed her, give her sponge baths, give her medicine, do the laundry.”

  Billy can’t fault Hilary for that. He would never have asked Becka what she wanted either. The odd time Billy visited he just peeked in Becka’s room and spent the rest of his time there in front of the TV with the dolls, resting his feet on Hilary’s rock collection, feeling as if he was in an orphanage close to the water. Silent, small bodies watching TV with him. It was comforting really. He doesn’t know why he didn’t go more often.

  “Okay” Dick says, leaning back. He clears his throat. “Why don’t we just check out the selection room? That way you’ll get some ideas as to what you are looking for. You can always come back later, tomorrow maybe, and settle on a definite plan.” Dick stands. He hates this part of his job. He prefers embalming and makeup, dealing with the corpse, not the living, angry, grieving, unhappy family. Dick, in general, prefers the dead to the living. Less complications. They seem, somehow, more grateful.

  Hilary and Billy follow Dick out of the room and down the hallway. Hilary feels like a mouse behind an elephant. Dick is so large and round. She notices that he is balding in patches on the back of his head. Patterned baldness, Hilary wonders if the spray-on hair she sees on late-night TV might be useful to Dick.

  “Have you thought of where you want to bury her?” Dick asks. Hilary shakes her head. “I just can’t believe she’s finally dead.” “Because all the cemeteries have different charges.”

  Hilary nods.

  “I’m sure you’re suffering now,” Dick says. “We have a grief therapist who comes in twice a week. If you’re interested, I could make an appointment for you.”

  This is the first time someone has acknowledged Hilary’s own pain and her heart speeds up slightly and she suddenly feels warm. She looks up at Dick and, even though she doesn’t want to talk to a grief therapist about her mother, she feels an overwhelming sense of gratitude. A weight has lifted from her shoulders.

  Dick can’t imagine not planning in advance for a funeral. It happens all the time but it still knocks him out. Clients coming in unprepared. He’s had his funeral planned from the day he turned four. He remembers his father sitting him down on his lap at the kitchen table and working out the details—casket, service, coach, plot. He still has the piece of paper his father wrote on.

  Behind Dick and then Hilary, Billy walks. He runs his fingers over the wainscotting and is amazed that there is no dust. A place this big, Billy figures, must take hours to clean. Billy wonders who Dick gets to clean the funeral home and then he wonders if, perhaps, he should start a cleaning business. It couldn’t be all that hard—a few mops, dusters, a vacuum. Hell, he could use Tess’s vacuum. It’s not as if he sees her lugging it around the house that often.

  In the selection room, Billy stands beside Dick and sizes him up. They were classmates, Billy reminds Dick, but Dick shakes his head and says,”Can’t matter much on the price, Billy. A casket is a casket. I can’t up or down the cost for anyone.You have to pick the one that suits your feelings for your mother, that makes you feel good about laying her to rest.”

  Hilary puts her hand over her mouth and swallows. The whole thing is ludicrous. She can’t move. The caskets are large before her. Her fingers ache around her lips, they feel tight, arthritic. Mother was in so much pain this morning and now she’s dead. Just like that. Everything happens so slowly and then so quickly. Hilary can’t keep track of time.

  Billy walks around the room checking out prices on the open lidded boxes, adding sums up in his mind, tapping each casket, looking for defects, for solid structure, for a good buy. Dick follows him around, giving him the sales speech.
He doesn’t push too hard. He knows Billy isn’t the one with the chequebook. He’ll wait for Thomas before he hard-sells. Hilary stands like an awed child, one hand up to her mouth, eyes wide open.

  “You can get an eternal casket,” Dick says. He taps a bronze one. “It will protect your loved one forever.”

  “I bet they aren’t as solid as they look,” Billy says. He knocks on the casket.

  Hilary thinks the caskets are beautiful. She remembers feeling this way about them when she would come here years ago, as if they were merely large beds, a pretty place to sleep. A place where you could shut the door and get some peace and quiet. Be alone with your thoughts. They look comfy and peaceful, with large pillows and shiny wood. And there are the eternal caskets too, copper and brass and bronze and a particularly pretty one called Blue Diamond that shines in the dim lights of the viewing room like a summer night sky, the gold-coloured handles like stars.

  Billy heads towards the pine box, the three-hundred-dollar special, but Dick says this box is only used for cremation. In his best salesman-like voice, Dick says that no one buys the pine box for a service. And Billy touches the tiny, cotton pillow once, runs his hand along the unfinished wood, and turns towards the Oak Memory casket, lined in white satin, dotted with roses. The average-price casket. Fifteen hundred dollars. Billy imagines what he could do with that kind of money.

  The room is large and quiet. Their footsteps are muffled in the thick rug, the walls are solid and seem to cushion any noise.

  “Is it true that you guys break the dead person’s legs if they don’t fit into the coffin?” Billy asks. “Or saw them off?”

  Dick clears his throat.

  Hilary looks startled.

  “I’m tall,” Billy says. “You’d have to break my legs, I guess.” “This is a fine model,” Dick says. “The Oak Memory casket. It’s a popular selection.”

  Hilary wants to curl up in a casket. They look so soft and warm. She wants to shut the lid and sleep for years and years, sleep backwards in time, if possible. Wake up on the day her daddy walked out of their lives, but do everything differently. Stop him at the front door. Stand in front of him. Hold him down. Pin him with her little-girl arms. Hilary moves up close to the Blue Diamond casket and touches the surface and then the inside. She shivers.