LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter Four

      On the night of the viewing, before the mourners arrived at the funeral home, I sat alone with my mom. Carrie, perfectly still in her satin-lined coffin, wore the prim, plum-colored dress that Jas and I had picked out. Generally, my mother went for Salvation Army cast-offs: outdated gypsy skirts, ruffled blouses and oversized sweaters. For once, she looked like a normal woman instead of a crazy, hippie lady.

      My mother might have looked peaceful, but I wasn’t. Tears, this time angry ones, rolled down my cheeks. “You could have at least hinted at what would happen to me when you died,” I told her. “Why didn’t you bother to tell me? Did you think you were going to live forever?”

      Scolding a corpse was ridiculous, but I was desperate. Desperate and terrified.

      “What’s going to happen to me?” I asked her. “What kind of things will Miss Spry force me to do? Will I ever get used to having this thing slinking around in my thoughts?”

      My mother kept her eyes closed and her hands demurely folded.

      I’d been speaking in a hushed voice, afraid that the funeral director would think I was crazy, but the more agitated I became, the louder my voice grew. “Will I become evil? Or slutty?” I swallowed. “Will I abandon Grace like you did to me?”

      I held my breath, longing for an answer, but nothing happened. For the first time in my life, I really needed my mother but, once again, she was nowhere around.

      Funerals are a lot like weddings. You invite people, find a minister, buy flowers and a new dress, and serve food. But unless the bride is up against a nine-month deadline, wedding planning is very open-ended. Funerals, however, must be quickly thrown together before the guest of honor rots away.

      For three hours, I stood in a tiny, stifling room, as a parade of men and women I’d never met paid their respects. Carrie’s first visitor was a dumpy, gray-haired man in wire-framed, rose-tinted glasses, and a tie-dye T-shirt so old and full of holes that it might have been a survivor of Woodstock. He smelled of pot and pressed my hand so tightly that my knuckles rubbed together. “I’m really gonna miss Carrie. She was something, you know? One in a million.”

      I nodded and mumbled, “Yes, yes. That’s true.”

      He cocked his head. “You don’t look anything like her.”

      I sighed. It seemed that my mother’s death would be very much like her life: the visit would be short, she would be surrounded by people whom I didn’t know, and everyone would find me disappointing.

      When the dumpy man in the rose-tinted glasses finally shambled off, Jasmine slunk over. She’d come for moral support, but had been sitting in one of the plush chairs all evening, texting her friends. Her eyes were wide. “Was that who I think it is?”

      I rubbed my temples. “Who do you think it is?”

      “That old guy from that band. You know, the one from the sixties. The Happy Dead? The Grateful Zombies? Something like that.”

      “I’m sure you’re right.” I had no idea what Jas was talking about, but it was easier to agree than try to make sense of it.

      She leaned a little closer. “Maybe that guy is your dad.”

      Leave it to Jasmine to make a bad situation worse. I had no idea who my biological father was. I’m pretty sure my mother didn’t know either. On the few occasions I’d asked, she’d scratched her head and said, “There are so many possibilities.”

      As a child, I hadn’t given much thought to my biological father. In fact, if Simon hadn’t been Japanese, I might have thought he was my real dad. Although I went through a curious phase in high school, as I grew older questions about my sperm donor fizzled away. Now, the only time I thought of him was when filling out health history forms at the doctor’s office.

      Jasmine continued to scan the room. “Maybe it’s that guy.” She pointed to a squat man whose turtleneck sweater made his large head and thin neck look like a light bulb. “Or that one.” She indicated a lanky transvestite in a silver lamé dress.

      “Give it up,” I begged.

      “Aren’t you a little bit curious?”

      “No.” A lie since I was now looking over the male visitors. Please God, not that one, I thought as I watched a man in a hooded parka stuff his pockets with tissues. Used tissues.

      “I’ll find out. Don’t you worry.” Jasmine floated off before I could stop her.

      Ariel had refused to come to the visitation and had stayed home with Tommy. Grace, however, had solemnly asked to go along despite the fact she’d never met my mother. For the past two hours, my daughter had been lingering by the casket, alternately reading the cards on the flower arrangements and peering fearfully at her grandmother’s body.

      Catching Grace’s eye, I held out my hand. She rushed over and hugged me tightly. “Grandma Carrie sure knew a lot of weird people,” she whispered. She indicated a pair of men in biker’s leathers and bandanas tied around their heads. They had matching eye patches and enormous, mutton-chop sideburns.

      “Yes,” I wearily agreed. “She sure did.”

      When my father came through the door, both Grace and I hugged him: me tearfully, Grace enthusiastically. My stepdad was accompanied by his current wife and Jas’s mother, Evelyn. As always, she looked like she’d just stepped out of the salon and dressed in clothes fresh from the drycleaner’s. I, on the other hand, was wilting like an uprooted weed on a hot summer day. My dress was as limp as the used tissue in my hand, and there were circles of dampness under my armpits.

      Evelyn is a kind person, but she and I had never been close. Even so, she hugged me, something she rarely did, and whispered, “You’re

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