The Northern Reach by W.S. Winslow

Author:W.S. Winslow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

PLANTING TIGER

Wake

“Jesus Christ, Merton, look at that. When Chubby walks, her ass looks just like two pigs fightin’ in a feed bag.”

This was the first thing Victoria Moody heard as she entered her father’s wake, and she felt as if God Himself were using her great-uncle Bud’s words to remind her why she’d left the town of Wellbridge the day after high school graduation and why, in the ten years since, she’d returned only for command performances like this one. Peering through the gloom of the funeral home, she spied the backside of her aunt Chubby. Victoria had to admit, it had expanded pretty spectacularly.

“Well, Vicky, fancy meeting you here,” said Bud. He lurched in to give her a one-armed hug. “Been quite a while since we seen you, ain’t it, Mert?”

“Ayuh, prob’ly four or five years.” For Merton, this was a soliloquy.

“Um-hmm,” Victoria replied. “Where’s Frenchie?”

“With Millhouse. Right down front there,” Bud said, indicating the row closest to the casket where Frenchie Moody rocked slowly, her elder son’s arm around her narrow shoulders.

“Your grandmother’s a pretty tough bird, but this is an awful hard thing,” Bud said. She supposed it was.

At Victoria’s approach, Frenchie looked up with ill-concealed surprise and patted an empty chair. Her left hand, nails lacquered as always in Rouge Red, clutched a mascara-smeared lace handkerchief.

“I’m sorry about this,” Victoria lied. “Hello, Uncle Mill. How are you holding up, Frenchie?”

Victoria’s fiancé had found it odd that she referred to her grandmother as Frenchie, and when he asked what their children would call their great-grandmother, Victoria had opted to fabricate a title rather than admitting that Frenchie was what everyone, including her children, called Magdalene Mere-Marie Gagnon Moody, just one of the many members of Victoria’s family she had no intention of ever introducing to any children she might have, let alone her fiancé, Tino. Thank God she’d been able to convince him to stay behind in Portland, three hours away and safely removed from this horror show.

Frenchie blew her nose and in the Quebecois-colored English Victoria hadn’t realized she missed said, “I’m okay me, but I don’t know about Chubby. She just cry and cry for her brother. You go see your daddy now, Vicky. He look so peaceful. You go and say bye-bye to my Tiger.”

There was nothing Victoria wanted less than to approach her father’s corpse, but Frenchie had given her a little push out of her seat, and Millhouse nodded, so up she trudged. The casket was wide-open, surrounded by a shrine to Tiger’s life: a lurid velvet painting of the Crucifixion she recognized from Frenchie’s living room, several childhood photos of her grinning father (including one of him holding a BB gun in one hand and a dead rat by the tail in the other at what appeared to be the town dump), and a massive floral arrangement in the form of a pack of Camel unfiltered. Below lay a smirking Tiger Moody propped at exactly the same angle as when she’d last seen him alive.

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