I'll Love You When You're More Like Me by M.E. Kerr

I'll Love You When You're More Like Me by M.E. Kerr

Author:M.E. Kerr [Kerr, M.E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781939601131
Publisher: IG Publishing


11. Wallace Witherspoon, Jr.

Sunday my father had to drive to the Hauppauge morgue to pick up a new guest. That left Mr. Trumble and me to put the caskets back in the Selection Room. This is the room where relatives come to pick out the coffin and finalize the financial arrangements for a funeral.

My father got the idea to do ours over because of an article in The Knell. That’s a monthly magazine published by The American Funeral Directors’ Association. According to the article, the Selection Room was the most important one in a mortuary. It could make the difference between a funeral selling for under a thousand dollars and one going for three thousand or more, depending on lighting, decor and ambiance. (On the front cover of The Knell, there is an hourglass with the sand running out.)

Our Selection Room had just been newly wallpapered with violet fleurs-de-lys on a white background. While the interior decorating had been going on, the caskets were stacked in the garage. Mr. Trumble and I had to lug them back in and arrange them so that the expensive ones were in prominent positions under the lights.

Mr. Trumble’s face was turning the color of the inside of a watermelon, and sweat was trickling down his forehead into his bushy white eyebrows.

“I hear you been dating a movie star, Wally,” he said.

“I haven’t been dating her,” I said. “She’s a television star, Mr. Trumble.”

“You always had fancy notions, Wally.”

“Don’t try to talk, Mr. Trumble,” I said. “Let’s get this stuff moved first.”

“You afraid I’m going to slip my cable on you?” he said.

“What?”

“You afraid I’ll get my sailing orders and leave you to fill my shoes?”

“There’s no sense pushing your luck, Mr. Trumble,” I said.

“You go from girl to girl like a grasshopper, Wally,” said Mr. Trumble. “Well, make hay while the sun shines.”

That night I dreamed that Sabra St. Amour and I were flying high in the sky like two birds, floating, falling, touching. Then out of her mouth came Lauralei Rabinowitz’ voice: “Don’t touch my legs, Wally. I need a shave.”

Monday morning Mrs. St. Amour called to ask if I knew where Sabra was. I answered the phone in our Memory Chapel. I was helping my mother prepare for a service the following evening. Our new guest was old Mrs. Wheatley, who’d been teaching history at Seaville High for twenty-five years, living with her mother until her mother became our guest last year. A.E. was searching for Gorilla, who’d been napping with Miss Wheatley until my mother walked into Slumber Room I and began screaming, “What are you doing in there, Gorilla! A.E., get your cat out of here!”

Mr. Llewellyn, our organist, was practicing two pieces Miss Wheatley had requested for her memorial service: “High Hopes” and “Tell Mother I’ll Be There.” He was singing “High Hopes” when I took Mrs. St. Amour’s call. Every few seconds he’d trill “Whoops! There goes another rubber tree—Whoops! There goes another rubber tree plant!”

“If you don’t know where she is, maybe your friend Charlie does,” said Mrs.



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