First thing’s first. Change the font. Change the size. Cambria is obnoxious, as is size 12. Size 12 is for writing that is meant to be read. Not the trite shit that you’re going to punch on the screen. Don’t get any big ideas. In fact, get small ones. Size 10.5, to be exact. A writer’s first mistake is thinking they can write. The second is writing in font size 12.
Anyway…
“Where’s Susan?” the woman asked. She was wearing a floral printed blouse with lavender tapered pants. Velcro shoes. The combination seemed a bit odd for a funeral.
“Oh, hello, Mrs. Jackson. Well, Susan and I got divorced about a year ago, actually.”
Mrs. Jackson shook her head in utter disbelief. “Well isn’t that a darn shame,” she said. “I liked her a lot. You all looked like you all got along real well together.”
The sad thing was that Mrs. Jackson had shaken her head in disbelief five times now. She had grey hair and liver spots and was senile.
“I know,” Rob said. “It’s for the best though, I think.” He looked at the artificial flowers that surrounded his childhood friend then back at the old woman who stood before him. “We, you know, function better as friends.”
He didn’t know what the word function meant. But it sounded nice when it dove quietly from his tongue. Real pretty and soft, like a swan.
Mrs. Jackson placed her wicker hand on his shoulder and looked at him with watery eyes. “Oh, hon. I’m sure you do. I’m sure you do.” (He found the subsequent pat on the shoulder very patronizing.) “It’s a shame she couldn’t be here for Benny’s funeral, you know. You three used to be quite the trio. Called y’all my little muskateers, you know.”
He smiled. Wondered why there wasn’t an open bar at funerals. Seemed more than appropriate. “I know,” he laughed in the most fake way possible.
“Alright, sug,” Mrs. Jackson cooed. “Glad you could make it. Benny’d be real happy to know you came down here to see him off.”
“I’m sure,” Rob replied. “I’m sure he would be.”
Mrs. Jackson left, and Rob found himself making his right hand form a spindly C where his drink should have been. He saw it, then shook it off like he would a spider. It had been about seven years since he had seen Benny. They’d been childhood friends in Rolesville, before he went away to Vandy and before Benny went to work for his dad’s tobacco farm. Years behind books and plows had separated them quite a bit, but when Rob got the phone call last Wednesday that the boy whom he’d swapped spit and blood with had died in a car wreck, he was quicker than a jackrabbit in booking his flight from Boston to his hilly hometown.
It was a hit and run. Apparently Benny had just left the farm one evening and was making the quick and routine walk back to his house. It was only a mile commute, and the weather was nice that day. Benny’s mama said that he was just walking along the main road and then bam, he was a bug on the windshield of a Dodge Ram. Asshole didn’t even bother pullin’ my baby from the ditch, she said. Benny’s mom had to go powder her nose after she said that. Damned jackass didn’t even wipe the dirt from his face.
Rob didn’t know what to say to that, nor did he know what to say to Mrs. Jackson’s comment about his ex-wife. The truth of the matter was that he was still completely stuck on Susan: her figure, her laugh, the dainty lines that formed in the corner of her eyes when she smiled. They reminded him of the little hash marks his mom made in the cherry pie so it could breathe in the oven. He’d tried fucking other women, yeah, but he just couldn’t get it for them. No matter how hard he tried. It was all cherry pie and giggles, and all he wanted to do when he was in bed with another woman was cry.
In silence, he walked over to Benny’s casket. He could see the makeup that had been piled on his face by an overpaid mortician. Stack after stack after stack of unnecessary shit like a gourmet cheeseburger. Benny, or Ben, as he was in his thirties now, probably would have clawed at his face ‘til all that shit was gone, however death had rendered him unable to do so. Rob had to fight the urge to laugh, to tell him that he looked like a real city boy now. That now they could get along well. But that faraway look in Benny’s eyes had him scared. Rob wondered where Benny was looking. Wondered what his heaven looked like. Wondered if Benny even thought heaven existed.
Rob got the phone call from Susan last Wednesday. He was at work, going through a recent deposition, when he saw her name pop up on his caller id. She wants to reconcile, he thought. She’s realized she needs me. That we’re meant to be together. That fifteen years of sharing the same street, friends, and bed wasn’t a joke. He grinned to himself as he picked up the phone. Today wasn’t going to be a bad day at all.
“Hey,” Susan said.
(He loved the way the –ay sound still swung from her vocal cords like an old tire swing.)
“Hey,” Rob replied, on the edge of his seat.
“So Benny died,” said Susan.
He pulled the phone away from his ears and looked into those dark little holes, expecting Benny’s goofy grin to pop out like a jack o lantern. Not real, he thought. Benny was always going to be fine. He had always been fine.
“Are you listening, Robert?" Susan asked. "His mom just called our—my house” The final t of his name stung his eardrums like a wasp. Reminded him of when he was younger and his father asked him to bring in a switch from the backyard when he brought home a report card with more than one C. He had never been good at science. But that didn’t matter then and it didn’t matter now.
“I…I heard you.” Rob clamored into the phone. He thought immediately back to the day he and Benny jumped into the lake and Benny didn’t come up after a minute. Rob thought Benny had died or hit a rock or something. 120 seconds later, Benny’s blonde head bobbed above the water along with his high-pitched laugh. “Goddamn it, Benny,” Rob muttered.
“Well,” Susan mumbled, “the funeral is going to be held this weekend.”
“Are you going to be there?” he asked.
He could see her head recoil like a rattlesnake’s tail. “I would, but I’ve got a client to meet this weekend. Big case. Hamptons. Trophy wife wants to suck some money from her old sugar daddy. You know.”
His heart sank. He loved the way she spoke. She made last wills and testaments sexy. “Right,” he said. “I understand. See you soon.”
Silence.
“OK,” Susan said. “You doin’ ok? Little Benny…he’s gone. I can’t believe it.”
He cleared his throat into the phone. It was so heavy on his wrists. It might as well have been an anvil now. “Yeah,” he struggled. “I’m OK. Gonna head home this weekend, I guess. Think I can manage that. I’ll say ‘hi’ to everyone for you.”
“Thanks. Gonna send some flowers.”
He could hear the sound of her sweet floral breath on the other line, and then the sound of phlegm. She cleared her throat. “Alright, well, bye.”
He inhaled for a moment to silence the “I love you” that had come so naturally to him for the past ten years now. “Right…bye.”
Click.
The flight home was a long one. He tried to distract himself with paperwork, with the shiny packaging of in-flight trail mix, with the Hawaiian-print acrylic nails of the clerk at the rental car kiosk, but all to no avail. It was just Susan.
All through the hills of Rolesville, he thought of her. To be fair, he thought of Benny a lot, too. About how when they were little they played dead to scare their baby sitter, about how when they went to Sunday school together and Rob didn’t know the bible verses Benny would get Susan to write them on a piece of coloring book paper and pass them his way before the teacher could swat him for not remembering what the Corinthians said about love. When he saw the way she dotted her I’s, though, he knew he what it really was. Love was the delicate white eyelets of Susan’s laced socks that framed her fuzzy peach skin; love was the thin vanilla colored part of Susan’s strawberry colored hair. Love was the way she would make a simple word like “hill” resemble one in speech. Hee-yul. A rise and fall, two soft and gentle syllables. Sweet and southern and symmetrical. Rob was nine years old at the time, and his concept of life hasn’t changed much to this day.
In between the identical strip malls of each highway town, he thought of Susan’s hands. How he missed holding them, how the callouses on her fingertips felt like firm little pillows, how they created beautiful sounds from the cello he had bought her with his pay check from his first trial. They were hard, but boy were they lovely. What they could make. That’s what he loved about Susan. Tough as a nail on the outside, but once you penetrated the veil, you eased into her like quicksand.
The problem was that he couldn’t get out. Even at the funeral of his best friend. Even when looking at the fake purple irises that rested obnoxiously close to Benny’s casket. Suz loved that shade of purple, Rob thought. But she called it violet. She didn’t like purple because Crayola invented the name. He chuckled to himself. That’s right, he thought, she called purple violet.
The pastor delivered Benny’s eulogy and service, and before he knew it he and approximately 40 others had migrated to a buffet. With drinks. People were eating soggy chicken wings and noshing on watery potato salad and talking about their memories with Benny. How he was a real pal, how it was a shame he hadn’t married, had any kids. Some people talked about Mrs. Jackson, his mama, and how it was good that she was too old for the memories to really stick. It would kill her, they said. Plain cut her heart right out.
No one recognized Rob at the reception. Although, he did keep quite aloof. By aloof, he meant he kept quite a warm seat at the bar. He had had four jack and cokes at the end of the first hour and was beginning to think real sour thoughts about his high school classmates that showed up to Benny’s reception. They didn’t give a shit about Benny. They just wanted to save face. There was Bettie, who won homecoming queen his and Benny’s senior year of high school. She had big melon breasts and white teeth the size of Chiclets, but he would never forget the day she got her boyfriend to egg his car when Benny didn't buy her a pack of menthols. And then there was Don, the hunk of his grade. He had a crush on Susan when they were in English together. They would get in fights about T.S. Eliot to win Suz’s affection, even though she hated the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock to begin with. But to this day, Rob would still chuckle to himself when he thought about how after sixth period they would cut out together and smoke non-filtered cigarettes and talk about existentialism, then duck back into class when the school bells rang. It felt exotic. New, different. Don had a receding hairline now, and the vertical lines of his oxford shirt were swollen and stretched around his midsection. This made Rob happy. And even though he and Susan were divorced after only fifteen months of marriage, Don’s bald spots made Rob feel like he had won.
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