The Postcard Read Online Free PDF Page B

and showed him the card. He looked at it, said nothing about it, but did tell me that he had gotten a few strange calls himself. It was probably just the same mixed-up guy who couldn’t remember the right number.
    “Hang up when that happens,” he said. “Old people are always making mistakes.”
    I finally met Mrs. Kee-whatever in the driveway. She was going to the funeral home with us. She seemed like a nice lady, short and round and neat. Her hair was a silver helmet. She wore two hearing aids and glasses, but not thick ones, with a pair of clip-on shades that she lifted into the up position to say hello to me.
    “It’s a blessing, your grandmother’s passing, you know,” she said to me, touching my arm. “For everyone.”
    I smiled at her. “Thanks.”
    Then I thought,
Blessing? How was Grandma’s death a blessing? And for who, exactly?
    She smiled and flicked her shades back down as we got into the Mosquito, she next to my dad and me squashed in the tiny backseat next to a box of clothes.
    “So, how long did you know my grandmother?” I asked her. “Did you know her for a long time?”
    “What day is this?” she asked.
    I looked at my dad in the mirror, and he glanced back.
    “Friday,” I said.
    “Friday,” she repeated.
    Another look at Dad while she closed her eyes and tapped on her fingers as if counting. She popped her eyes open and said, “About thirty years, give or take. Heee!” She cackled like a witch on Halloween. “Heee!”
    So maybe everyone in this town was “off.”
    In case my dad couldn’t find the funeral home, I had the obituary page in my pocket for the address. But Mrs. K knew where the Brent Funeral Home was, or “Brent’s,” as she called it. She seemed to know where all the “mortuaries” were, and pointed out a few of them on the way and told us the names of people who had been “laid out” there.
    When we got to Brent’s, the parking lot was full, which made me scared that I would have to meet all kinds of Grandma’s friends. “Everyone,” as Mrs. K had said. But the cars were there for another old person. We were shown to a very small room by a narrow pasty-faced man. Except for the coffin, a few flower displays, and about twenty chairs, the room was empty. The place was overcooled, which I thought might have had something to do with it being where they kept the unburied dead.
    The coffin was sitting closed on its stand in the front of the room. I liked that it was closed. I had never seen a real dead person before and didn’t want to start looking at one. I guess we were there too early. For nearly an hour it was just me, Dad, and Mrs. Kee-something in the front chairs. The room was tiny. The more we sat in it, the tinier it got. At ten-thirty, there was a rush of people from the other service. They jammed the lobby outside the door. They were loud and laughing. A few people looked in, hushed for a second, smiled sadly, then waved or nodded to the three of us. When they drove off in their cars, it was quiet again. It was like that for another fifteen minutes or so.
    “They’ll come,” said Mrs. K, pressing my hand.
    “Who? Everyone?”
    “They’re just so busy,” she said.
    “Doing what?”
    She gave me one of those smiles again, then shared it with the pasty man at the podium rustling papers. He smiled back at her. I couldn’t tell if he was just being nice, knew what she meant, had a secret, thought she was “off,” or was fascinated by her helmet hair. His name was Chalmers, which seemed oddly right for a funeral director.
    Mr. Chalmers.
    If he even
was
a director. Maybe he was an assistant director. After all, his name wasn’t Brent. And we had the small room. Maybe Grandma’s whole funeral was on a budget. That seemed right, too, for my dad. I could just hear Mom complain about how cheesy it was, and him saying nothing, and us all thinking:
loser.
    While Dad went to the bathroom or something, I got up and asked Chalmers about the