Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 25 - The Wake

The deviled eggs were generously sprinkled with too much paprika and diced green onions. The spice had darkened with time, leaving dark maroon patches on the tops of the cooked yolks after they’d been mixed with cheap store-brand mustard and mayonnaise. There were at least two dozen left over, all still carefully arranged upon a platter, covered in Saran Wrap, and placed on the refrigerator’s top shelf.

Gordon would eventually throw most of them away, as he’d done the first time he saw these very same eggs.

Next to the platter was a bowl of homemade pimento cheese and several casseroles stacked in sturdy white cookware. The casseroles were made of various combinations with basically the same ingredients: frozen mixed vegetables, cream of some-sort-of-soup, dried onions, and either canned tuna or chicken.  They all tasted the same, too, Gordon knew.

Then there were the jars of dill pickles, bowls of potato salad, and plates of spinach and artichoke dips.  Bags of chips poured into bowls. Tiny finger sandwiches with the crusts cut off.  A tray of meats and cheeses accompanied by multiple dessert plates.  Chocolate cream pie, plain brownies that still looked delicious, and a pecan pie with a tub of Cool Whip balanced on top of it.

It was all exactly as Gordon remembered it. All this food mysteriously made its way into his home before the actual funeral, both the first time, and again all these years later. 

After that first funeral for Marie, most of the congregants who’d gathered together to mourn Gordon’s beloved wife had processed from Burkett Methodist back to the small and modest Hewing homestead where they offered more condolences and calories to Gordon and Delores, his mother-in-law.

His house had been full that afternoon with people whose names were once familiar and secondhand but now seemed faraway and distant, like authors whose works he once read in middle school and seemed so important to him when he was thirteen, but no more. These long forgotten mourners were the same ones who had placed the food out in an overwhelming buffet.

On every space of the kitchen counter was a plate of food. Someone had draped a clear plastic table cloth over the small kitchen table, which was then covered with two liters of soda, towers of red plastic cups, and several metal buckets of ice.  There were two bottles of Jack Daniels and another of Smirnoff. 

All that was after the first time they said goodbye to Marie, and yet here it all was once again.

On that first day like today it seemed as though the entire town of Burkett had turned out to witness Marie’s internment into the earth. On that day, afterward most of the mourners piled into the tiny home Gordon thought he’d share with Marie for the rest of his life.

This time, the only one who returned to his house was Gordon himself.

Earlier at Burkett Methodist, more people had slowly came back to their senses upon realizing what had happened to them all. Most quickly left the church and raced back to their own homes. Reverend James, still confused by the transpiring events, hastily offered a few words of prayer before the funeral director lead Marie’s burial in the cemetery grounds behind the Church. There he guided the few remaining men — including Gordon — as they worked together to respectfully lower Marie’s casket into the ground for a second time.

“Good thing the hole was already dug,” Reverend James told Gordon.

“Yeah,” Gordon responded. “Good thing.”

Photo by Sandra Seitamaa on Unsplash

Then, as if through muscle memory, he drove directly to Delores’ apartment, as if he’d been there only yesterday.  He maneuvered through Burkett’s winding and surprisingly clean roads, its power-washed sidewalks, and past buildings and homes that had long been ransacked into empty lots where other buildings would eventually take their places.  But that newer construction was now nowhere to be seen.

The last time Gordon walked through the doors to his mother-in-law’s apartment was after Delores herself had been buried. On that day, just a few years after Marie died, Gordon was the only vestige of a relative remaining to pile Delores’s clothes and proliferous knick-knacks into cardboard boxes before hauling them off to the local Goodwill.  With her daughter long deceased and her sweaters now disbursed, it was as if Delores had never served any other purpose in existing but to birth a daughter over whom Gordon would spend his life mourning. There had been no sign left of her existence.

But now here she was again as she took Gordon’s arm and let him guide her down the hallway to her apartment. Upon entering, they were greeted by a small brown and white spotted cat with long hair and deep green eyes.

“Is this Rascal?” Delores asked. The cat rubbed against their legs before flopping on the floor and rolling onto his back.

“I believe so,” Gordon said, but at the time wasn’t so sure.

Rascal, too, had been buried many years before.

Gordon lingered just a few minutes as Delores set a kettle upon the stove, somehow falling right back into the habit of preparing a cup of tea whenever she arrived home.

“Lock the door behind me,” Gordon instructed before his mother-in-law settled into her favorite seat.

“I always do,” Delores said.

“I’ll come check on you tomorrow.”

“I’ll call if I need anything.”

“Do you still have my number?” Gordon asked. “I’m not even sure what it is.”

“I’m sure it’s on my list by the phone,” Delores answered.

Gordon walked into the kitchen and, sure enough, a small handwritten list of names and phone numbers was pinned to a small cork board hanging on the wall.

“Goodbye, Mother.”

“Goodbye, Gordon. Thanks for driving me home.”

They awkwardly hugged.

“Of course,” Gordon said.

Upon returning home, Gordon walked the rooms of his small house, caressing the walls and furniture, most of which he still owned decades later. Or rather, he’d still own them decades from now. 

There was the same, small kitchen table where he balanced his checkbook, the sitting chair and ottoman in the living room that faced the television he rarely watched, the same bedroom suite.  All the furniture still had a sheen to it, a newness, void of scratches and tears and worn spots from too much use over too many years.  

Out of the refrigerator Gordon pulled the platter of eggs and popped one into his mouth, chewing slowly.  An infrequent drinker, he then filled one of the plastic cups with ice and fumbled to measured out what he amateurishly believed was the approximate of a single shot of whiskey. He then watered it all down with Coca-Cola that he clumsily sloshed out of a bottle.

He was alone in the house, as he always was. 

Putting the platter of eggs back into the refrigerator, he began organizing the unopened pile of bereavement cards into a tidy little stack. He placed the bigger ones on the bottom and the smaller on top, but didn’t bother to read any of them.  He’d mournfully poured over them once before. Even with forty years passed, it was still too soon to read them again.

“I’m definitely not dead,” he said aloud.

He nodded his head several times, as if affirming this declaration to himself.

He stared at the drink in his hand and — after working up the courage — downed two considerable gulps of his whiskey and Coke. 

“And I’m not dreaming,” he said as the alcohol burned his throat. Dreams were never this clear, and never this tangible.  

Events — confusing as they admittedly were — were all moving in far too linear of a fashion for this to be a dream.  He’d clearly been at Burkett Methodist, and then the cemetery behind the Church, and then to Delores’s apartment. From there he’d continued his exploratory drive through Burkett, arriving as if pulled by an invisible magnet to the gas station between his house and the movie theater. There he sat in his car for several minutes and stared at the same green dumpster guarding the same dark alleyway where he’d lay just hours before with broken ribs and a concussion after being attacked. 

It had all happened in a linear time line.

No, this wasn’t death, and it wasn’t a dream.

Now here he was, at the end of this day, sitting on the edge of what Marie had called his reading chair, nursing a drink he never really liked but would always ask for on the rare occasions he found himself in social situations. 

“Jack and Coke,” he’d say, as if it was his favorite.

He’d always drink the whole thing as the back of his tongue swelled with each sip, as if his mouth didn’t know how to process such intensity.  He’d drink it because he honestly didn’t know what else to ask for.  

This time, Gordon stood from his chair, returned to the kitchen, and poured it down the sink after just a few sips. He threw the cup in the trash.

Everywhere he looked he was surrounded by sameness, by a status quo that was all too familiar and unchanging.  And here stood Gordon Hewing, one-time owner of a small time grocery store, wearing a black suit and new shoes that had been purchased so as to look appropriate and proper when burying his love, burying his wife, burying his Marie, who’d been gone for forty years.

And yet he buried her again that very day.  

Gordon pressed his hands against his eyes and wailed aloud. 

After a moment, though, the grief passed and shifted as abruptly as it arrived, like a cloud unexpectedly parting in the middle of a sprinkling rain, allowing the sun to strike through in a single, powerful beam.  

It wasn’t that everything had changed. It was that, suddenly, everything was exactly as it once was. 

Everything — people and couches and storefronts and cats and bottles of whiskey and deviled eggs — had somehow reverted back to what apparently was the same place and same spot in time when Gordon was just embarking upon a decades long journey of inescapable grief and loss and disappointment. He’d suddenly and somehow returned to the beginning of when he’d stopped living, when he was first alone after losing Marie, when he originally took that first step toward the arduous years that lay before him.

He would not take that step again.

As Gordon stood in the kitchen, his cheeks still wet with tears, a deep breath unexpectedly poured into his lungs. He wiped at his cheeks and exhaled deeply with a shudder. He felt lightheaded and relieved. He felt like he was breathing again for the first time in years.

Reaching up to his throat, he loosened his tie and undid the top button of his shirt. He’d never worn that tie again after Marie’s funeral, nor did he ever throw it away.

He intuitively knew that right at that moment that he was once again living the first day that originally lead to many years of sleepless and lonely nights.

But this time, Gordon realized with a deep certainty that he’d never had before that, despite everything around him — the food waiting in the fridge, the pile of greeting cards, and even the reappearance of his once dead mother-in-law — that his period of mourning had finally, truly, come to an end.

“Goodbye, Marie,” Gordon said. “I love you so much.”

Photo by Serhii Kalyn on Unsplash