Monday

The Long Saturday

Chapter 17: Monday

Grief, it turns out, keeps office hours.

On Sunday, pain is elemental. It moves through the house from room to room. It sits at the kitchen table and follows you into the shower and waits at the edge of the bed when you try to sleep. There's nothing to do with it except feel it.

On Monday, somebody wants your brother's Social Security number.

I wake before Mom does and stand in the kitchen in the half-light with my phone in one hand and Dad's old legal pad in the other. The coffee is going. The house smells like grounds and lavender and the shirt I slept in because I was too tired to find clean clothes. There are three numbers Jude wrote down for us last night: funeral home, church office, insurance.

I dial the funeral home first because it's the one I least want to dial.

"Holloway and Sons," a woman says, in the calm, upholstered voice of someone who speaks to the newly bereaved for a living. "This is Marjorie."

I tell her my name. I tell her why I'm calling. The words still feel impossible in my mouth, as if language ought to refuse them on moral grounds.

"I'm so sorry," she says. Not performative. Not thin. A real sentence, spoken by a woman who means it and has probably said it a thousand times. "We can see you this morning, if that would help."

Help is not the word for what funeral homes do, but I know what she means.

"Ten?"

"Ten is fine. Bring any paperwork you have. Birth certificate if you can find it. We'll walk you through the rest."

We'll walk you through the rest.

As if there is a path. As if this is a country other people have mapped.

Mom comes in while I'm writing down the address we've both known since Dad died.

She has her robe on. Her hair is still flattened on one side from sleep. For a second, before either of us speak, she's just my mother in a kitchen on a Monday morning. Then she sees the legal pad in my hand and remembers where we are.

"You called?"

"Ten o'clock."

She nods. Walks to the coffee. Pours into the blue mug. Her hands shake only a little.

"Thank you, honey."

I want to tell her not to thank me. I want to tell her no son should ever be the one making these calls. I want to tell her I should have done more, sooner, differently, always differently. Instead I say, "I'll drive."

We sit at the table with coffee and the legal pad between us like an exam we're both failing.

Name: Micah Daniel Whiting.

Date of birth: August 19.

Place of birth: Mercy County.

Parents: Helen and Thomas Whiting.

Occupation: climbing gym instructor, route setter, almost-guide in Colorado.

I don't write the last part. Not yet. Mom doesn't know it yet, and I can't stand the thought of making his unfinished future sound official on a legal pad.

Mom stares at the pad.

"What do they ask?"

"Everything."

She gives a short laugh that breaks on the way out. "Of course they do."

I reach across and put my hand over hers. The same table. The same kitchen. A different day.

"We can leave anything blank until later."

"No." She straightens a little. "Let's do it."

So we do.

Marital status.

Never married.

Clergy officiating.

Jude Okafor.

Clothing.

There it is. The first question that feels obscene on contact.

"Do you want him in a suit?" I say.

Mom looks at me as if I've asked whether she wants the moon rearranged.

"He hated suits."

"I know."

She wraps both hands around the mug. Thinks. "Your father bought him that navy button-down for Easter. The one he complained made him look like a substitute teacher."

I can see it. Micah in the kitchen, tugging at the collar, making a face at his reflection in the microwave door while Mom told him he looked handsome and he said, I look like I run detention.

The memory lands whole and living, and for a second I can't breathe around it.

"The navy one," I say.

Mom nods once, hard, like she's signing a treaty.

---

Holloway and Sons is colder than I remember.

Not in temperature. In category. When Dad died, I was twenty-three and everything the funeral home did seemed to occur in a haze around my mother, the practical world stepping up while we were too shattered to stand. I understood almost none of it. I held doors. I carried casseroles. I wore the tie Caleb-the-seminary-student was supposed to wear and said the sentences people expected.

Now I am the practical world.

Marjorie Holloway is in her sixties, silver hair, tortoiseshell glasses, a cardigan the color of oatmeal. She takes us into a room with soft chairs and a table set with tissues so strategically the gesture would be insulting if it weren't merciful.

"Take your time," she says, which means we are still going to talk about urns.

She asks the questions in a voice that knows where to pause.

Was Micah baptized?

Yes.

Would you like a visitation?

Mom looks at me. I look at her.

"No," she says quietly. "Service only."

Marjorie nods as if this is not a decision but a fact of the weather.

"Burial or cremation?"

That one hangs.

Dad is buried. White stone on a low hill at Mercy Memorial, two rows back from the maples. We stand there every Father's Day. It feels impossible to imagine Micah under earth because Micah was never a still person. Soil seems wrong for him. Too contained.

And then Mom says, through the shaking, "He told us once he wanted to be burned up and scattered somewhere pretty."

I look at her.

"He said that?"

"At your father's graveside, remember?" She closes her eyes briefly. "You told him not to say burned up in a cemetery."

I remember. Not from a loop. From the actual day, years ago. Micah, twenty-two and unable to respect the emotional register of a place for more than twelve seconds at a time, sticking his hands in his coat pockets and saying, For the record, when it's me, just burn me up and dump me somewhere with a view. Dad had been dead six months. Mom had laughed in spite of herself. I had told him to have some respect. He had replied, I do. I'm respecting the view.

I had forgotten.

"Cremation," Mom says.

Marjorie makes a note. Nothing in her face changes. This, too, is weather.

Then she slides the paperwork toward me.

Authorizing agent.

Signature.

Relationship to deceased.

The word deceased is somehow worse than body. Worse than remains. It sounds like a function has been completed.

I sign because someone has to sign.

We make choices I would not have believed a human being could make with ordinary speech: service on Monday, obituary by Wednesday, temporary urn now and something else later if desired. There is a catalog for permanent urns. It contains more wood grain than any grief should have to endure.

Mom stops on page four and presses the heel of her hand to her mouth.

"I can't."

"We don't have to pick today," Marjorie says.

"Good," I say, too fast, because if I have to spend one more second comparing cherry to walnut for the purpose of containing my brother, I am going to stand up and walk into traffic.

Marjorie doesn't react. She just closes the catalog and moves on.

Outside, the June light is offensive. Cars are driving past. Somebody is mowing a lawn across the street. A woman in yoga clothes is loading groceries into a trunk. The world has the indecency to remain made of errands.

Mom stands beside the car with her sunglasses on and says, "I hate that place."

"I know."

"The woman was kind."

"I know."

"I still hate it."

"Me too."

This, apparently, is what Monday love looks like. Agreement beside a car in a funeral home parking lot.

---

Back at the house, the casseroles start.

I had forgotten this part from Dad. The economy of grief. The way people who can't fix a death bring dairy.

By two o'clock, there are three foil-covered dishes on the counter and a pound cake from Mrs. Pacheco and a bag of bagels from Sal's that somebody thought was thoughtful and is, in fact, devastating. Mom sees the bag and has to go to her room.

I stand in the kitchen with my hand on the counter until the shaking passes.

Jude arrives at three with a Tupperware container and the kind of silence that doesn't require managing.

"How bad?" he says.

"Catalog bad."

He nods. "Yes. Monday is usually catalog bad."

We sit at the table. Mom comes back out. Jude doesn't say how are you because he knows how useless the question is. He opens his legal pad instead.

"Obituary," he says. "We'll do a first draft and hate it together."

So we do.

Beloved son.

Cherished brother.

Died unexpectedly while saving a child from drowning.

Each sentence is true and each one feels like a theft.

"It's too polished," Mom says after the third attempt.

"It's an obituary," I say. "Polished is the genre."

"He'd hate it."

Jude taps the pad with the eraser end of his pencil. "Then let's make it sound a little more like him."

He looks at me.

"Tell me something small."

"What?"

"Not the lake. Not the official biography. Something small."

I look at the yellow lines on the paper. At Jude's pencil. At my mother's hands.

"He always brought me the wrong bagel on purpose," I say.

Mom laughs once, quick and wet. "Because he thought plain bagels were a moral failure."

"He was wrong," I say automatically.

"He was absolutely right," Jude says.

And there it is: the first real thing in the room. The first sentence that belongs to Micah rather than to grief.

We keep going.

He worked at Summit House Climbing Gym.

He loved lakes, loud music, and weather.

He made people feel welcome in under ten seconds.

He was thinking about the mountains.

That last one I say before I fully know why I'm saying it. Jude writes it down anyway. Mom looks at me, curious, but not yet. That conversation belongs to tomorrow.

By five, we have something that might survive the newspaper.

Jude stands in the doorway before he leaves.

"This part is ugly," he says. "It stays ugly for a while. Don't turn that into a spiritual problem."

I almost laugh. Even now, he knows where I'd be tempted to go — to make theology do crowd control.

"Okay."

"Eat something if you can. Sleep if you can." He puts a hand on my shoulder. "And if you can't, call."

After he leaves, the house goes quiet in the particular way houses do when the helpful person has gone and only the family remains.

Mom goes upstairs early. I stack casserole dishes in the fridge until there isn't room for the milk. I throw away half a bag of bagels because I can't look at them.

At 8:13, my phone buzzes.

Unknown number.

Voicemail.

I let it sit for an hour before I listen.

"Hi, Caleb. This is Stephanie Marsh."

Her voice is smaller than it was on the lake. Smaller than it was in any loop, which is not a useful comparison anymore and yet my mind still makes it, reflexively, as if the old architecture might somehow reassert itself if I keep feeding it data.

"I know you don't know me well," she says. "I just... I wanted to say his name out loud to someone who loved him. Micah. My son is alive because of your brother. We are praying for your family. I know that may not help. But we are."

A pause. She breathes.

"You do not owe me a call back."

The message ends.

I sit on the edge of the bed with the phone in my hand and the dark gathering in the corners of the room. Micah's name is still in the air.

Tomorrow I will go into his room.

Tonight I can only stand outside the door and rest my hand against the frame and think of my brother in a navy shirt he hated, laughing at his own funeral clothes before they were funeral clothes, before Monday existed, before there was paperwork and pound cake and strangers with catalogs.

I stand there a long time.