Luck by Joan Barfoot Page B

doors are heavy—however do the frail or the elderly manage them?—then inside comes the sudden silence of a different world all its own: of chilled and dimly unnatural light, of dark woods and ivory wallpaper with faint ferny-green tracings, of dark red, worn carpet runner underfoot, of—she can’t say what exactly, but something like reverence.
    Can she do this?
    Just watch her.
    A discreet buzzer has sounded with the opening and closing of the door. Now here’s the surprise: from a doorway along to the right bounds a blond open-faced man in bluejeans and smudged baseball-team T-shirt, hand outstretched like a pudgy salesman, and fifty if he’s a day. Not remotely who she’s looking for. “Hello, I’m Hendrik Anderson,” he says, and the voice confirms this is so. “Pardon the outfit. I was trying to catch up with my garden.”
    Is that obsessive—digging one way or another in one sort of soil, potential soil, or another? What’s that under his fingernails?
    He’s shorter than Sophie. Men often are, she is used to casting eyes downwards over a view of foreheads and scalps, as their eyes are cast upwards. She prefers not having to do this. She does not care to
loom.
And with men who are taller than she, there’s a nice sense of being protected, even if protection is unsought. Or untrue. Look at Phil.
    To look at Phil is why Sophie is here.
    “I am sorry,” says this chubby, blue-eyed, professional observer of grief, “for your loss. It must be a shock. And for the widow. An unhappy business but, as I’ve said, I’m here to make it easier, at least in the most practical ways.” This sounds less unctuous face to face than it did over the phone. “Anything I can do.”
    She thrusts the gym bag and Nora’s note into his hands. Sink or swim. “There
is
something you can do, as a matter of fact. I want to see him.”
    He steps back. Looks at his watch. “If you come back late this afternoon, that should be possible. If you’ve decided to hold a visitation after all, I expect we could be prepared by then.”
    “No. I mean now.”
    His mouth loops into a downturn of distress. “I beg your pardon? Do you mean you want to
see
him now? Oh, but I’m afraid, no, he isn’t prepared, not by any means. In a fewhours, but now, no.” This must be a hard line of work. Although he chose it, and why would a person decide to make a living moulding cold stony flesh? In times and places of disease and starvation and violent hatred, there are acknowledgements of griefs, yes, but not so much in the way of elaborately manufactured arrangement of feature and limb. There are brief, desperate, profound obeisances to mortality and that’s it. Less than that, even, in times and places of slaughter. This man is lucky, whether he knows it or not. Probably not. People don’t.
    “Now,” Sophie repeats. She thinks if he were as adamant as he sounds, or as adamant as she is, his mouth would not look distressed.
    “I’m so sorry, but he’s not even in an area open to the public.” As if that is the most compelling argument he can make. Do mourners, or just people with secrets, never make odd demands? Do they, for instance, not sometimes express a desire to regard the dead as they are, not as they could be once made false and presentable?
    On the other hand, if his profession is death, it must also be life. The lives, specifically, of the bereaved, most of whom likely do require protection from the most raw and bare aspects of their bereavements.
    Which has nothing to do with Sophie.
    Still, she is disarmed by appearance: that he is not what she expected. This Hendrik Anderson could belong to any glad-handing service club in the town—and is there a code of ethics for people who run funeral homes, to do with the privacies and indiscretions of mourners? Otherwise how irresistible to whisper tales of not only the non-wife’s unusual role in arranging proceedings and delivering clothes, but also of the same non-wife’s