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That made me feel pretty sure Jake wasn’t going anywhere.

“Do you want a coat?” he asked me.

“No, I’m good with just my blazer. It’s kind of balmy today.”

Jake lifted his suit jacket off of the back of the kitchen chair and shrugged into it. “Then we’re good to go.”

Mary’s service was at Chambers Funeral Home and just a few minutes drive from our house. There was a hefty turnout and Jake had to drop me and Grandma off at the entrance before going off in search of a far away parking spot. He was attending with us because Clifford had been his baseball coach in middle school and he had also had a lot of mutual acquaintances with Mary in the neighborhood.

I was obviously prepared for there to be a lot of people inside. I wasn’t prepared for the vast quantity of dead people that were hanging around.

It just about smacked me in the face as soon as we walked in.

I saw dead people.

Since my newfound spiritual mediumship had commenced, this was my first funeral and I really hoped it would be the last for a very long time.

There was no rhyme or reason to who was in attendance.

It was like an accumulation of ghosts going back to the funeral home’s inception. There were elderly men in slim fitting suits with skinny ties, men with toupees and leisure suits, and one man even in an eighties velvet tracksuit. The women were like a parade of fashion from the last seventy years as well, with swing skirts giving way to polyester suits and shoulder pads. Most disturbing of all was a young teen girl in an early two thousands pink sparkly prom dress, her hair in coils and her eyebrows razor thin.

“I feel like I’m going to be sick,” I murmured to Grandma. “It’s like breathing in the afterlife in here.”

She patted my hand. “Just don’t make eye contact.”

I had no idea what I would do if I didn’t at least have her trust and belief in what I was seeing because there was no way a nonbeliever wouldn’t think I was completely and totally insane.

The overall vibe I was getting was heavy and oppressive, like a blanket of sadness smothering me. Grandma was greeting her friends and they were all shuffling around the room to look at the photos of Mary and the guest book, which didn’t help my mood either. Shuffling can be creepy under the wrong circumstances. Most circumstances.

“You think we’re going to be ready for Opening Night?” Anne barked at me.

I had learned over the past week and a half that Anne barked instead of simply speaking.

“Well, considering that I have no idea what I’m doing and Thisbe is terrified to hold any sort of knife, we won’t be ready to go pro, but we’ll be okay.”

Grandma had gotten, while not her dream role, a bigger part taking over for poor Mary, but she refused to hold a knife, so we were going with a plastic knife compliments of the kid’s toy department at Target. I didn’t blame her. I looked at our kitchen knives at home with a whole new light when I was chopping vegetables for Jake to sauté.

Anne just grunted and stomped away, presumably to bark at someone else.

“She’s trying to get her hooks into Clifford now that he’s single but she has stiff competition. No pun intended,” Grandma said.

That almost made me laugh. “We’re at Mary’s service. I feel like maybe the ladies should leave Clifford alone.”

“You can’t let the grass grow under your feet if you want to hook a man in his eighties. I’m not sure which is coming at him faster—death or a dozen widows. There’s no time to lethim grieve. Besides, he’s loaded. Tons of money. He’ll have a sweetheart by next week, mark my words.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being single.”

“How happy were you single?” she scoffed.

“I was fine,” I protested. “You’re single. You’re fine.”

“I’m built different from most women.”

I had no idea what that meant and I wasn’t asking.

“Oh, crap, here comes Sara Murphy.” Grandma moved faster than she had since they closed Kmart and marked everything ninety percent off fifteen years ago. She disappeared into a crowd of mourners and left me to take the brunt of Sara’s hugging and sobbing.

“It’s just so awful!” she said, squeezing me tightly. “I’m so glad you’re here.”