Page 25 of Four Weddings and a Funeral Director
Mort
Ah yes, the endless weepy hugs that came with being a funeral director.
Mort was presently enveloped in a bosomy embrace that seemed to have gone on a solid minute too long.
(Alas, not even a switcheroo thing, but a came-with-the-territory thing.) Over the sturdy shoulder of Aunt Agnes, he could see a line of similarly distraught women waiting for their turn at the hug dispenser.
There was entirely too much physical contact involved in this job. And none of it the good kind, like how Lily had gently reached for his hand last night …
No, no, Mort. Stop right there. Feelings were bad. They inevitably ended in pain. And there was a high possibility that said pain involved death.
Exhibit A: the funeral he was overseeing this very moment.
This was what happened when you loved someone.
They carked it and left you with endless decisions to make about caskets and flowers and liturgies.
Not to mention the estate. Oh, the angsting over estates that Mort had endured throughout his youth, and now, especially now, as the de facto psychiatrist in the room.
Estates were terrible things because they meant divvying up assets, or worse, debts.
Given that he’d seen family members fighting over lasagne apportionment, the prospect of dividing up a home was a thing to be feared.
There. Mort felt much more grounded after that. All thoughts of Lily were gone. It was just Mort and the corpse and the hugging women. And now a man.
‘I miss her,’ sobbed the man, unloading a set of false teeth on Mort’s lapel. Mort gingerly handed them back using his pocket square as a buffer. ‘She was my queen. My queen !’
‘Uncle Irv ,’ said a woman with a magnificent purple rinse through her hair. Ah, Cousin Domenica. ‘Beverley wasn’t your queen. She was Poppy Clive’s queen. Remember?’
‘No! Not Clive’s!’ Uncle Irv’s eyes were red-rimmed. (The potential cause of this seemed manifold.)
Mort suspected there might be some skeletons in the Alberi family closet, and not all of them in the casket at the front of the room.
‘How about we take our seats,’ Mort said gently. ‘We’ll begin the service shortly.’
‘Me first! Bags the shotgun seat,’ shouted Uncle Irv, muscling several aunties and a few kids out of the way.
Not trusting Uncle Irv to behave for the duration of the service, Mort ran to fetch a Rubik’s cube to keep him busy. Hopefully Irv wasn’t a pro at algorithmic problem solving. (He’d run into this issue before.)
Finally, the rowdy crowd settled down, and the pastor stepped forward to begin the eulogy. But the siblings weren’t having it. The purple-rinse woman pulled a knife from her purse and started banging it against a funeral urn from Mort’s display.
‘Toast time!’ bellowed a guy in a Seventies velvet suit with astonishingly expansive flares.
‘ Roast time,’ corrected Cousin Domenica.
Ah. So here came the switcheroo action. Mort desperately wished he’d stocked up on distractions and diversions.
There was a slinky somewhere in one of the back rooms, and from memory a game of Hungry, Hungry Hippos in one of the cabinets of the morgue.
But they weren’t enough to distract from the fact that Purple Rinse was carefully working through sixty years of the deceased’s sexual exploits in strict chronological order.
‘And then there’s the horrible kids,’ howled Cousin Domenica. ‘I see you here, counting your inheritance on your little phones. That should’ve been mine. Poppy Clive, you’ve got some explaining to do!’
‘Don’t blame me,’ shouted Poppy Clive. ‘The kids are Uncle Irv’s doing.’
‘I told you she was my queen!’ Uncle Irv leapt up in his chair and flung his solved Rubik’s cube at Poppy Clive’s shiny head.
He missed by a fraction. The cube bounced off the coffin, leaving a smudgy red dent.
‘How else do you think they all got into MIT? It certainly wasn’t your brains, Mr Unranked Two-Year Technical College. ’
(Well, that explained the speed cubing and the terrible arm. Apparently a lot of temperamental MIT alumni retired to Mirage-by-the-Sea.)
Mort tried to position himself between Poppy Clive and Uncle Irv, who it seemed had some unfinished business that spanned generations. Specifically, the generation that came directly after theirs. ‘Um, let’s move on to the next part of this … celebration of life.’
‘Righto. Who’s ready for the bouquet toss?
’ Sister Margaret (sister as in genealogically, not as in the devoted to Christ type) had grabbed the bouquet of lilies from the casket and had leapt atop a chair.
Her back to the crowd, she held the bouquet between her knees, ready to show Uncle Irv a thing or two about hurling things across a room.
A bouquet toss was not what Mort had in mind.
‘We don’t really …’ Mort swallowed. ‘That’s more the remit of next door.’
But the mourners – revellers really – were not having it. A gaggle of wrinkled women had shoved aside the chairs that Mort had carefully set out that morning and were primed for a crucial moment of athleticism.
‘Let ’er rip, Marge!’ shouted Aunt Agnes, whom Mort did not doubt for a second was ready to perform a tackle if needed. She’d absolutely played rugby during her college years. Her quads strained as she settled into a catching pose.
‘Agnes, you were first to get married. You’re not wining this race, too,’ grumbled Cousin Domenica, who had no shortage of grievances today.
She’d been fourth in the family to be married, although she’d managed it four times, so perhaps she’d prevailed in the end.
Well, her wedding planners had, anyway, although Mort wasn’t sure that wedding planners had been a thing half a century ago. He’d ask Lily next time he saw her.
‘Please let it be me,’ wheezed Great-Great-Auntie Petunia, who was hooked up to enough oxygen to keep a submarine crew underwater for a solid six months.
For some reason she carried a bucket filled with kitchen utensils.
(Advanced age brought out odd proclivities in people.) ‘I don’t ask for much … only death.’
It was a fair ask, Mort had to admit.
There was jostling and grumbling as the mourning women hoicked up their skirts and kicked off their shoes in preparation for the athletic feat about to follow.
‘And a-one! And a-two! And a …’ Sister Margaret hurled the lilies over her head and into the circling crowd of funereal sharks.
It was a solid throw: Sister Margaret had a better arm than Uncle Irv, and the lilies flew through the air on an impressive arcing trajectory, racing through the too-slow grabbing hands of Aunt Agnes and tumbling to the floor.
It was a bloodbath. Great-aunts and sisters and cousins-twice-removed and a bearded gentleman with The Dude vibes who’d introduced himself as the pool guy descended in a frenzy of high kicks and elbow jabs and hair pulling.
Mort had never seen anybody at a wedding so desperate to catch the bouquet.
And he’d certainly never seen anyone at a funeral fight to be next in line to die.
Through all the chaos, Great-Great-Aunt Petunia was sneaking in on her chair, brandishing a pair of tongs she’d pulled from the quiver on her back like some sort of elderly kitchen-hand assassin.
A snapping of tongs – not quite, almost … yes! The tongs grabbed at the bouquet, clasping at the ribbon that held it together. Great-Great Aunt Petunia yanked it towards her like a fisherman triumphantly landing a fish, then cradled it like said fisherman in his dating app photo.
‘I got it!’ whispered Great-Great Aunt Petunia, a tear trickling down her wrinkled cheek. ‘Oh, happy day.’
Mort swallowed. This was not precisely how he would’ve categorised the outcome, but she seemed happy, and who was he to argue with that?
Bouquet in her lap, Great-Great-Aunt Petunia rolled up to Mort. She reached for a black Glomesh purse, pulling from it a hefty pen and a not-so-hefty chequebook.
‘Mr Mort, will you do me the honour of being my funeral planner?’
Mort spluttered. This was almost as romantic a proposal as the one that had caused this whole situation.
And then, because the switcheroo couldn’t get enough of making fun of poor, sad old Mort and his dreadful career choice, Beyoncé’s ‘Crazy in Love’ started blasting over the speakers.
Once he’d taken Great-Great-Aunt Petunia’s deposit, Mort went off shakily to the kitchen to pour himself a champagne.