Page 34 of Four Weddings and a Funeral Director

Mort

Like any film buff, even as one steeped mostly in the scarier side of what the movies had to offer, Mort had seen My Big Fat Greek Wedding .

He’d chuckled along and had even come around to the value of Windex as the ultimate panacea.

But he hadn’t anticipated that he’d end up hosting one.

Because weddings weren’t really his remit.

Or at least, hadn’t been until recently.

Mort knew the deceased, of course; he knew just about everyone who ended up wheeled through the funeral home’s doors in some capacity.

Christos Georgiou had been a semi-famous local architect known for his ability to seamlessly add modern extensions to the storybook houses of Mirage-by-the-Sea without violating any of the heritage laws.

You’d never know from the street, but if you snuck into many of the village’s back gardens, you’d find multi-storey additions with vast floor-to-ceiling windows, ivy-wrapped greenhouses, and elaborate tiered gardens with squared-off fish ponds all overhung by glass-framed patios that made it feel like you were hovering over a magical forest.

Christos had consulted on the funeral home’s pre-switcheroo casket displays and had helped Gramps expand the consultation room.

The expansive windows had been his addition, although the cupcake-patterned chiffon curtains that now adorned them had not.

That said, they were starting to grow on Mort, and the families seemed to like them.

Even if they’d increased the client consumption of complimentary cake by a degree, that was not good for Mort’s bottom line.

Or his waistline. Which in turn was not good for his EKG line.

At least Mort had cultivated a strict fitness routine over the years – he was not about to invite Death in by slacking on his daily push-up regimen.

‘Sorry for your loss.’ Mort greeted the black-clad mourners one after another, turning his head to ignore the grille that connected the two Eternal Elegances – and the flashes from last night that simply would not stop bubbling up at this incredibly inappropriate time.

He was meant to be overseeing a funeral, not thoughts of Lily’s body.

He should be mourning a dead guy, not the chance with the girl next door that he’d horribly, irrevocably blown.

‘Christos’s buildings live on,’ said a burly man Mort recognised as a local general contractor. Mick something, or so the personalised licence plates on his enormous work truck parked out back proclaimed.

‘He designed my favourite rooflines,’ sobbed Timbo Jones, the roofer who’d come in to assist with the post-switcheroo leaks.

(‘Can’t explain it. Roof’s sound. Just a freak leak.

That’ll be five hundred bucks.’) He’d since become one of Lily’s best friends, and regularly stopped by to taste-test the club sandwiches she was trying out for upcoming weddings.

According to the commentary Mort had overhead through the grille that joined the two businesses, Timbo was a fan of sandwich pickles, but had thoughts about smoked salmon.

‘Mort!’

Angela and Tink swanned through the door in head-to- toe black lace (polka-dot lace in Tink’s case), looking like an extremely cool punk rocker duo. Tink definitely played drums, while Angela definitely sang while attacking a bass guitar.

‘You knew Christos?’ Mort leaned in for an awkward hug.

‘My uncle,’ said Angela. ‘Or thereabouts. The man got around, let me tell you. I’m not sure where I saw him more often: at family dinners, or in my real estate listings. Speaking of, we need to talk about Whispering Waters.’

Mort nodded. They did in fact need to talk about that, because there was no way that Mort was shipping off Gramps to that place. (Unless Gramps kept up the snoring.)

‘I’ll never forget that grill out on the beach,’ said Tink dreamily. ‘Just us and the ocean and half the contents of the ocean on a firepit. And wine. So much home-made wine.’

‘Retsina, my first great love.’ Angela dramatically clutched her hands to her heart. ‘Oh, there’s my Yia-yia. I gotta go say hi – make sure I keep my rightful place in her will. Joking, joking.’ She dropped her voice to a stage whisper. ‘Half joking.’

‘Quarter joking.’ Tink waggled her fingers in a toodles and strode off to sign the guest book. ‘Oh look, someone’s drawn a dick. Three dicks. Mort, what’s your policy on dicks?’

Mort groaned internally. The funeral home had various policies on dicks, depending on what part of the funeral one was talking about.

But in general they had a no-dick policy when it came to the guest book.

This hadn’t typically been a problem in the past, but since the switcheroo, there’d been an alarming uptick in drunken dick drawings. And off-colour jokes during the eulogy.

‘I’ll get the white-out.’

Mort stalked over to his office to grab the pencil case he kept inside his desk drawer for stationery emergencies. But as he made his way back to the foyer, a scene at the viewing room caught his attention.

Mort stopped in his tracks. A group of suit-clad men were gathered around the coffin.

Well, not around the coffin, precisely. They’d hauled Mr Georgiou out of said coffin and had propped him up against its side.

This was, of course, against every single rule or regulation in the funeral director’s handbook, and several laws as well.

‘What’s going on in here?’ asked Mort, brandishing his pencil case.

The group of mourners – if mourners was the word given the upbeat mood in the room – stepped back. One held a squirt can of shaving cream, while another held a fancy, multi-bladed razor with a lovely ergonomic grip. All held guilty expressions on their faces.

‘We’re shaving the corpse,’ explained a guy Mort recognised from the local hardware store. Alex, from memory. He’d helped Mort pick out a safety ladder a few years back.

‘But … why?’ Mort had personally ensured that Mr Georgiou had been stubble-free during the embalming and makeup session. Speaking of makeup, the men had scraped half of it off with the razor. Poor Mr Georgiou looked like he’d been attacked by a bear. Several bears.

‘It symbolises his separation from his family,’ said another of the men. ‘And since I’m currently going through a divorce, I’m top choice for the blade.’

The man went in for another scrape with the razor – he clearly had some unfinished business with his divorce lawyer.

Mort had heard enough about Angela’s family’s escapades that he knew the tradition. And while he wasn’t an authority on Greek funerals, he was fairly certain that this was not a funeral tradition. The switcheroo was at it again.

‘Give me that,’ he said, snatching away the razor from the deceased’s ageing friends.

The divorced guy tried to grab the razor back. ‘Hey! That’s a good one! It’s got the fancy head and the built-in soap. Its native habitat is in a locked case at CVS.’

Mort was thankful – as he often was – for his great height. He’d been a childhood keep-away champion, and his prodigiousness in this area of life continued to bless him. If he’d been more of a joiner (and didn’t take issue with sand being in his bits) he might have been a volleyball champion.

‘Look, we can honour the deceased,’ he said. ‘And we should. But scraping at his skin with a rusty metal blade is not how it’s done.’

‘Boo,’ said one of the would-be shavers, swigging from a slender bottle of Ouzo. ‘Boo!’

Mort ushered them out of the viewing area and back to the eulogy room, where a group of mourners was clustered around the deceased’s widow, who had overdone it on the sugared almonds and was snoring like a champ. Were they … writing on her shoes?

‘It’s so we can see who’ll be next,’ whispered a pretty young woman he recognised as a regular from The Hot Pot. She crossed her fingers as she used a sparkly pink pen to write her name on the bottom of the widow’s best black pumps.

The switcheroo was really pushing its luck at this funeral, thought Mort.

Maybe it was the scale of the thing – there were hundreds of mourners milling around, hurling rice and bopping along to Zorba’s dance.

And those who weren’t inside the funeral home were cruising past the back of the building in their cars, honking cheery tunes on their car horns.

The town’s Nextdoor group had plenty to keep them occupied.

But amidst the chaos, which Mort was doing his best to quell with his patented Placating Hands? and Gentle Hushing Voice ? , came a noise that caused horror to rise in his heart.

A high-pitched smashing sound. The sound of porcelain hitting the floor.

Lots of porcelain. About a hundred and fifty pieces of it, in fact.

Mort’s eyes widened. He followed the source of the smashing to the kitchen, where he’d been storing Lily’s carefully curated stack of kitschy mismatching porcelain ahead of the toothpaste heiress’s wedding.

A half dozen aunties danced around, grabbing plates from the stack and hurling them to the floor.

They cheered and twirled with each smash, clapping their hands with the kind of joy that made Mort wonder whether Christos’s death had in fact been due to suspicious circumstances. The women were giddily happy.

‘Not that one,’ he snapped, grabbing the rooster plate that Lily had wanted to claim for herself, and positioning it high up in the cabinets. ‘Everyone out! We’ll be heading to the cemetery soon enough, and I expect you to be on your most funereal behaviour until then.’

The women sauntered out, one of them giving him the evil eye. Mort gave her one right back – with all the ills that the switcheroo was raining upon him, he wasn’t scared of an extra curse or two. All right, perhaps a little.

‘You can ride up front,’ he called placatingly to her back.

He sighed, stooping to gather the shards of the hundreds of plates that carpeted the floor like a dusting of extremely sharp snow.

Alas, he thought, sucking at a cut on his thumb and hoping it wouldn’t turn septic – 350,000 Americans died of sepsis every year – this was a job for the big broom and the big bucket.

‘There you are.’ Angela poked her head around the doorframe. ‘Wow, did we have an earthquake?’

‘Just some very intense mourning.’ Mort scraped a pile of plate shards into the bucket.

Angela picked her way across the floor towards the dessert table, which groaned aromatically with pistachio-topped pastries. ‘You’re going to need a bigger bucket.’

‘I think you’re right.’ Mort couldn’t see the carpet through all the shards. ‘The worst part about it is that these aren’t even my plates. They’re Lily’s.’

Angela paused, mid bite of baklava. ‘Lily has an extensive collection of plates she keeps at your place? Why not start small? Like a toothbrush.’

Mort spluttered. ‘No, no, it’s not like that.’

Although it was like that, after last night. Or could be. Mort could still feel Lily’s lips on his neck, could still see the delicious shape of her body right there in front of him, inviting him to explore it …

Mort! You’re at a funeral! Funerals and sexy thoughts were mutually incompatible, even with the switcheroo looming over everything.

‘The plates are for a wedding,’ he explained, mopping his forehead with his skull-patterned kerchief. When had it got so hot in here?

‘Well, at least they smashed the plates and not the baklava.’ Angela closed her eyes dreamily as she chewed on a mouthful of honeyed pastry.

‘I can’t resist it. It’s just so good. Pistachios.

Filo pastry. It’s heaven on a plate. I sort of feel like Christos would want me to eat it.

So, I hear you stopped by Whispering Waters.

With Christos gone, you’ve got an extra residence to choose from.

This one has ocean glimpses, and an original pink bathroom. ’

‘I need to think about it,’ said Mort.

‘You’re bleeding, by the way.’ Angela pulled a Band-Aid from her giant handbag. (Realtors always came prepared.)

Mort wrapped the Band-Aid around his finger, then with a sigh went to fetch the broom and bucket he kept in the janitorial closet.

How was he going to explain this to Lily?

She’d worked so hard on the weird hippie wedding, and now the fabulous plating styling she’d organised was a pile of shards that even the most diligent archaeologist would struggle to put back together.

He could imagine her lips turning down at the corners, and her chin doing that slightly walnutty, wobbly thing, like when she’d knocked on the door worried that Esmeralda had disappeared (but was just at a neighbour’s eating a second dinner. Third dinner, probably.)

He’d fix this. He’d come up with a way to fix this. Even if it meant individually gluing together every single plate in the stack until Lily had something to serve her uncooked retirement home food on.

Wait, there! A plate had survived the drop to the ground, courtesy of a well-placed napkin.

Mort was reminded of the egg drops his class had done from the school roof in fifth grade.

Mort picked up the plate and held it aloft.

It was a sign that not everything was ruined. That something could be salvaged.

‘Opa!’ came the cry from behind Mort. ‘ Opa!!!! ’

Mort, who never responded well to people bellowing in his ear, dropped the plate, which shattered on the tiles.

Smashing, he thought.