Page 7 of Four Weddings and a Funeral Director
Lily
Sure, the line till death do us part is a core component of any wedding vow, but Lily hadn’t expected the death part to arrive before she’d even presided over an actual wedding.
She couldn’t shake the faces of Fran and Derrick – nor the fact that her favourite handbag had become the resting place for a corpse’s head.
(She hoped this wouldn’t preclude her from listing it on Poshmark, but she’d have to check the terms and conditions. And maybe lie a little.)
As she always did when she was dealing with stress – for example trying to talk her serial monogamist mother through yet another one of her disastrous relationship breakdowns or accepting that the perfect shoes she’d bought off Etsy were too narrow or having two people abruptly die in front of her at the cinema – Lily threw herself into her work.
This was probably a good thing, as her phone had been ringing off the hook with people enquiring about her services (and on a couple of occasions, about the funeral parlour’s services, but she was getting good at forwarding those).
Speaking of the phone, it was ringing again.
‘Hi, this is Venus,’ came a smooth woman’s voice over the phone. It was the voice of someone who spent a good deal of their life livestreaming their every thought to a captive audience. Which of course Venus, as the sole heiress to one of the nation’s largest toothpaste empires, absolutely did.
Lily tried to modulate her voice so that she sounded cool, calm and professional, and not like she’d secretly been following Venus’s relationship exploits across every fashion blog, podcast and dental office magazine for as long as she could remember.
There was the Greek mouthwash heir, then the co-founder of the mail-order orthodontics start-up that had mysteriously shuttered in the night, and most recently the DIY fluoridation entrepreneur.
(Venus tended to stick within a particular niche when it came to her dating life.)
‘Venus!’ Lily exclaimed, her voice breaking and coming out in a squeak.
Oh well, she’d tried.
‘Lily, I’m so glad we connected. I knew that Honour Nivola would come through with the backup wedding planner goods after I showed up on her doorstep that night – she just has good karmic juju like that, wouldn’t you say?’
Lily didn’t know the specifics of how this had happened, but Honour Nivola was somehow tangentially connected to Annika, who had a job in PR and therefore was about two degrees of Kevin Bacon away from most people in the world.
Lily had had no personal contact with Honour, although she did love Effanie, the villain she played in the daytime soap Time After Time , which was second only to Passions in its narrative brilliance.
Who could have guessed that Brooks Masters had a secret twin called Masters Brooks?
Or that Ainsley Harlow would somehow return from her coma after three years to drive her pink Cadillac into the living room of her cheating husband’s mansion?
‘Absolutely, she’s fab.’ Lily couldn’t wait to share the details of this call with Annika.
‘I’m sure you’ve been given the basic rundown, but the energy is flowing today, and I thought I’d give you a call to send it out your way. Put it out there, you know?’
‘Can’t argue with the energy,’ said Lily.
‘So as you’ve probably gleaned from the fact that we’ve rented a fifty-acre space on a microgreens farm – friends of the family, they’re such darlings, so down to earth – we’re looking for something earthy, green, a boho vibe.
Very low-key, rustic. Please, spend whatever you need to make it look rustic. ’
‘I … can absolutely manage that,’ said Lily, who in fact was a bit alarmed by the statement. She’d never had a blank cheque to work with before, and the responsibility was worrying. But surely Venus hadn’t meant whatever whatever. Everyone had a budget, didn’t they?
They were interrupted by a hammering at the door.
Or rather, given the hulking, black-clad figure she’d caught a glimpse of through the front windows, less a hammering and more of a Poe-esque rapping, rapping at her chamber door.
Mort. Lily wondered how he was doing after last night, although maybe he wasn’t fazed at all.
Perhaps it was completely normal for him to scoop up a couple of corpses as part of a night out.
‘Let’s get a meeting on the books, Venus,’ she said, getting out her planner and a glittery highlighter. (Lily had a weak spot for stationery, but who didn’t.) ‘How’s Friday, 10 a.m.?’
‘Oh. Well, I don’t actually believe in linear time, you know? I find it awfully restrictive. How about I have my assistant handle that for you. She’s wonderful at her work. Much better than the last three. Anyway. Toodles.’
Venus rang off to wash her hair in a sensory-deprivation chamber, or whatever it was that toothpaste heiresses who don’t believe in time did in their spare moments, and Lily hurried – no wait, walked leisurely – no wait, walked at a normal pace – no wait, oh, whatever, she was doing her best – to the front door.
The bell above the door tinkled as she let Mort in, ignoring the flop of her heart as she drank in the way his black shirt, which he wore with the sleeves rolled back, hung on his muscular arms, just so.
Did Mort … work out ? She couldn’t picture him skating on the spot on an elliptical or grunting over a barbell.
Maybe lugging bodies around built muscles. Did funeral directors lug bodies?
If so, had he lugged the bodies of Derrick and Fran back down the hill last night?
No, she couldn’t be thinking like that. The village’s dead were her new neighbours.
And Mort was their mayor. In a manner of speaking.
She had to get used to it, or she’d end up with bodies permanently on the brain, and that did not bode well for her wedding planning ambitions.
Squaring her shoulders, she mentally swept the bodies of Derrick and Fran under the rug. (A metaphorical rug, but a big metaphorical rug.)
‘What can I do for you, Lurch?’ she said cheerily to Mort.
‘You could update your mailing address.’ Mort handed over a small box. ‘These were misdelivered to me. Business cards. You should use Tink next time. She’s great, and will even hand-deliver them to the right address.’
‘Oh go on, Roddy’s doing his best. Ah, you opened them, I see.
’ Lily pulled open the box, admiring the cards.
The printer, one she’d used often back in La Jolla, had done a fabulous job – all that foiling and debossing, and the way the cards folded together in a kiss!
Glorious. She demonstrated, and Mort nodded brusquely.
‘They were addressed to Eternal Elegance. Easy mistake to make. Although …’ Arms folded, he took in the very cheerful, very bright decor of Lily’s shop.
Lily grinned as she spun a quick circle, gesturing at the library catalogue cabinets she’d repurposed for stationery, the balloon corner, and her favourite bit: the flower wall, which ran amok with a rainbow of gerberas and sunflowers and ranunculi.
She hadn’t got around to painting the desk, but she had a hot pink tub of paint on standby.
‘Our businesses couldn’t be more different, could they? ’
‘My clients are certainly easier to manage.’
‘Grim. But probably accurate,’ she agreed.
Mort browsed through the display of wedding favours adorning a bright yellow table: vintage-looking matchbooks, stained-glass granola jars, gold records, little bags of potpourri. Did he linger on the hacky sacks?
‘What on earth are these … doodads?’ he asked, appalled. He prodded a pyramid made from tiny jars of honey with decorative bees on top.
‘Wedding favours. The couple gives them to guests as gifts.’
‘Ah, because they’re doing said couple a favour by attending?’
Rude. So rude. But not entirely wrong.
Was there a touch of a smile there? Lily suspected he was teasing more than judging.
‘Sometimes they are indeed. It’s probably the same at your funerals, though.’ Lily accordioned the kissing business card in and out. ‘You should get Tink to make you some of these. The punters would come running.’
Mort shook his head. ‘And what do you propose the design would consist of? A body being plopped into a casket? A casket being lowered into the ground?’
‘You could get some nice texturing if you added grass,’ Lily said thoughtfully. ‘Maybe some hands, and a dove.’
‘I’ll let my marketing manager know,’ Mort noted wryly.
‘You should definitely have them reconsider your uniform. It’s very … Gomez Addams.’
‘Next time I’ll wear my orange boiler suit,’ said Mort, now peering through a disposable camera wrapped with a cardboard sleeve that could be personalised with a couple’s preferred design.
(Even better, every photo came out watermarked with a bespoke romantic message.) ‘I bought it for an OSHA-related funeral.’
Lily folded her arms. ‘You didn’t.’
‘I didn’t. I look terrible in orange. Washes out my complexion.’
Lily could see how this could be true. Was he simply afraid of the sun, or had he not seen a steak in a solid ten years?
He had the porcelain skin of, well, the porcelain dolls that Lily’s terrifying step-cousin Pomona collected.
Oh well, for all her faults, Pomona and her dolls were keeping climate-controlled storage units in business.
‘At least you have the makeup for that. Hey, was everything … all right last night? With Fran and Derrick?’
Okay, so not mentioning Fran and Derrick wasn’t going so well. But she was a novice to this whole death thing. She was entitled to at least one question.
Mort sniffed a custom candle (tailorable to your unique couple’s scent). ‘As all right as it could be. They were definitely dead.’