I guess that meant Wendy knew where the office safe was. I went to his bedroom and opened the closet. His clothes—myriad shirts, slacks, and three suits—still hung inside. On the left side of the closet were banker boxes and a guitar case with my father’s Martin guitar. I pulled them away from the wall to reveal the safe, then set the paper with the instructions on the floor.
Home Safe
23 R – 32 L – 51 R
My first attempt at opening it wasn’t successful, which didn’t surprise me. In my experience, safes were hard to get into even with the combination. My ex-husband had a safe and not once had I gotten into it, though I’ve since considered that he had purposely given me the wrong combination. He had secrets.
I spun the dial around a few times to clear it, then tried again without success. I tried a third and fourth time, each time more carefully moving the dial, before finally giving up and deciding to try again later.
CHAPTER eight
A writer’s job is to give us moments that last a lifetime.
—Robert McKee
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 31
A funeral isn’t a whole lot different from a book signing—except there are no books, no signing, and not a lot of author interaction. It didn’t surprise me that my father had planned his own funeral. It would have been a surprise if he hadn’t. My father was an event planner extraordinaire. It came naturally to him. One of the quotes he dropped on me from time to time was “Those who fail to plan are planning to fail.”
I remember a book signing my father had held with a new author named James Redfield. Redfield had just released a book called The Celestine Prophecy. My father had an instinct about books, and he had scheduled the signing months before the book became a blockbuster bestseller. By the time the book signing came around, The Celestine Prophecy was the bestselling book in the country, maybe even the world.
More than three thousand people turned out for a book signing at our little bookstore that barely held fifty people. Even the local press showed up. I remember watching the cameramen walk up and down the line interviewing excited attendees.
My father was prepared with extra staff, streamlined book purchasing beneath tents outside the store, and stanchioned-off lines to control the crowds. The event came off flawlessly, and my mother reported that even Redfield claimed to be impressed.
My father had planned his funeral as meticulously as that book signing, though I’m pretty sure he was unhappy about having to pass it off to someone else for execution. That someone was Wendy.
I left the house a few minutes before nine, walking less than a block to the church where his funeral was being held. There was a sleek black hearse backed up to a side door, with the mortuary’s name emblazoned on the side.
To my surprise, there was a line of cars on the street waiting to turn into the church parking lot. My first thought was that the church was simultaneously hosting two events. My father, as I remembered him, had always been a quiet man and a bit of a homebody, less happy in a crowd than reclined in his easy chair with a book. I had no idea my father even knew this many people.
I stomped the snow off my feet then walked into the church. There was already a line of mourners that stretched the length of the main church corridor before disappearing around a corner. I walked up to the door where the line fed into the room with my father’s casket. Standing by the door was an older, silver-haired man wearing a black suit with a gold badge that read BEARD MORTUARY. The man put out his arm to stop me from entering.
“Excuse me, ma’am, the line for the viewing starts around that corner,” he said. “Some of these people have been waiting for several hours.”
I looked at him incredulously. “I’m his daughter.”
“You’re whose daughter?”
“Robert Book’s,” I said. “The deceased.”
The man flushed. “I’m so sorry. Please, go right in.”
I shook my head. Just another reminder that I was an outsider. I pressed my way into the crowded room.
Most of the mourners were my father’s age, but not all. The people gathered were as eclectic as the books he sold. With the exception of somber whispers of consolation, the room was quiet. It was a far cry from the last funeral I’d been to. Three years earlier I had gone to a wake for my ex’s uncle. The service was held at a country club with an open bar. The noise level grew so loud with laughter and chatting that it was hard to talk without shouting. At one point a fight broke out. It seemed to me that the casket and its occupant were little more than a conversation piece at a frat party. I said something about it to Marc, but he just said, “You know Stan. He would have wanted it that way.”
The line to my father’s casket followed the perimeter of the room. Against the walls were tables set up with an array of photographs, books, and other knickknacks from my father’s life.
There were pictures of my father as a young man. It struck me how handsome he was, something a child rarely thinks about a parent. There were pictures from Vietnam, none of which I had ever seen. In one he was shirtless and holding a machine gun with ribbons of bullets crossing his chest. It was as ironic a portrayal of him as I could imagine.
There were myraid pictures of him and my mother—at least six from their wedding day. They looked like children. They practically were, as they married in their early twenties, almost ten years younger than I was.
There were pictures of our family, the three of us. Those were halcyon days. In one picture I was maybe four or five, walking between my parents, each of them holding a hand. There was a picture of me and my dad at my mom’s funeral. I don’t know who took the picture. I don’t know why they took the picture.
In addition to the photographs there were books. Many of my father’s favorites were on display, as if he were still trying to recommend them after his death. I walked over to the table to look through them. Most significant to me was Cervantes’s Don Quixote. It was the perfect book to represent my father. He was always tilting at windmills.
I assumed the displays had been put together by Wendy. I looked around for her. She wasn’t hard to find. She was standing next to the casket, her eyes red, talking to someone I didn’t know. Actually, besides her, I didn’t know anyone.
My father’s casket lay against the east wall. It was partially open, the lid raised from his chest up—half-couch, they call it. The lower half of the casket was draped with a beautiful crimson spray of flowers. Red roses, red gerbera daisies, and red carnations, stark against the casket’s varnished rosewood veneer.
The casket was nice, which made me think that it was probably chosen by Wendy, as my father would never have chosen, or allowed, such reckless vanity. I once heard him go off on a diatribe about people building monuments to themselves after attending the funeral of a local author.
He used to say to my mother, Just put me in a cardboard box and bury me in the backyard. I used to hate it when he said that, but I’m not sure he was joking. He did, however, stop saying it after my mother died. And, I remembered, she had a beautiful casket, if there is such a thing.
My mother’s was a unique funeral, different from most. I remembered that after the ceremony we all walked outside and released butterflies.