When Bartlett came into his office, he found Millie looking over the family snapshots on his mantle. This made him very nervous. The young funeral director always worried that this display of family affection would be seen as tasteless by the bereaved, that he was gloating about his vast, joyous family when they had just lost a loved one. Bartlett often thought about taking the photos down-replacing them with something more neutral or even nothing at all-but he could never bring himself to do it. The truth was that Bartlett was deeply uneasy about his line of work. He was uncomfortable about death and, even after years of doing so, always felt uncertain when speaking with the bereaved. Tears were the worst. He couldn’t stand them. The line of framed pictures was about the only thing that kept him from bolting from the room when the crying started. They reminded him of why he did this. He had learned to look at them without showing any sign of the bliss they inspired within. At any rate, he felt the macabre portrait of his grandfather lent the office the somber note it required. The photos were a necessary balance.
Bartlett sat behind his oaken desk to signal Millie that their meeting was about to commence. There was a whole secret language of signs and gestures between the funeral director and the bereaved. Bartlett was skilled enough that he could proceed through the major points quickly and efficiently, while still appearing sympathetic to the loss. Tears, however, were a hindrance to the grammar of this language. They caused a skip in the system, slowed things down and sent Bartlett off towards the images of his kin. He didn’t think the young woman who was sitting down before him would cry, though. There was an aloofness to her movements and to her gaze which led him to believe that either she had already cried herself out or that she was still a few days away from doing so. Bartlett smiled compassionately and began running through the options.
“There was this one thing,” Millie interrupted, “In the will. He had only one request for the funeral.”
Bartlett was a little put off by this surprise. Why hadn’t the lawyer informed him of all the particulars? He took this in stride, however, and was only slightly awkward when he asked for an elaboration. But the request threw him more off course than he had expected.
“The standard depth is two meters,” he protested. “Around six feet. As per the common parlance.”
Millie was apprehensive but firm. “He said it. Plainly. He wanted to be buried at ten feet deep.”
Bartlett glanced away. He thought about the stories his own father used to tell at parties and family gatherings, about the eccentrics that came in with their strange requests. He could picture himself as a child, sneaking away from the others to overhear the grown up party. There was one time when his uncle cracked up over an especially bizarre case: an old woman had willed that her cat be euthanized, stuffed and buried with her. Everyone at the service was made uncomfortable by the sight of the open casket.
“You are aware,” he said, “that it is the cemetery employees who physically dig the graves. They do have a standard depth.”
“Do I have to talk to them?” Millie asked, clearly frustrated. “I thought it was your job to sort out all these details.”
“It’s just…” He was floundering. “There might be some added expense.”
That stopped her. It had never occurred to her that it might take more money to dig a slightly deeper hole. “How much more?” she asked, and immediately regretted it.
Bartlett had no idea how much more it would cost. He didn’t even know if it would cost more or if the groundskeepers would do something like this. He was glad when Millie spoke up before he had a chance to say something stupid. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “This was Dad’s will. He wanted this and I’m going to make it happen.”
“Very good, miss,” Bartlett capitulated. “I’ll see what arrangements can be made.”
The rest of the meeting went along hastily. Bartlett, losing all composure, became sulky and rude, frequently losing his train of thought to stare off at his grandfather’s portrait. Millie tried to be gracious and accommodating on every other point, but in Bartlett’s mind basic civility was impossible. By the time she left his office, they were happy to be going their separate ways. She caught a streetcar on the corner and set off down through the city.
As the car rocked back and forth, Millie’s mind drifted to memories of her late father. She thought of a time when she was eight, shortly before they left Albany. Her father had come home suddenly from one of his walks in the middle of the afternoon. She was lying on her bed and listening to her mother singing in the next room. Her mother only sang when she was alone, and only when her father was out of the house. The door to their small apartment slammed abruptly. The singing ended mid-note. Millie could hear the sound of a man crying and she silently crept from her bedroom to see what was happening. She found her parents just inside the front door, her father drooped over on the floor and her mother crouching next to him. Millie stayed hidden behind a chest of drawers.
“I counted the steps today,” her father began as he recovered himself. “The number of steps from the alley to the street corner.”
Her mother’s reply was steely and without a hint of surprise: “Not this again, honey.”
“Do you know?” he said, “how many?”
Millie tried to see her mother’s face from around the corner but couldn’t. She could imagine it though, that same look from a dozen other arguments.
“It was thirty-two steps,” he said hoarsely.
Millie’s mother sighed audibly. “That’s a very round number…” she began to say before trailing off into silence.
Millie glanced out again at her parents. Her father had stood up, looking angry or hurt, Millie couldn’t remember which. There was a long silence between the two of them before Millie’s mother turned away. Her father grabbed her by the arm and held her in place. “Don’t you understand?” he yelled. “This whole building! This whole city!” He dropped his wife’s arm and began to pace down the hall towards Millie. She ducked back into her room but kept her ear on the door. “It stinks! It’s off-kilter, the whole place.” There was a pause. Millie pressed the side of her head up against the door as hard as she could. She worried that she wouldn’t hear if he stopped yelling. “I hate it here,” her father said evenly.
Millie thought it was over, that there would be nothing left to hear. She was shocked when her mother started to yell. She had never yelled before, had always tried to console him. This time it was different. “What do you want?” she shrieked. “Huh? What do you want then?”
Her father answered quickly. He had been preparing for this. “Let’s move away,” he said craftily, “to Toronto. Everything will be perfect there. I’m just so sick of this crooked city and the Gulf and this whole damn country.”
They did move a few months after that. Millie’s mother had not taken to life in Canada and died of pneumonia during their first winter there. Her death had broken Millie’s father and it was over a year before he recovered. When he did come out of his depression, he was a better man than he had been since his daughter’s birth. His wife’s subtraction from the family allowed him to settle into a kind of comfort with the imprecision of life. He finished raising Millie on his own and saw her enter adulthood before he passed on. His eccentricities had never abated but they had seemed less manic in his final years.
Millie rang the bell on the streetcar a stop early from her building so she could pick up some things. She went into the corner grocer and smiled at the old Serb who sat grouchily behind the cash. Due to a recent stroke, his face was twisted into a lifeless half-smirk and his left eye was permanently pinched shut. He had taken to tilting his head so that his good eye remained central to his body-a gesture that only exacerbated his body’s newfound asymmetry.
The old Serb watched Millie closely as she walked to the back of the shop. He remembered a trip he had taken to a beach on the Adriatic when he was a teenager. He’d spent the day with an Italian girl that he met there. Millie reminded him of her, but then all the pretty girls he saw these days had him thinking of better times. It had been almost a decade since he came to Canada. His home had been destroyed in a NATO bombing campaign so he came to live in his son-in-law’s house and work in his store. His daughter tried to make him stop working when he had the stroke, and she succeeded for a time. But he was back at it as soon as he was strong enough to defy her. She scolded him whenever she saw him down there, but she seemed to know that he was not built for idleness.
Millie returned to the counter with a bundle of fresh fruit. Three oranges, half-a-dozen apples and a bag of grapes. The old Serb wordlessly rang her through and handed her a paper bag to put her things in. Once she had packed everything up, he smiled and tried to give her a smart, quick nod. The gesture was awkward: his lips refused to twist the way he wanted them and his tilted neck sent his nod on the diagonal. Millie skillfully suppressed a giggle. The old Serb appreciated her efforts, but he could see that his age made him ridiculous. As Millie left the store he thought again about that Italian girl and wondered if time had been so cruel to her too. He tried to picture what she might look like now, but then decided that they were both better off in his memory.
Millie walked down the street to her building with the groceries under her arm. She climbed the stairs and walked down the hall to her apartment. As she searched for her keys, she heard the door down the hall open and glanced over to see her neighbor Eric. Eric was a young man, perhaps a few years younger than Millie, who made his profession as an actor in television commercials. “I love what I’m doing,” Millie once overheard him say at a mutual friend’s party. “Every day a different thing. One time I was a Redcoat, another I was a frat boy. I’ve been a consumer of shoes, sandwiches and beer. I’m living the life we all want to be living, the one people have in commercials.” He also nursed a very public affection for the stranger who lived down the hall, and Millie was in no mood to deal with him that day.
“Millicent, Millicent!” he boomed before she had a chance to get away. “How are you today? What’s new in the world of Millicent?”
She smiled as politely as she could manage and stammered a perfectly generic response. Eric leaned up against her door jamb and struck a casual pose. “How about you and I go down to the Duke’s later for a couple of drinks?” he asked.
“I don’t know, Eric,” Millie said. “I’ve been running around all day and I’d just like to fall asleep.”
Eric retained an air of dignity as he straightened himself out and began to edge back towards his own place. “If you say,” he said as his mind churned away. Calculating, Millie thought. It seemed like he might not say anything more, but then he looked right at her and blurted out in a sudden fit of desperation, “You and I belong together, you know.” Millie smiled, and tried to not look unsympathetic, but Eric turned a deep red. Rather than press his luck, he just grinned sheepishly and gave Millie a sort of half-wave, half-salute before returning down the hall to his apartment. Millie waited until he was out of sight and went in through the door.
Millie set the bag of fruit on the counter. She retrieved a single apple and turned on the television but found static on every channel. She remembered that she hadn’t paid the cable bill that month and flicked off the set angrily. Her thoughts turned to her encounter with Eric in the hall and she was immediately glad that she had not told him about her father’s death. There would be nothing more theatrical than for Eric to show up at the funeral and embarrass her in front of all her relatives. Millie smiled at the thought of the scene she had avoided. Avoided just by not mentioning something, by forgetting to mention it really. She wondered what her father would think of Eric or the other things in her life that she hadn’t told him. They had stopped being close when she turned seventeen. She had seen him every week up until his death, but had stopped telling him anything really personal about her life years ago. Their meetings quickly became formulaic and predictable, a situation that had obviously delighted her father. Millie did indeed fall asleep shortly after finishing her apple. She slept on the coach in front of the broken T.V. and thought about her father until she drifted away.
She stood in the cemetery a few days later and watched the procession from afar. There were some lovely eulogies by uncles and cousins, but when Millie went up to deliver her own she faltered. She had spent days working on the perfect speech but looking over at the sealed casket she realized she couldn’t give it. She started to cry a little and one of her relatives moved to take her away. She rode to the cemetery in the rental car of a cousin she’d never known and decided to walk the grounds before the service began. It was in this way that she found herself away from the others when the hearse arrived to deliver the remains.
There was a little boy playing between the graves not far from Millie. He ran down the aisles while his mother knelt beside a grave just a little farther off. Presently Millie saw him stop to watch her father’s funeral procession in the distance.
“Mommy!” he called out. The other woman rose from beside the grave and stormed over to him.
“Don’t call out in cemeteries,” she said.
“Why does that man only have five pallbearers?” he asked. The mother squinted and looked out in the direction her child was pointing. She started to turn to Millie to share this observation, but didn’t after she considered the etiquette of talking to strangers in cemeteries.
The two stared at this odd occurrence for a moment more before the boy chirped up, “Maybe he didn’t have enough friends.”