Five days later we shadow the viewing room door at the mortuary. Tina and Rick stand facing a wall, their heads together, backs to the casket. Mrs. Painter touches my shoulder. She moves past me to embrace Tim. She wears makeup.
“Had to slip out for a smoke,” she says, apologetic. Pupils tight and irises red-rimmed. Blue eyeliner. “Thank you both so much for coming.”
We step inside.
“Oh, hey,” Tina says, barely audible.
Rick comes to Tim, encircles his shoulders with his arms, eyes squeezed shut. “Glad you’re here, man.”
Tim acknowledges both teens, his expression halting.
“I, um.” I grasp for meaningful words. “I wish I’d have known your dad longer.”
Tina says, “I do, too.” Head down, she moves away, out the door.
Rick smiles, lifts his hands, follows her.
“Do her good to get some air,” Mrs. Painter says. “I don’t know but it hasn’t been right for her to be in on all these decisions about arrangements. We’re just, both of us, unacquainted with such matters.”
We stay beside Mrs. Painter, glancing at the form in the casket, until another friend of hers arrives. On our way out Tina and Rick appear down a quiet hallway. He’s offering her tissues, and she’s a whisp of cloud.
Later, inside our front door Tim says, “Guess I’ll finish greasing the Fairlane heads.” His coat’s off and he’s squatted in front of the engine parts on the floor.
I slide my back down the wall to sit near him. Legs outstretched; my ankles waggle my feet side to side. “What was it like during the ice storm?” I ask.
Tim wrote to me about it. He sent pictures. In January Charleston seized up under freezing rain. Powerlines snapped. Tim invited the Painters over to use his gas stove, and they camped in the living room watching his three-inch battery powered TV.
Tim had lived here a month before the storm. If it would have been me, I wouldn’t have met them yet.
He says, “we lined up the sleeping bags and brought in extra blankets. Tina brought over her Twister game. We were trying anything to keep warm.”
“What was Mr. Painter like then?”
“Fine.”
“You and he could talk about stuff?”
“Yep.”
“I’m sorry he’s gone.” I wish I knew what else to say. Mostly I don’t mind Tim taking his time with the greasing job.
“I met a man in Maryland, when I was at nuclear training school,” Tim says, using his rag on the metal. “His daughter and her boyfriend were on their CBs a lot – that’s how I got to know them. We met up at her dad’s house, and it turned out he was semi-retired. Fixed up old cars and sold them.”
“Ah,” I say. “Like Fords?”
“Fords, Chevys, Plymouths. Anyway, I asked him about the carburetor on the Falcon, if he had ideas why it kept seizing up. He showed me how to take it apart, clean off the idler arms, and get it going. Then I watched him take off valve covers and adjust them.”
“Oh, you learned a lot.” I can’t decide whether I’m grateful to the man or not. But I can tell he was important to this man in front of me. If only I’d meet someone who could take Tim’s valve covers off, show me what to do…
“Anyway, right before I finished school, word came over the CB. The man who taught me engines died of a heart attack. That, uh, sucked.”
Quite a few people show up at Mr. Painter’s funeral. In my skirt on the mortuary’s folding chair I watch my husband’s face. I remember services my dad led in his gentle manner over the years.
My sophomore high school year, my parents and brothers and I sat, numb, at an Episcopal funeral for Debbie, who’d drowned. She was 11. Her brother and mine were best friends. Debbie and I got along well; she spent the night once in my double bed when their parents were out of town. During her service I thought about how she’d never shaved her legs.
Now Tina is weeping beside her mother. We glimpse them behind a screen. Rick sits there, too, his arms around both women.
Afterward there’s pie and a fruit salad. Tina laughs when Rick makes a face over coconut protruding strangely from an orange.
“Hey,” Rick says as Tim and I carry our empty paper plates to the trash. “Wanta ditch this joint?”
We pile in the Falcon. Tim finds streets leading to the Battery, near Old Town. Out across the water is Fort Sumter. Tina stumbles hopping across sidewalk to flowing lawn at the park. “Gotta get back soon to Mama,” she says. The breeze is soft but chill.
Rick steadies her. She gazes at his face; her wide, pretty mouth smiles.
