by Harper Lin
The women’s voice overlapped and merged as they went on and on in their chattering and so-called condolences that all too frequently sounded more like thinly veiled insults and criticisms.
“Such a tragedy, losing both your parents. And you so young yet!” “You’re all alone in the world now! Neither of your parents will be there to see you get married when you finally find the right girl!” “Oh, your children won’t have any grandparents!”
At that point, I grabbed Matty’s arm and pulled him through the crowd toward the front door of Mr. Cardosi’s house.
“Didn’t Mike want us to look through the house?” I asked loudly.
“I can help you!” one of the women called.
“No, no, we have it!” We were almost at the door.
“I know where everything belongs! I spent quite a bit of time with Gino!”
Matty and I whirled around. Matty had specifically said that his dad didn’t really socialize, so I wanted to see who was claiming to be his close friend. It was Mrs. Collins, a widow who lived across the street and two houses down, directly across the street from my house. She was rather well known for her, well, let’s just call them “exaggerations.” I narrowed my eyes at her, telegraphing a “back off” message. She stopped in her tracks at the edge of the group of women. Without taking my eyes off her, I pushed Matty toward the front door. I backed through it after him then slammed it and locked it for good measure.
“Thanks for that,” Matty said as I stalked to the back door to lock that too.
Satisfied that we would have no surprise or accidental visitors, I walked back to Matty. “They should be ashamed of themselves.”
I glanced around and noticed the living room curtains were open. I didn’t put it past a single one of those women to walk through the flower beds and stare in, so I pulled the curtains closed, glaring through the window at the lingering crowd before I did. I walked through the first floor and closed the rest of the curtains before circling back to Matty, who was still lurking in the entryway.
“That should keep them at least from being full-on Peeping Toms,” I said.
Matty nodded and shoved his hands in his pockets as he looked around. “He’s really gone, huh?”
The aggression I had felt toward the meddling neighbors vanished, and I was filled again with sympathy for Matty. I rubbed his upper arm with my hand. “I’m so sorry.”
He was quiet, staring at his shoes, then he looked at me. “So you found him?”
I swallowed hard and stepped back, shoving my hands deep in my pockets. “Yeah,” I said as I nodded.
“Did he look—? How did he—?”
“I thought he was asleep,” I said softly, understanding what Matty was asking.
“And you didn’t see any—”
“No.”
Matty nodded and looked at the ceiling with a sigh. “Thank you.”
“For what?” I scoffed. I’d found his father’s dead body and called the police. That was nothing special. In fact, I wouldn’t have blamed Matty if he’d been angry with me.
“Finding him, calling the police, saving me from the biddy brigade out there,” he listed.
“I didn’t do anything special.”
“Who knows how long he would have been back there if you hadn’t walked by?”
I shrugged. “I’m sure it wouldn’t have been long.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Matty said. “Any time is too long.”
I nodded sympathetically. My mother had collapsed in public and been whisked straight to the hospital. I couldn’t imagine how awful it would be to know that your loved one had been lying somewhere, dead, for an extended period of time.
Matty took another deep breath. “Should we look around? See if there’s anything missing or out of place that Mike didn’t notice?”
“We?” I asked, surprised. We’d been close growing up, but I had barely seen Matty since high school. Even though I’d been thrust back into his life, I didn’t expect him to want to share such a personal moment with me.
He shrugged. “I don’t really want to be alone. And you’ve just been through the same thing. You’re not going to be all nosey and stuff, asking me a bunch of intrusive questions about how I feel about everything.”
Well, that was true. The first days after I’d been home, several of my mother’s “friends” had come by, including some of the women from Mrs. D’Angelo’s Ladies Auxiliary. They supposedly wanted to express their condolences, but they’d seemed more interested in poking around the house, making snide comments and asking not-so-subtly about what had gone wrong with my fiancé. The people who came by and just wanted to express their condolences and sit quietly with me, drinking a cup of coffee while I stared into space, were few and far between, but they were much more what I needed as I struggled to process everything.
“Okay then,” I said. “Where do you want to start?”
“Living room?” Matty suggested.
That seemed like as good a place as any, so we walked back to the room where we’d sat and waited for Mike what seemed like ages ago, even though it had only been an hour. We worked our way through the house, one room at a time. Matty looked around in each, surveying the contents. He told me stories about the objects in each room—souvenirs they’d picked up on vacation, the lamp he’d broken when he threw a baseball through the open window while playing catch with his dad, knickknacks that his grandparents had brought over from the old country, trinkets that had belonged to his mother. I already knew a lot of the stories from growing up with Matty, but I let him share them anyway. I knew how much he needed to talk about his dad without any pressure from me.
We finished without finding anything that looked unusual and returned to the living room.
“You want a cup of coffee?” Matty asked. “I know it’s getting late, but I think my dad keeps some decaf. Although I feel a little inadequate making it for the coffee queen here.”
I laughed a little. “Whatever you have will be fine.” Yeah, I’d been around coffee my entire life and could tell a good cup from a bad cup by the look and the smell, but that didn’t mean I didn’t have manners. Besides, decaf or no, I knew I wouldn’t be getting much sleep that night.
“All right,” Matty said as we headed toward the kitchen. He reached to open the coffeepot to put in the filter and grounds but stopped suddenly.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I didn’t notice before—the coffeepot’s half full. It looks like Dad was only on his first cup.” He pulled out the coffeepot and held it up for me to see.
Sure enough, it was only partially empty. Matty paused, staring at the coffeepot. The visual evidence of his dad’s interrupted morning must have brought his grief back to the forefront. Not that I could blame him. He looked at it for a few more seconds then poured the coffee down the sink. He rinsed out the pot and started a fresh batch.
We sat in silence at the kitchen table, each of us lost in our thoughts of our own parent’s recent passing. With a lot of people, that kind of silence might have been awkward, but with Matty, it felt completely comfortable. When the coffee was ready, Matty poured us each a cup and brought them back to the table.
“Sorry, no fancy designs,” he said with a sad smile.
“It tastes just as good without them,” I said before taking a sip. It did not taste good. Clearly Mr. Cardosi hadn’t spent any more on his coffee than he’d absolutely had to. It was so bad, I actually wondered if there might be something wrong with the coffeemaker. I set my cup on the table. I’d had a lot of bad coffee in my life, and swallowed some of them down just to be polite, but I wasn’t sure I could manage it with this one.
Matty put his cup down at the same time as I did. We sat for a moment, each staring at our cups.
“We can just throw it out if you want,” he said.
I couldn’t stop the laugh from bursting through my lips. Clearly Matty thought the coffee was just as bad as I did. “That might be a good idea,” I said.
Matty took my mug and his cup over to the sink. He poured them both out then grabbed the pot from the coffeemaker and poured that coffee down the drain as well. He rinsed them all out and left them in the sink. “Sorry about that.”
“I don’t think anything you did caused that,” I replied, the bitter taste lingering in my mouth.
He smiled slightly as he stared out the kitchen window. After a few minutes, he took a deep breath, exhaled sharply, and turned to look at me. “I guess it’s time to go home then.”
“I guess so. Is there anything else I can do for you? Anything you need?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Not now.”
“Okay then,” I said, getting up. I walked over to him and gave him a quick hug. “If you think of anything, let me know. You know where to find me.”
“Thanks,” he said.
“Seriously, Matty, I know I didn’t want to ask anybody for anything those first few days, but I needed the help. There’s a lot to take care of. Just ask.”
He smiled sadly. “You know, you’re the only person who still calls me Matty.”
“You’re the only person who still calls me Franny.”
“What do people call you now, Franny?” he asked.
“Fran, Francesca.” I shrugged. “Mostly Francesca in New York, mostly Fran here. Just depends on who’s doing the calling.”
“I see,” he said.
“Everyone calls you Matt now, huh?”
“Yup… but you can still call me Matty if you want.”
I smiled. “We’ll see. We’re not five years old anymore. But you’re welcome to keep calling me Franny.”
“Will do, Franny,” he replied.
I chuckled softly. “I guess I’d better get going then.”
“All right. I’ll see you.”
“See you.”
Matty walked me to the door. I headed off to my house and my bed, which I knew I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep in because of thoughts of my mother and Mr. Cardosi.
Cappuccinos, Cupcakes, and a Corpse is available everywhere.