The Urn Carrier

by Chris Convissor

  The Urn Carrier

  Chris Convissor

  © 2016 Chris Convissor

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

  reproduced or transmitted in any means,

  electronic or mechanical, without permission in

  writing from the publisher.

  978-1-943837-38-0 paperback

  978-1-943837-39-7 epub

  978-1-943837-89-2 mobi

  Cover Design

  by

  Bink Books

  a division of

  Bedazzled Ink Publishing, LLC

  Fairfield, California

  http://www.bedazzledink.com

  Nineteen-year-old Tessa is suddenly tasked with spreading her great aunt’s ashes all over the US and Canada so the rest of her relatives can receive their inheritance. After her initial dismay, she finds the road trip full of mystery and surprises. Old family secrets, girlfriend problems and beautiful sunsets accompany her as she honors her aunt’s wishes.

  To all my ancestors, my relatives, my siblings and most especially my mother, Margaret and my father, Larry.

  Without you, I would not be me.

  To a certain nineteen-year old: Thank you so much for your integrity, honesty and unflinching courage. I love you without condition. None of this would have happened

  without your wisdom, drive and generosity.

  Acknowledgments

  My gratitude to Claudia Wilde and C.A. Casey for taking a chance on me. Casey, your editing is invaluable. Thank you.

  Lynn Starner, thank you for your stunning cover design. Elizabeth Price of Priceless Photography for the Author head shot, you are terrific and we always laugh!

  My appreciation and love to:

  Holly Bender

  My Family

  Carolyn Schwab

  Jackie and Nancy Ferguson

  The Tally Hoes: Jen, Carolyn, Linda, Kathy, Beth, Renee, you women rock!

  My Golden Crown Academy classmates, faculty, and staff. Additionally, my appreciation to Ali Sandler, Braxton Busser, Linda Kay Silva, Amanda Kyle Williams, Doug Stanton.

  Lee Lynch and Ann McMan, thank you so much for your mentorship through the Academy. You are two of the most incredibly warm and generous people I know.

  “No matter where I am, and even if I have no clear idea where I am, and no matter how much trouble I may be in, I can achieve a blank and shining serenity if only I can reach the very edge of a natural body of water. The very edge of anything from a rivulet to an ocean says to me;’ Now you know where you are. Now you know which way to go. You will soon be home now.”

  —Kurt Vonnegut

  “If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the Sea, even then Thine hand would lead me and Thy right hand envelope me.”

  —Psalm 139

  Prologue

  TESSA HAD DONE a face plant in snow. She couldn’t move. She felt the cold snow on the left side of her face and neck. The heat from her jugular pounded a space with every heartbeat between her skin and the snow. She counted her heartbeats—one, two, three, four.

  Someone else was breathing in her ear.

  “Tessa!” Her twin brother, Eli, was bending over her. “Please. Get up. Don’t be dead.”

  Dead? A rocketing explosion in her head, and in her gut, propelled her to twist and look up, but her eyes wouldn’t focus, so she had this blurry thing going on, like she had put on some old person’s thick glasses. She squeezed her eyes as tight as she could and counted one, two, three, four before letting them open again. Bare tree limbs high up seemed to be clearer.

  “Oh God, Tessa.” Eli pulled her to her knees and held her. Her face was matted with something. Gooey, warm, mud? She tasted blood in her mouth.

  Eli was sobbing like a little boy, not an almost man.

  He was clutching her so hard his fingers were digging into her spine through her wool jacket. She was frightened by his sobs rocketing off the hills in these remote woods and she wondered why were they kneeling on this incline and why her stomach and head hurt so much? In the distance she heard a truck lumbering, wheeling, and whining down the old two-track. Forward it drove and then reversed. The engine plunged and shifted and roared, ramming and pushing through the thick snow on the Rayle road. Even though the hills were thawing, the snowmobilers had padded down a track on the seasonal road all winter long. It was very near impossible to get through.

  In fact, her dad and Eli and she had snowshoed in on the road from 669. Her dad.

  She doubled over, her insides cramping. A three-pronged bird claw twisting inside her.

  “Oh fuck, Eli, what’s going on?”

  She felt like her insides were tumbling out. Because they were.

  Chapter 1

  Three Years Later

  AS ASHES GO, Aunt Sadie hardly amounted to two cottage cheese containers. Tessa’s neighbors’ St. Bernard had required a shoebox.

  The gold filigree vase, Aunt Sadie’s last container, sits on a beautiful dark, delicate mahogany wood table. The urn is perfectly centered on a small veil of Hungarian lace in a circle just like the tabletop. Various relatives mill around, scarcely giving the urn or the table a glance as they look at other furniture, dishes, ornaments, silverware, glassware, the keepsakes, the things on the wall, all to be divided. Aunt Sadie never had any kids of her own.

  Tessa lounges against the wall, her brown-and-pink hair, with a shock of blonde in the middle, draped over one eye. Although Tessa probably hadn’t met Great Aunt Sadie more than two or three times, she’d been totally enamored by her.

  At family gatherings, Great Aunt Sadie hung out with all the kids. She didn’t stand much taller than their eight-, nine-, ten-year-old selves. She always wore brightly colored pantsuits, like sunflower yellows and fuchsia pinks and eye-popping lime greens. She wore gold jangly things around her waist and would gyrate impressively, the bells and clangy things making tinkling water noises. Sort of like when the snow would melt off the roof and run into the gutters. Aunt Sadie claimed she was a belly dancer.

  Uncle Percy, her husband, had been just the opposite of Sadie. He had been super tall. He never said much. Everyone said he was Canadian. Tessa figured that meant Canadians didn’t talk much.

  He’d stand, leaning one shoulder against the wall, impressive with his shock of white, thick, well-groomed hair, smiling. His bright turquoise blue eyes grinned when he watched his wife belly dance—holding her hands out to the children, engaging them in dancing with her, encouraging them to mimic her moves, fluttering around like a happy sparrow in spring. Diminutive sprite fit her perfectly. Uncle Percy would watch with a big grin. The smile they shared in their eyes as they’d wink at each other would provoke Aunt Sadie to say, “He’s my forever love!”

  Tessa wanted a love like Uncle Percy and Aunt Sadie’s.

  Aunt Sadie never talked down to the children. Even though she was old and wrinkly, she’d sit at the kids’ table during meals and share secret jokes about all the adults. Aunt Deidre positively hated it when Aunt Sadie would sit with the kids.

  Most of the time, Sadie and Percy lived in Florida. The last time Tessa saw Great Aunt Sadie, Percy had died the year before. But instead of being all sad and gloomy, Sadie enthralled the kids at dinner with ghost stories about how Percy returned the day Aunt Deidre came over to this very country house.

  “She was telling me I had to move in with her and Chuck,” Aunt Sadie whispered as they sat at the kids table. “No offense to you two.” She motioned to Jill and Joe, Deidre and Chuck’s kids, before continuing her dramatic replay. “Well. Percy was having none of that. The garage door started going up and down. It did it four times. All by itself.”

  “Maybe a plane flew over and set it off?” E
li suggested.

  “Four times?” Aunt Sadie asked. “Then, when she told me I had to sell the house, well, that did it. The lights started coming on and off. She had the nerve to ask me what was wrong. I just said, plain and simple, ‘Percy doesn’t like you.’ But do you think that stopped her?” Aunt Sadie’s fork was midair.

  She waited for all the kids to shake their heads.

  “No. She followed me into the kitchen. And when she bent over to look at what I was cooking in the oven, well,” Sadie paused for effect, “don’t you know that refrigerator door flies open and smacks her right in the ass.”

  The kids’ eyes widened, and they all laughed so hard, Eli’s milk came out his nose. Then they all laughed together about that. No one said swear words in conversational tone to them but Aunt Sadie.

  “That’s when I said, ‘I think Percy is telling you to leave.’ ”

  All the kids shivered and agreed: it had to be Uncle Percy. Aunt Sadie wasn’t done. In a stage whisper loud enough for all the adults at the grown-up table in the next room to hear she said, “She’s just after my money. She’s got a loooooooooooooong wait coming.”

  Aunt Sadie was like a kid but a lot older.

  “Why do you sit with us?” Tessa asked. “When you can sit at the big table?”

  “Well, sweetie, it’s like this. At these family gatherings, I much prefer your company.”

  That was twelve years ago. Aunt Sadie never did sell the country house, but she got as far away from Aunt Deidre and Uncle Chuck as she could. She remained in Florida.

  Tessa finds it odd the dining room table has been moved to the living room. All that remains in the dining room are the tiny table and the vase. She watches all the adults and some of the cousins printing their initials on little labels and sticking them on all the material things they want. She sighs and wanders into the large old farm kitchen. She hops onto one of the counters and scrounges a chocolate chip cookie from a nearby platter before Jill unceremoniously pushes open the heavy swinging kitchen door.

  “Thought I’d find you here.” Jill smirks, her forearm deep into the potato chip bag. She munches like a cow grazing in a field, her eyes scanning the shelves for anything of value. The same zombie look everyone has outside the kitchen. Jill wanders over to the oven and looks inside.

  Tessa watches the refrigerator door, and by the fourth count, it doesn’t even hint at moving. She glances out the large window behind her. Murphy, the black, flat-coat retriever, is sniffing in the melting snow, wandering from fence side to fence side. Tessa wonders if he knows his owner is in the vase.

  “This is so lame.” Jill is trying to engage Tessa in camaraderie talk, like they are the cool ones of the group and everyone else just side characters. “How long do you think it’s going to take?”

  Tessa shrugs, keeping her silence. She doesn’t dislike Jill, she just doesn’t get her. Jill makes her uncomfortable. She is classically pretty, with large almond eyes and dark hair, a bit heavy, with an attitude a mile long. She is loud, assumptive, and sometimes shares too much information, like now.

  “That date I went on last night? Totally a waste. The guy didn’t even try to kiss me. Just wanted me to blow him. Like, really? Are you serious, dude?” Jill half laughs.

  Ewwww. Tessa tries to not focus on the potato chip remnants hanging from the corner of Jill’s mouth, but it’s kinda hard to look away. Jill’s presence demands you pay attention to her before she can . . . uh oh.

  “That guy you were chatting up at the bar seemed pretty cool.”

  Yup. Jill was that intrusive. They haven’t seen each other in five years, and now here they are, at Aunt Sadie’s wake, and all of a sudden they are supposed to share their deepest, darkest secrets.

  Tessa just shakes her head.

  “I mean, how does that work anyway?”

  “Tessa!” Her mom’s voice from the dining room rescues her.

  Tessa scoots off the counter. She starts to toss the half a chocolate chip cookie in the waste basket, and Jill’s hand intercedes.

  “If you’re not going to eat that, I will,” Jill says. “May as well not go to waste. You don’t have any infectious diseases, right? I’m just kidding, man. Geez, don’t look like death just walked in.”

  Tessa hands over the last half of the cookie as her mom pushes open the door, revealing a crowd in the dining room.

  “We need you.” The lines between her mom’s eyes seem deeper than normal and the dark circles under her eyes even darker.

  Tessa follows her mom into the dining room and all the relatives are looking at her. An old man she has never seen before, appraises her carefully from head to toe. He has large round glasses, and his crinkly wrinkly eyes are an unreadable watery blue. He looks stern. Even though he is old, something about him makes Tessa’s skin crawl. It’s almost as if he knows everything about her, about Eli, about . . .

  “Well, Beth, tell her.” Aunt Deidre’s voice kills her thoughts.

  Her mom’s nervous tic, a quick head shake, jumps through Tessa’s energy. Her mom is really upset, but trying to keep it together.

  “I don’t know how to say this Tessa . . .” Her mom looks at the old man.

  The old man clears his throat. “Tessa, is it?” He waits for her to acknowledge him with a nod.

  “I am Dan Forsythe, your Great Aunt Sadie’s lawyer. Her will is very specific. Before any of her monies, trust, and personal belongings are disbursed, her ashes must be spread in various locations, on a specific route.”

  His cough rattles shallowly from his throat, and not from his chest. To Tessa, his throat resembles a turkey’s waddle. Why she is so fixated on people’s appearances today mystifies her. Maybe she always notices these things, but today, for some reason, she is acutely aware of them. She realizes he’s been speaking and catches up with his words.

  “And in accordance with her wishes someone must scatter these ashes in a certain order. It’s not a difficult task. It seems like no one has an open schedule but you.”

  Tessa opens her mouth and then closes it. Her mom stands next to her, not looking at her but at the floor, and touches her forearm.

  “I told them that just because you are in between jobs and are unsure if you’re going to return to school next semester, didn’t mean you were available,” she says, her quiet voice painfully etching out her words. “In fact, I said you were unavailable.”

  “Whoa, dude,” Jill says from behind her, catching the drift far faster than Tessa. “I can’t do it. I’m in pre-med.”

  “That’s what I told them.” Aunt Deidre’s exasperation annunciated through her arms flinging out to the side.

  Fourteen relatives shift on their feet uncomfortably as they looked expectantly at Tessa. Uncle Chuck, front and center, crosses his arms across his large, girthy belly. He looks like a horse that swallowed a hippo.

  “You don’t have a job. Well, you do now.”

  He starts to light the half stale, stinky cigar he has in his hand.

  The lawyer glares at him. “There’ll be none of that.”

  Everyone looks at him, but the lawyer is unmistakably speaking to Chuck.

  “Not in the house.” The lawyer’s stare lasers into Chuck so hard the energy in the room vibrates. The static is palatable.

  Chuck scowls, releasing the flame on the lighter. He jams the unlit cigar in his mouth. He chomps on it as if he is chewing steel. His eyes narrow, exposing a molten anger beneath Chuck’s otherwise fluffy exterior.

  Tessa looks at the urn. What the hell?

  “Before anything is removed from the house,” the creepy dude says to Tessa in a much calmer voice, “before monies are . . .”

  She holds up her hand. She gets it. She looks at him directly. “What about Murphy?”

  A slight upturn on the old guy’s thin blue lips, reveals his amusement.

  “The dog?” Aunt Deidre asks. “You’re worried about the dog? Isn’t he like, a hundred years old?”

  “Excellent questio
n.” The lawyer looks at his papers. “Your Aunt Sadie wants Murphy to go along.”

  “That cinches it,” Jill says. “I’m allergic to dogs.”

  More like allergic to doing anything for anybody else.

  Tessa laughs, and then frowns. She knows she heard a voice, but apparently no one else has. It’s unlike her to be that sarcastic.

  “Something funny?” the lawyer asks.

  No. I’m sorry. I—”

  “You don’t have to apologize,” her mom says. “This is ridiculous. She’s been put on the spot by all of you. Wanting things.”

  Her mom despises greed. She told Tessa she was dreading seeing the relatives today, fussing over Aunt Sadie’s things. The only reason Tessa agreed to come was because she could see how upset her mom was. And her mom always stood by her. It was the least she could do.

  “Mom. Let me think a moment. I’m not sure I understand everything.”

  “Why don’t you all get refreshments?” the lawyer says to everyone else. “While Tessa and her mom and I find a quiet room to discuss the details.”

  “Wow, better you than me,” Jill whispers to Tessa, before returning to the kitchen.

  Once the lawyer details everything, Tessa fully understands why no one else is willing to undertake the task.

  “So let me get this straight.” Tessa is sitting on the edge of the comfortable bed. It’s a bright room, with older dark furniture and light flowing in through airy windows. Light walls. Old-fashioned. Her mom sits beside her. Murphy at her feet.

  “Aunt Sadie wants some ashes in Lake Superior, Lake Michigan, and then I start driving to various places across the US and Canada and spill some of her ashes out? Then I call you each time, check in, and when all her ashes are gone, I return? And it’s all paid for? Do we know how long it might take?”

  “About three months. You could do it sooner, but there is no need to rush. Whoever does it is welcome to take her 1968 truck and the camper. Then Murphy can go with you. I’ll give you sufficient funds to make the first third of the trip and then dispense funds as you need till you finish.”