“Are you talking about the thing for Juli? Where is it?” This is Gav, from the line. Half a dozen other voices join in from around the room—a line cook, the kid on potatoes, the new dish guy struggling to load a rack of glasses—all calling out questions about the logistics of the visitation.
“The obituary said it’s tomorrow at the funeral home. It’s like—like an open house.”
Sheila, the dining-room manager, comes in and sees all the eyes trained on Carly. She nods sharply and begins to pull folded napkins from the shelf to restock the wait-station. Carly joins her and takes an armload into the dining room. When Sheila follows, the little pause ends and everyone gets back to work.
Gav swipes his forearm across his sweaty face and dumps rigatoni into a bowl. “You got the obituary, Drew? My old man threw out our paper ’fore I could clip it.”
“Yeah, I got it.”
“Could I see it? I just wanted to see her picture, is all. I don’t think I got any of her, ever. If we go to the funeral and you can see her, I wanna be able to remember the real girl. She didn’t talk a lot, but she was pretty alive, you know.”
Julianna twitches, or feels like she does, when they talk about her. These were her friends. They spent hours together every shift, so they were intimate with one another’s moods and rhythms, parents and partners. She never met Drew’s girlfriend, but she saw the little packets of cookies she made for him. Gav and Ayesha flirted and fought, flirted and fought, until Julianna didn’t know what to hope for, but they were entertaining to listen to. She and Carly would throw croutons when things between them got too snarky or too mushy. When Julianna submitted her book for publication, she brought all the envelopes she got back to the restaurant before she opened them. Whenever there was a rejection, Gav would say, “They don’t know shit,” even though he never read her poems, or any poems. Carly and Ayesha would hug her, and Drew would find a way to get at least a couple pieces of cake off the high-strung, nearly silent pastry chef before the end of the night.
Then one day she opened the envelope and her eyes swam over the words “Delighted by the inventiveness of the language and the formal ease.” It took her a few moments to make sense of the most pivotal sentence: “We would be honoured to publish your collection.”
She remembers Carly hopping from foot to foot. “I knew it! They want it—I knew it! You’re amazing, girl!” And then she clutched her in a hug before Julianna could finish reading the letter. She felt another set of arms embrace her and Carly both, and then everyone was cheering. Everyone else was delighted, but Julianna couldn’t make the news real in her own mind at all. When she got home, Sean asked how much the publisher was going to pay her and then snorted at the number; he thought she should hold out for more. When she said the money wasn’t the point, he ignored her the rest of the evening.
Back in what she supposes is the present, Drew stares down at the bedraggled basil leaves he’s scattering on a spaghetti plate. “I don’t think, I don’t think they’re gonna have the body there. So you can see her, I mean.”
“Oh. I guess ’cause—yeah, they wouldn’t,” Gav says. “She always was kind of a private person.”
“Yeah.” Drew slides the spaghetti onto the pickup shelf and starts plating some chicken in a creamy sauce. “You can ride with me if you want. My girlfriend’ll lend us her car for that.”
“Thanks, man.” The oven screeches as Gav opens it and slips the paddle in to yank out a just-done lasagna, dripping over its ramekin. “I can’t even process it. Remember in September when she cried about Princess Diana dying. She took it so damn hard, a stranger across the ocean. Kept saying how she was too young and never got to do what she wanted. And now fuckin’ this. Like she knew.”
“I know it, man, don’t I?” Drew claps his palm on Gav’s shoulder and nods toward Carly, who counts a dollar in dimes into her palm, then pauses, wipes tears from her eye with a closed fistful of coins, counts again. “Everyone knows it.”
—
After work Carly, Ayesha, Gav, and Drew go to a bar, as usual. As a concession to their jobs, no one asks the waitress for anything to eat. At the end of the evening, they will tip far more than any of them can afford. Julianna only joined them a few times, but she remembers well how it felt to watch them go off together laughing and punching each other’s shoulders while she scurried toward the bus stop. She remembers the times Sean let her go, how fine and easy it felt to sit on a high stool without someone holding on to her arm, drinking a beer, her only responsibilities to talk and laugh.
These were Juli’s best friends. Are, she thinks. She loves them still. At the table, though, no one seems to be feeling the love that Julianna is sending. Drew sits with his mouth open for a moment before putting beer into it. Everyone sits in grim silence, thinking of her, and there’s nothing she can do to make them feel better.
“What do we wear? You guys know?” Gav asks, picking delicately at his beer-bottle label. “I don’t know if I got nice-enough shoes. You think I should buy shoes?”
Ayesha squeezes his hand. “Aw, Juli never cared about your shoes. She won’t care now, neither.”
“Hey, will her book still get published?” Drew gestures with his beer. “I really wanted to read it. Finally find out what she was always writing about.”
Carly sighs. “Yeah, sure it will. Why wouldn’t it—it’s a book. Doesn’t have anything to do with her, necessarily, once it’s done.”
“But it’s not just her, right, for the funeral?” Gav slurps foam, swallows. “There’ll be people there—her folks and, like, uncles and shit. Maybe Sheila’ll go, even. I oughta look respectful, you know.”
Drew flattens his palm onto the wood grain of the table. “Sean will be there.”
“Well, yeah. He’s her boyfriend,” says Ayesha.
“Fuckin’ asshole,” says Carly, looking at the copper-wire hairs on the back of Drew’s hand. “You know, whatever happened to her, it had to have been his fucking fault. I told that to the police when they interviewed me and they were like, yeah, obviously.”
Ayesha twists toward her. “I don’t know about that. He loved her.”
“We both saw him knock her purse out of her hand in the parking lot that time. He was mad because she couldn’t find some goddamn thing he wanted, cigarettes or something.” Carly is shredding her cardboard coaster. “It was open—shit went everywhere and he didn’t help her pick it up. It was snowing.” She shakes her head and, when a thick curl falls into her mouth, sucks on it for a moment before spitting it out.
“That’s a shitty thing to do,” Drew says, “but it’s not leaving a body in a field.”
“She always had bruises on her arms, her legs. You saw her move around the restaurant—she wasn’t clumsy. He had a parole officer—Juli ever tell you that? He couldn’t control his temper, got into a bunch of fights at work, broke some guy’s jaw one time—she told me. Something must have happened because she didn’t usually talk about bad stuff. She was really upset on the bus home one night, half asleep, almost crying. The cops better be checking up on him.”
Julianna doesn’t want that—she doesn’t want anyone to go after Sean. Even though she is angry at him, she’s sorry Carly hates him so much. They’re still linked, Julianna and Sean. Just imagining his narrow, weather-raw face, the dry creases in the palm of his hand, the low thunk of his bottle-opener keychain against the door as he unlocks it—she feels herself drifting toward him.
He’s in the living room, in their low-ceilinged basement apartment, on the sprung couch swathed in a thick, colourful quilt in that northern way that no one in this city can understand. He is sunk all the way in the corner of the couch, clutching the wood-grain armrest, watching on TV as the puck bounces off the side of a skate and out of harm’s way. His hoarse grunt is a cheer. She knows this because she knows everything about him, because that is the only way she can love someone. Almost everything about him.
She used to literally wring her hands like a fretful V
ictorian maid when she was nervous or upset. Carly made fun of her for twisting her fingers into knots at bus stops, in front of angry customers, over her notebooks, when her cat was sick. Now that she is bodyless, Julianna finds she misses the hand wringing. The clutching, containing, if only of herself, was comforting when there was nothing else she could do. Now she has nothing at all.
Sean sits in front of the TV, drinking, yelling for the good plays, and then when the game pauses for commercials, he weeps during the ads for bleach and popcorn. The apartment looks the same as it did when she was alive, except messier. There’s only a tiny bit of kibble in Archie’s dish, and she can’t see him anywhere. Sean always talked about how they should let the cat “go wild” and now that she’s not there to tell him that cats can’t be wild in the city, just hit by cars, she figures that’s what’s happened. If she still could, she’d probably cry. Archie only ever had her to take care of him; now he has no one. Of course, the same is true for Sean.
She drifts into the kitchen, which is a swamp of old food and dirty paper towels clumped on the counter. The sink, which she liked enough to write a poem about even though the hot water was inconsistent and it was small and shallow, is filled to the brim with plates and mugs. The low ceiling and lack of windows always made the kitchen a sad room, but she liked to write at the narrow beige breakfast bar, because Sean mainly left her alone there, and it was far enough away from the TV that she wouldn’t be distracted. It’s an ugly room, but she bought bright orange tea towels and potholders to make up for the lack of sunshine. Now she sees that the towels are sopping and browning, and the potholders have fallen behind the stove. Some of her notebooks are still on the counter, though—her imaginary fingers twitch to write in them, or at least flip through the pages.
She drifts back out to the living room, watching Sean watch his terrible, most beloved Leafs lose again. It’s like it always was: him rooted on the corner of the couch, her drifting around—tidying, nibbling, reading a page, scribbling a note. Except now, she doesn’t have any of those actions left to her, except the drift, and not even really that. She can’t move because she isn’t anywhere. Just there. Useless.
The world is starting to feel fuzzy to Julianna—streets and intersections she used to walk to without conscious thought now have vague locations on her mental map. Now, she can’t even picture where Fenderson’s Funeral Home is in relation to her apartment. She just is there, in front of the pretty old brick building, and then inside the quiet rooms.
In the anteroom, the gang from the restaurant is standing around, waiting to be told where to sit. Carly is silent and calm, but Julianna can sense her anger. Normally when Carly gets upset, her curls bounce and her eyes light up, her hands dancing as she tries to make her point. “You’re such a cutie when you’re mad,” Julianna used to tease her. “You should try to go on all your dates when you’re really enraged—brings a nice colour to your cheeks.” Carly would roll her eyes at that, but the teasing jostled her out of her mood more often than not. She’s in a black jersey dress with a drooping sash, her chapped plump hand clutching the arm of the corduroy blazer Gav borrowed from his father—only Julianna sees the tendons stand out around her knuckles, the tension in her rigid shoulders, lines curving around her mouth. The others are distracted, looking around at the other mourners.
The object of Carly’s blue glare is Sean, slouched against a tasteful cream wall by the tasteful polished side table with the coffee and tea. “He’s not even fucking—he’s not even fucking paying attention. He was the person she loved most and he’s not even—”
Suddenly Julianna’s parents loom into view at the other end of the room, blond and miserable, pulled tightly in on themselves. She drifts closer toward them—she hasn’t seen them in over a year, money too tight for visits. They are murmuring to each other, clutching each other’s hands and arms. Someone comes up to them and offers coffees and they nod as one. She has not been close to her parents in a long time—they never forgave her for moving away, for Sean—but the unity in their movements, the tenderness with which they speak to each other is how she always understood love to be when she was a child, before she got old enough to find her own version of it. They are united against the world, a world that sometimes included Julianna and her rash, sad decisions. Even though they are grieving now, they still have each other, always.
Julianna used to be part of a pair—not like her parents, but in their own way, when things were good, she and Sean moved through the world side by side too. She remembers a wedding back home in Iria, eight or nine years ago, when she was still living with her parents and trying to go to school and he was making furniture for his uncle, and nothing had happened to them yet. When he told her in the car on the way to the church that her dress was pretty, she had blushed, even though he wasn’t looking at her. “It’s Shelley’s—I didn’t get a new dress or anything.” They were saving up to get a place together. Her parents weren’t in favour of it, but she was working on them, having Sean over to dinners on Sundays. She thought they were coming around.
The wedding was for a guy Sean used to hang around with, and it was a simple event—the bride’s dress a frilly eyelet thing her mother had done up. The church was unfamiliar, over-warm and without stained glass. The reception was in the grey-walled basement. Sean held her hand as they walked slowly between groups of relatives and friends, sipping punch. Some of the guys seemed to be going out back to drink something harder—she saw Sean get a couple winks—but he stayed with her all night. Julianna loved being beside him when all his friends greeted him and nodded at her—she felt official, acknowledged. Sometimes Sean even had his arm around her, or held her hand, and she let herself imagine her own little white dress.
She rubbed her bare shoulder against his suit jacket. “I was so hot in the church but it’s cool down here.”
“Basements are always cooler, cause of the damp.” He picked up a shish kabob from the buffet and stood staring at it a moment. “Do I just…bite it off?”
She drew her hand away from his and rubbed her cool arm. Perhaps Sean would give her his jacket as the evening wore on and got less formal—he didn’t like wearing it anyway. “Sure, why not?”
“I just don’t want…you know, etiquette.” He glanced around and then bit some meat off the skewer, pulling it off the end with his teeth.
“I guess there’s no good way to eat those, so don’t worry about it. I think people just think they look nice and figure how you’d actually eat it isn’t their problem.”
“Exactly. You always get me, Juli.”
She leaned against his arm, cuddled into his warmth. He never did offer her his jacket.
There were so many disappointments in the years after that, so many stupid fights about Sean imagining she was disloyal or not paying as much attention to him as she should have, but she knows he really believed that she understood him, always. She could go far on a compliment like that, and she did.
Remembering her past with Sean draws her to him in the present. His tight face is tucked over his shoulder, trying to see the back of his shirt. The right shoulder blade is smudged with something. The outfit itself is all right—nothing too formal, but he’d managed a white shirt and dark pants. She notices flattened wrinkles where he tried to iron. Maybe the iron being dirty caused the smudge. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone used it. If she were alive, she would’ve seen the mark before they left the house. If she were alive, she would’ve done the ironing for him. If she were alive, well, they wouldn’t be here.
Sean twists one more time and then leaves the room, just as a tall thin woman in a velvet dress starts ushering everyone into another room where rows of cushioned folding chairs wait. It actually hurts to see him go, even though no part of Julianna can physically hurt anymore. But he just walks away, out of the room and into the day outside the funeral home, knowing he won’t ever see her again.
Gav stares out the door after Sean. “That fuck, he left. He didn’
t even say anything to her parents. I was watching, he didn’t.”
Ayesha fiddles with her shoulder strap as she asks, “Should we go and sit down?”
“Of course he left.” Carly is red-faced with fury. “I was shocked he even came. He was fucking abusive. You know he was. Everyone knew.”
Gav won’t meet Carly’s eyes as she speaks. Drew shuffles his feet, starts to touch her arm, then stops.
Carly catches each friend’s gaze in turn, trying to give her words force. “She never came out for drinks after work, always had to go straight home. She’d get so nervous if she missed the bus she told him she was getting. One time when I was picking her up from her place, I saw him kick her Archie—she loved that cat. The sore ribs—remember how Drew tried to hug her last Christmas and she jerked away like he was fire? And that time she was off work for ages and never really said why? I couldn’t even get Sheila to tell me.”
Gav startles. “You asked Sheila about her?”
“You think Sheila would have let anyone else miss that much work and not fire their ass? Anyway, I was worried about her. I knew she was trying to work a lot, save up for her own car, and then she was just gone. And you guys didn’t know and Sheila wouldn’t say anything. So I went over to her place, just to see how she was doing.”
Gav, Drew, and Ayesha widen their eyes. Julianna is surprised too.
“She’d been gone, like, a couple weeks already, and I knew she couldn’t afford it, and she wasn’t answering her phone. Sean came to the door, so I told him I brought her a feel-better cake. I was really nice about it, acted like I just thought she had the flu or something.”
Gav leans forward slightly. “So did you see her?”
“No. He was totally psycho about it. There are ways to say, She’s not feeling up to guests. But he just lost it. Who told you to come here, I don’t recall inviting no dumb-bitch girl over here. He knocked the cake out of my hands—it splattered all over the back stoop. He tried to grab my arm, but I slipped away. He was screaming at me as I ran to my car, all kinds of horrible names.”
So Much Love Page 24