David Driscoll: CASKET SHOPPING • Cleaver Magazine

Fiction by David Driscoll
CASKET SHOPPING

Grandma died sitting up in her bed. It was the afternoon, and all four of us were there. We didn’t see her soul winging out of her mouth on a little puff of smoke or anything like that, but we could tell when it happened.

“Oh my,” my aunt whispered. My uncle put his arm around her.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” my cousin said, and pressed up next to her.

My grandma was my aunt’s mother, so I understood why they were huddled around her like that. I really did, but on the other hand, my grandmother was old, really old, and even though it was sad to say goodbye, it seemed better, really. Granny hadn’t wanted to live any longer. She’d told me so several times herself.

“Uh oh,” I said. “Guess what we’ve got to do now?”

Grandma had told us that after she died, she wanted us to go feed the birds at the beach like my cousin and I used to when we would visit her. Back when we were little.

“Right now?” my cousin asked.

“I don’t think I’m up for it,” my aunt said. “And we’ve got to call the hospice service.”

“You boys go ahead,” my uncle said.

“She said she wanted us all to go right after it happened,” I replied. She’d had this nutty notion that the seagulls would carry her on her way, that we needed to let them know she was gone and give them an offering.

“We can’t just leave her sitting here,” my uncle said.

“Why not?” I asked. “The wheels on the bed are locked.”

I thought my cousin, at least, would laugh a little at that one, but he didn’t.

“What difference does it make?” I asked. “We can call hospice when we get back. This was, like, literally her dying wish.”

We decided to take separate cars. I sat in the passenger seat of my cousin’s car and took my hitter box and lighter from my pocket. I mashed the little metal pipe down into the weed chamber and took a hit.

“You want one?” I asked and held up the pipe. My cousin shook his head. I loaded up one more as we turned out of the subdivision.

“We probably should have lowered her down,” my cousin said.

“What?”

“The bed. We left her sitting up like she was watching TV,” he said.

“I highly doubt she’ll mind,” I said.

I could see he still didn’t like it.

“Look,” I said, “we’ll get her an apology card at the grocery store.”

By the time we got to Ralph’s, I was super high. The fluorescent lights shining off the tile were glorious, and something about the sheer quantity of colorful products towering over me in the cereal and bread aisle made me feel giddy. I knew I was supposed to be acting somber, but I didn’t feel that way. I kept thinking what Granny always said, “You’re nineteen. Live it up.”

“Should we get multigrain or white?” I asked, holding up a loaf of each.

“What?” my cousin asked. “Get whatever is cheaper.”

“I guess you don’t care about the health of the birds,” I said.

My cousin turned and headed for the registers, his hands deep in his pockets.

I grabbed three more loaves off the shelf and followed him.

“It’s sort of selfish that Grandma laid this on us,” my cousin said as we waited in line. “I’m sure my mom doesn’t want to do this.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “What would we be doing instead? Sitting around the apartment waiting for someone to pick up the body? I think it’s sort of funny that Grandma made us do this weird thing, like it’s supposed to bring us all together or some shit. At least she didn’t give us a soundtrack. Make us bring a boombox to play ‘My Way’ as we stand on the sand.”

My cousin shrugged.

“Look,” I said, “I’m going to miss her, too, but don’t you sort of feel like this is a good thing? There wasn’t anything left for her to do. She didn’t have anyone to take care of. She couldn’t even take care of herself. It’s not always like that when people die, you know?”

When we got back in the car I took out my hitter box again. As I was lighting up, my cousin said, “You alright, dude?”

“Yeah, man,” I said. “I’m great.” I blew a big cloud of smoke out the window and spotted two gulls flying overhead. “Follow those birds,” I said and pointed. “We’re coming, birds!” I shouted, and held aloft one of the loaves.

As we sped along the interstate, I started thinking about one of the nights I’d spent over at Grandma’s apartment shortly after we’d brought her home from the rehab facility for the last time. I’d elected to sleep on the floor in the hallway outside her room so I could hear if she tried to get up on her own to use the bathroom, but Grandma was playing her audiobook of Edward M. Kennedy’s autobiography so loud I had to put an earplug in one ear so I could get some sleep. It was a nonsensical arrangement—I knew it even at the time—but it seemed to be working all right until some point when I must have fallen asleep too deeply because I was awoken by a tremendous thud that shook the ground.

At first, I had the absurd thought that someone had dropped a vase in the common hallway of her building, but I knew immediately that couldn’t be right, and after clawing my way up to the level of waking consciousness, I ran into her room and found her on the floor beside her bed, her feet caught in her twisted blankets and a wide look of terror in her blind eyes. She’d knocked over the nightstand, and her oxygen cord was askew in her nose and wrapped around her body like a thin, transparent snake.

I carried her into the bathroom, lecturing her all the while for not ringing her little bell for help, and after I set her on the toilet, I pulled her wet pajama bottoms down so she could finish peeing. She sat there with her spotted forearms propped on her thighs and let out a weary sigh.

“I bet you never thought you’d be doing this,” she told me as I’d stuck a fresh pee pad to a clean pair of underwear and helped her slide them on. Then she added, almost as an afterthought, almost as if she wasn’t speaking to me at all, “There are so many things you shouldn’t have had to deal with.”

My cousin and I were almost at the beach.

“I wonder if we’re going to have to pick out a casket,” I said. “Undertakers, you know, they have these vaults underneath their funeral parlors where they keep those things on display. It’s like a bonafide showroom. The boxes even look like Cadillacs.”

I mugged like a car salesman and slapped the dash.

“And this one here comes in either Vatican purple or a green marble exterior with your choice of gold or chrome for the handles and clasps. As you can see, the interior is plush with white leather, which was hand-sewn by Veronese elves.”

My cousin didn’t smile. He was keeping his eyes glued to the road.

“Ten grand!” I said. “You can easily spend ten grand. And it’s like, what the fuck for? It’s not like it makes anyone think the person was any more important. Or like you’re going to forget that death is serious. What we should do is put everyone in boxes that look like dirty old fruit crates, let people see what death is really about. Maybe then they’d wake the fuck up.”

Across the lanes of the interstate, the signs stretching up from the hidden strip malls below drifted past. For a second, I wondered who was stupid enough to get lured in by them and then realized the answer was all of us. Maybe we actually would be better off dead.

“I think Grandma wants…wanted to be cremated,” my cousin said.

I looked at him and started laughing.

“More instructions,” I said. “Good for you, Granny. You go, girl.”

When we got close to the beach, I rolled down the window. The smell of the ocean filled me with a weird sort of nostalgia for those days when I was little and used to wish we lived in California. It seemed ironic that I actually did live there now and yet found myself experiencing that longing still, as if it might give me an escape from my current situation. Then again, I knew what that longing was about. It wasn’t about California. It was about living in a world where it was always summer vacation and you got to go to Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm and hang out with your cousin in the pool all day. When you didn’t have to think about serious shit like the rest of your life or Granny sitting up dead in her bed.

We turned a corner and the ocean flashed into view. The sunlight was wild on the rising mound of a wave and forced me to look away. In the parking lot, my aunt and uncle leaned against their car, each of them peering down into the blacktop beyond the toes of their walking shoes, lost in their separate thoughts.

I got out of the car and held up all four loaves.

“Do you think you bought enough bread?” my uncle asked.

“Granny may have been a cheap ass most of the time,” I said, “but she knew how to lay it down for a big occasion.”

I handed a loaf to my cousin and one to my uncle, but when I tried to hand one to my aunt, she didn’t reach out to take it, so I set it on the hood of her car and headed for the beach.

It was a glorious day. The sun was shining and the breeze drifting in from the water was something else. The sound of the waves always felt so calming, almost like it was communicating with some locus of sanity deep inside of me. I stopped just over a little rise where the seaweed had been marooned when the morning tide rolled out. My uncle caught up with me there.

“Sometimes I think it would be nice to be released into all of this,” he said.

I whacked him in the butt with my loaf of bread. “Knock it off,” I said. We both laughed.

“I sure do miss your parents,” he said.

I nodded and stared off towards the ocean, and I kept on nodding for too long, as if this activity might somehow stop the pit from opening inside my chest. I could feel it spread, like everything inside me was crumbling, and I closed my eyes and clenched my fists, as if by flexing into an intense rigidity, I might be able to prevent my mind from getting sucked through space and time and dropped in that moment when I’d opened my eyes in the backseat of that tilted and shattered SUV and leaned forward to see my father suspended by the seatbelt’s shoulder strap, his arm dangling out the demolished driver’s side window, and my mother’s head lolling on the headrest of the passenger seat, her mouth slack, and her eyes half-lidded over her quaking pupils that futilely tried to track my face. I watched the brutal dent over her right eye slowly darken, her facial motions becoming increasingly erratic as her consciousness receded, first to a kind of animal and then finally a vegetal awareness.

Next to me on the beach, my uncle had the bag of bread open and gave it a sniff, completely unaware that I’d just been transported, that I’d been hit with a surge of dread and abandonment so intense it felt like my skin might turn itself inside out. It had been eleven months since the accident, and only recently had I begun to experience those memories with any kind of affective force. It seemed strange, really, that it was getting harder to live with as time passed.

I lowered into a squat and touched the sand, scooped up a handful and let it sift through my fingers.

“There are no birds,” I said to my uncle.

“Fucking figures,” he said.

There was a homeless guy sleeping in the grass near the bathrooms, so we laid the loaves of bread out at his feet like we were making an offering at the foot of some shrine and then walked to a pizza place that my cousin knew. It was filled with dark wood and small windows that kept out most of the light.

We sat at a round table near the back, and I stared disinterestedly at the TV while my uncle ordered pizzas and a pitcher of beer. When the beer came, my uncle promptly took my glass of water and my cousin’s glass of water and poured them into the nearby brick planter before refilling the glasses with beer. We sat there drinking the beer and eating pizza and then had a little more beer as if it might make us feel better, and for a moment, maybe it did make us feel better. At least for a moment, we were simply hanging out instead of trying to force ourselves into the shape of a family, none of us even sure of what that should look like.

When we got back to Grandma’s apartment, I was almost surprised to see her still sitting there in bed. It looked like she might be sleeping, though of course she wasn’t sleeping, and her hand was crooked into this weird little claw. I had a strange impulse to touch it, and for a moment, it felt like we all might join hands, and as I pictured this, I was visited by a strange image. I saw in my mind each of us encased in a sleek futuristic capsule of a high-white sheen, the capsules connected by clear tubes through which red hearts circulated like blood cells as we floated evenly and serenely through the depths of space.

I looked back at Grandma, but when I imagined the feel of her rigid fingers, I suddenly recoiled from the thought and grabbed for my aunt’s hand instead.

It took me a moment to gather the guts to look into my aunt’s face. My aunt, my mom’s sister.

“Sorry,” I said.

She shook her head as if to tell me it didn’t matter, that it was okay, and gave my hand a squeeze. I looked at my uncle and my cousin and felt suddenly like I had to do something.

I picked up the remote for the bed and pressed the button to lower Grandma, and we all stood there, watching the bed recline beneath her head and flatten out under her knees. I suppose I was hoping that once she was down, something would change, but it didn’t, and when the bed stopped moving, I was still pressing the button and pointing the remote at her, not realizing it until my thumb started to hurt and I finally let go.

David Driscoll’s fiction has appeared in Mississippi Review, Witness, TriQuarterly, River Styx, New Stories from the Midwest, and more. He studied creative writing at the University of Chicago, where he earned a master’s in the humanities. He is also a yoga teacher and father to three young girls.