Jennifer Longo - Six Feet Over It

Emily?

No. My brain loves to turn every small, dark-haired girl I see into Emily, but no. This girl is maybe a little taller, and she’s out there wearing a dress—a dress, for crying out loud—and tall black boots. She runs to help with the lilies. She heaves armloads of arrangements and potted plants, refers to a list, searches for headstones, places blossoms and baskets. That dress is going to get filthy.

Just some girl.

Not Emily.

I salt the wound, pick up the phone receiver. Dial Emily’s Mendocino house.

The number you have reached…

Same as the last hundred times I tried. Why do I do it to myself?

Back to Ovid.

Chill October air moves through the window and around the open door, swings the dust and stale pipe residue around my head full of Ceres searching for her daughter, of Emily, a sound track of ducks quacking beneath the willows.

“Hello?”

I slam my hand into hardback Ovid, startled. In the doorway, Dress and Boots Girl winces.

“Oh God, sorry! Sorry!”

I rub my red knuckles and she steps in.

“Are you okay? Can I…”

“No, it’s fine, it’s… okay.” I squeeze my pink fingers, push Ovid aside.

Not Emily. Younger than me. Small. The knots of her dark hair are braided, wound and pinned above each ear. Her dress is cotton, pale blue stripes, and she has a white soil-stained apron tied around her waist. Her black boots are leather, tall as her knobby knees. She should be herding Alpine goats. Instead, she’s just standing here smiling, shifting her weight. Maybe she has to pee.

“Can I help you with something?”

She turns her head sideways, reads the Metamorphoses spine.

“Are you reading that?”

I shrug.

“For fun ?”

“School.”

She nods. “What do you think?”

“Um.” Why does she care? “Kind of depressing.”

“Sure.”

“And wordy.”

She smiles. “Yeah.”

“And he doesn’t seem to think much of the ladies.”

She leans against the desk. “How so?”

Uh. Okay, Mrs. McKinstry. I guess we’re doing this.

“Well,” I say, “he’s no fan of subtlety. His women are wallowing in grief and then—oh, look out, literal metamorphosis!—all of a sudden they’re mute. Or petrified, or turned into gold. Or a cow.”

She laughs. “You’re so right.”

Her laugh is not Emily’s, not bright and big. This girl’s is… lighter? Smaller.

“Okay,” she says, “but don’t you love the comfort of it?”

Clearly she has read it for fun. “The what?”

“Well, I mean the whole thing that it’s always been this way, it always will be, nothing is static, life is cyclical, no one ever really leaves…. It’s very… I don’t know. I love it.”

“Guess I’m not to the comfort part yet. People are still just…”

“Dying,” she says. “Yeah.”

She goes back to smiling.

“So,” I say again, “is there something I can—”

“Oh! Sorry, yes…” She hands me her list. “We’ve lost track of this guy.” Single depth in Serenity. “He’s new to us, maybe we got the row wrong?”

I nod, pull out the binders.

“Rockin’ the old school?” she says.

“Sorry?”

She nods at Pipey’s ancient binders. “No computer?”

I tap the landline phone with my pen. “Just upgraded from rotary. Pretty sure the binders are here to stay.”

“Oh my gosh,” she says, “my parents are practically Amish. Cell phones give you neck cancer, no TV because it murders your brain, and computers … people are so mad we don’t have a website to order from, but my dad is terrified, he’s all, ‘Computers have three purposes: porn, fifteen million ways for people to steal your identity, and government spying.’ ”

Sounds a lot like Wade’s asinine logic, except in our case there’s also the part about having no money. Which I don’t mention.

Hangtown is a black hole for cell service, so I don’t actually mind the landlines. We had a computer in Mendocino, but Wade opened some Trojan horse thing, janked it up with a virus too expensive to fix so he turned it off… and just didn’t ever turn it back on again. His current gospel runs the way of, “If binders were good enough for Pipey, they’re good enough for us!”

The girl lingers in the doorway. “Otherwise things going well?”

I turn the stiff pages of maps. Where is this guy?

“Hasn’t been long, right?” she says. “Few months?”

I nod.

“We were kind of friends with the Hoegreffs before they sold it. I haven’t met—is it your dad?”

I nod.

“Oh, so that’s fun. Family business!”

I feel myself visibly blanch.

“Well, not fun, I just mean… like, we have the nursery, my parents…” She waves at Overalls Mom, at the van out in the graves. “So I work with them instead of having to get a job at a… like, a taco shack or something.”

Taco shack?

“I was gone most of the summer, Habitat for Humanity internship, so now I can build anything you want with a drill and some drywall, no joke. And I’m normally only on morning deliveries when I guess you’ve been in school, so it’s… We’ve been ships passing in the night! But my mom told me she’s seen you. My stupid brother’s at Space Camp all week, so I’m filling in his shifts and… I’m just really happy to finally meet you. I’m Elanor.” She extends a small, pale hand. I scribble row M, space 81 on her list and draw a little map. Put it in her open hand. She folds it into her apron pocket.

I should say my name. Introduce myself.

“Well. Thanks,” she says. “Sorry I scared you.”

I shrug.

She leans back in the doorway.

“Smells okay in here. Better. The Hoegreffs were nice but that pipe was out of control.”

I nod.

“Okay,” she says. “Maybe I’ll see you later? Are you here a lot? Like a schedule?”

I nod.

Cold air swirls around her in the open doorway.

She pulls the list from her pocket, memorizes the plot number. “Thanks again.” She jogs back through the graves.

I watch her find the space I’ve mapped, watch her mother fill the flower can with late-season imported daffodils— expensive! —and then watch as they turn the van around and head back out through the Manderleys.

The side of the van reads serving hangtown—and the shire—since 1958. What on earth is “the Shire”? And how is she here in the morning—doesn’t she go to school? Not the high school anyway; there is only one in this town and I would not have missed so close an Emily doppelgänger, not noticed that Princess Leia hair.

I’m so tired.

She talks so much.

But smart.

Like Emily. Too much.

Out my spying windows, I watch the ducks float aimlessly. The plain brown female ambles from the murk and takes a stroll through the babies’ headstones, the small section of lawn reserved just for infants and children, a little graveyard daycare. The worst. People’s kids. That duck is stupid.

Despite Wade’s piecrust promise of “Jeez Louise, that’ll never happen on your shift, it’s all Pre-Need, old people dying in their sleep, don’t worry about it!” it’s already happened once. A kid from school. A couple of years older. I didn’t know him, but he was an idiot. I know this because he died driving drunk with a drunk bunch of other idiots, but still, how much did that suck for his parents to have to come here and buy his grave from some random kid younger than their dead son? Sixteen used to seem so old to me.

The duck strolls from the babies’ graves and nearly gets hit by a truck coming fast, gravel pinging the Manderleys. It parks at the office door.