Act 1, Chapter 1, Part 7: Obituarial

Recapitulation: After receiving a month’s suspension from grave digging, Barry returned to his apartment only to find Jenna, the indirect source of his suspension. She established the pecking order, flaunting her ability to cry on command, and Barry has decided to play along with her master plan on grave robbing.

***

Wrinkled newspaper sheets covered the kitchen floor, like the bottom of a bird cage, replete with various droppings everywhere. In the middle of the floor, Barry and Jenna hovered over several of the sheets, thick black markers in hand, circling or crossing out various names in the obituary section. Then, without warning or reason, Jenna would leap up to the kitchen table, now moved into the living room, flip through the open phone book, and cross out another name.

“Do you have to do that?” Barry swiped out another obituary. “There might be people still living there, kids, spouses, friends.”

“And then there might not be. I’m just keeping it up to date.” Jenna tore out a page, crumpled it up, tossed it at Barry.

“Don’t do that, we might need it later.” He unballed the paper, smoothed it out against his leg.

“If we need it later, you’ll know where it is.” She balled one of the random sheets of newspaper, tossed it at him. “Oooh, here we are. Gertrude Wilborough, I think we have something. Old school name, respectable hair, Willow Grove Funeral Home.” Jenna thumbed through the phone book, her fingers caressing the pages. As gently as she would seduce a lock, she tickled down a page in the back of the book. “Oh, oh, here we go.”

“What?”

“Gertrude Wilborough. 41 Walker Avenue.” She reached over for the house locator, nicked from the grocery store. Under normal circumstances, you can’t steal what they give away. So, while Barry went around buying copious amounts of red meat and shredded cheese and bread, Jenna slipped a couple of the thick books down the front of her pants. She did this in plain view of the customer service desk, and they goggled as she held her hand beneath her square crotch. “Fuck me beautiful.”

“I don’t think that’s going to be possible.”

“Look at this price for 22 Walker Avenue. That’s more zeroes than a Star Trek convention.” She ran over and shoved the book into his face. Barry smacked it out of the way.

“Alright, now what.”

“What now what, we crash the funeral.” She rummaged through her purse, came out with a handful of orange rectangles. “I love these things, if a cop ever stops you, just tell him you got lost and flash your tits. Well, not you.” She flipped one around. A large black “FUNERAL” emblazoned the front. “We wait until everyone leaves, you distract the digger, I go in and get out. Simple.”

Barry laughed. “What if something goes wrong?”

“We improvise. I sure as hell wasn’t planning on you stopping me, now look at you.”

“This couldn’t have gone worse if I got you pregnant.”

“All I’m asking for is one job. We finish this and I’m gone. Simple, husband.”

“Shut up.” Barry got up, looked out the window. “If we do this, we do it right. We need a plan, we need a contingency plan.”

“Rob the grave, fudge it if something changes. Fine.”

Barry looked at her. “The only reason you got away was because I screwed up. We’re not going through that again. Hell, look at this.” He waved his arm at the strewn newspapers, his chaotic apartment. “How many times did you say you did this before?”

“At least twenty. Who can keep track.”

“And you’re living out of your car.”

“No, I’m living out of your apartment.”

“Whatever, we have two days until the sixteenth. We’re going in with more than a rudimentary plan. Clean these papers up.” Barry moved to the table, itching to get it back into the kitchen, lined up with each leg square on a tile. Something felt wrong about this, beyond the fact that he was going to be stealing from a dead woman. “How many funerals have you really attended, as a guest.”

“Does it matter?”

“It will if you want to blend in. You’ve got all the right clothes, you cry all the right tears, but there’s something about you that screams desperation, not the right kind of desperation. You don’t feel like you belong, and I can’t describe why.” He dragged the table back into the kitchen, set it up, repositioned the sole chair. Like a priest at an altar, he brushed off the table, set the phone book and housing periodicals to one side, swept the dirt off, prepared it for consecration. For the next few hours, they sketched out their master plan, mostly Barry throwing down ideas, and Jenna shooting them down. Like any other collaboration, they called it quits having accomplished little. Jenna stole away to the bed when Barry nodded off, leaving him to lay claim to the couch.

He stared without seeing, cloaked in the dark night, the city gasping in the background, hacking, wheezing, crying. She wouldn’t need her jewelry. She wouldn’t miss it, a fact he kept repeating before closing his eyes.