The Book of Joe

around the showroom, sweating and panting dangerously as he expounds on the virtues of the higher-end coffins, looking slightly pained when I bluntly ask for pric ing, as if he finds the discussion of money vulgar and inappropriate. He works on commission, no doubt, which strikes me as being in poor taste, given the circumstances of his profession. The collective grief of Bush Falls will put his kids through college.
    I finally settle on the Exeter in a mahogany finish, which comes to fifty-six hundred dollars before sales tax. I briefly consider haggling over price but decide that it would be a serious breach of etiquette, and besides, I just want to be gone from here already. Richard nods obsequiously at my choice and plants his considerable girth down at the laughably small black desk in the back of the room to write up the purchase.
    “There’s also a sixty-dollar charge for refrigeration,” he advises me.
    “Excuse me?”
    He looks up from his papers. “The body. We refrigerate it until the interment. It’s thirty dollars a day.”
    “Oh, okay.” I’m sorry I asked.
    “And there’s the seven percent Cougar discount.”
    “What?”
    Richard looks up at me. “Your father was a Cougar, wasn’t he?”
    “He was,” I say.
    “He gets seven percent off.”
    “Lucky him.”
    Richard stands up from behind the desk, his chair letting out a hissing sigh of relief, and hands me my receipt. “Once again, I’m terribly sorry for your loss.”
    “Thanks,” I say, thinking that at a ten percent commission he’s just made six hundred dollars for fifteen minutes of work, so how sorry can he really be. But then again, after almost seventeen years of not speaking to my father, I’ve just picked out his home for all eternity, so I just shake Richard’s fat, clammy hand and get the hell out of there.
    The funeral is attended by a good portion of the Bush Falls community, who don’t view my father’s death as any reason to stop staring at me with eyes that range from clinically inquisitive to outwardly hostile as they mill about the greeting hall before the service. It’s one thing to know that I am generally despised by the bulk of the population, but to have so many of them under one roof at the same time is another thing entirely. It feels like those childhood dreams where you show up to school and realize too late that you’re not wearing any pants. The nakedness might be metaphorical, but the arctic frost in my intestines is inarguably real.
    Looking around the crowd, I see that a significant percentage of the men are wearing their old Cougars team jackets in a show of solidarity for their departed teammate. Like fire-men or policemen, they are here to bury one of their own, fallen in the line of duty, as it were. There is something oddly grand in this gesture, even if the faded jackets looked silly on the balding, fleshy, potbellied men who wear them over button-down shirts and ties. I know it’s ridiculous, but I can’t help bitterly observing that even in death my father has managed to remind me one last time of my exclusion from the privileged inner circle he and Brad inhabit as Cougars.
    Thank god for Owen, who arrives from Manhattan in the obnoxious white stretch limo he has hired for the occasion.
    He strides purposefully into the hall, looking spectacularly and inappropriately dapper in a tan poplin suit, mint green shirt, and a speckled bow tie. For years, Owen struggled with whether his wardrobe should exude the sharp, clean lines of corporate confidence or the finer, softer dimensions of intellectual and literary perspicacity. Over time, his atrocious attempts to reflect this dichotomy yielded a dreadful, poly-chromatic style, which he’d ultimately embraced as an affectation. “I thought you could use some moral support,” he announces grandly, basking in the stares he’s generating.
    “But as I am famously bereft of anything resembling morals, you’ll have to settle for my unmodified support.”
    “Thanks for coming,” I say as he briefly embraces me. It’s the first time he’s ever hugged me. He smells like Old Spice and baby powder.
    “Please,” Owen says, stepping back to stare around at the gathering crowd with unconcealed curiosity. “How could I not?”
    Wayne shows up looking shockingly healthy in his Cougars jacket and borrowed suit pants that manage to somewhat conceal his wasted frame. He gives me a light hug and we grin at my own borrowed suit, as if any further