He arrived two days after that phone call and was sitting across from me at my breakfast table, our eyes heavy with sleep. “I don’t want to,” I mumbled, unsure if the words were even audible. The only thing I could hear was my spoon knocking against the white rim of my cereal bowl and the snapping of my rice krispies. The kitchen was in a dull roar, my appliances humming underneath Will’s foot tapping and my spoon clunking.
“Leah, you have to go,” Will declared, rolling his eyes like he did when words weren’t enough. It was a quick circle, his head following the direction that his copper eyes looped. “Everyone goes to wakes. It’s, like, a thing. You say hi to the family, shed a tear if you can spare the moisture, and hope for free cheese and crackers.”
I had no idea what kind of wakes Will had gone to that provided cheese and crackers. It reminded me that his lavish New York life was full of eccentric actors and flower children trying to stop genocides in Africa, while I spent the majority of my time in my lab or teaching my students. “Maggie is such a jerk, though! I know you’re always saying it’s because of her old husband, whatever. I don’t care. She’s straight-up rude.”
“Was,” Will gently reminded me, his veiny hand dancing along the cardboard top of the blue cereal box. A quiet moment fell between us, but not the one Will expected. Instead of being slapped with the realization that Margaret had finally met her maker, I let a heavy sigh rise from my chest and escape out of my nostrils. It was just like him to believe a subtle reminder that this woman was dead would lull me into attending her wake, but it was just like me to see right through his tactics. Will is sharp, but I’m sharper.
It wasn’t that I was completely closed off to going to the wake. Sure, I had considered it. I thought about dressing in my black stockings underneath my skirt, maybe wear my cherry red flats as a subtle middle finger to Margaret. I even envisioned the dusty funeral home, the way pictures of my old teacher might be spread in uneven frames that are taped on the corners. The way I would look at them and see the scowl of the woman who failed me in acting classes so I eventually had to switch to biology.
What really turned me off, though, was the idea of tears. The mere thought of my peers shedding compassion for the woman who never showed any mercy, who constantly berated students to the point that words would haunt them, really just threw me.
Nope. Not goin.
I unwrapped my spoon from my fist, dropping it into the plastic bowl. The milk recoiled onto the tree ring ingrained in my wooden table and the krispies quaked, the cereal becoming a swaying naval battlefield.
Will could see that I was unperturbed by his method of attacks, following me to the sink as I let my bowl crash onto the other dirty plates suffering the same fate of waiting for the growling dishwasher to be emptied. “You know, the school will probably fire you if you don’t go.”
“What?” I asked incredulously. I know Will’s an actor, that being dramatic pays the cable bill so he can watch Rizzoli and Isles (“They’re both so hot, it makes me want to get murdered so they can examine my body,” he’d always say) but this just pushed the line. “You cannot fire someone for not going to their colleague’s wake.”
“Alright, fine… but before you were her colleague, you were her student, too. Leah, you really should. It’s etiquette.” Will practically scoffed, as if I were some four- year-old who didn’t understand why they needed to put away their finger paint. “If you don’t, people will think you have some psychotic issues you need to work out. Which, you know, I’m not denying, but…” he winked, although I told him it looked like more of a disturbed twitch.
I didn’t see how being a colleague required me to attend the wake. Just because I took a few of her classes until I couldn’t hack it anymore didn’t mean I needed to attend. Yes, we worked together, but barely. We taught in separate departments and I had only taught Cells and Life for a year now. We weren’t exactly break room chums.
Will dropped his head into his hands and I caught a ghost of a glimpse that my college buddy was going to be thirty next month. A light wrinkle had formed just under his mouth, his fawn-colored eyes looking worn out from what I expected was a boring five-hour drive. Even when we met at nineteen, Will always retained that air of intellectualism that older, educated men at country clubs seem to have. I never had mentioned it, but I admired the way everything out of his mouth was as proper as a seventeenth century nobleman. As for me, you can guess my parents have some teeth missing just by the fractioned way they speak and unfortunately, I adopted their middle of nowhere, Maine dialect. I spent years with my nose in books just to finally sound remotely like anyone else at my private high school (where I was on scholarship, of course).
“Listen, Leah,” he sighed, meeting my eyes. “The funeral is at Creak Point.”
Will had to say no more. Creak Point was just outside our former college town and at night, the woods were our favorite spot to stargaze under the influence. The idea of sipping a few beers on a fall night in the quiet of the trees sounded like the perfect reward for showing up to the wake for ten minutes.
“Fine. Fine. I’ll go. Okay?” I muttered, turning to face my friend with my arms severely crossed, tight against my flat chest. Will and I sometimes joked that we were the same bra size, although I once let him look at one of mine and he acted as if it were some ancient artifact that he better not touch.
“Is that what they teach you in all those New York acting classes? How to annoy people until they do what you say?”
Will nudged his scrawny elbow into my waist, pushing me aside so that he could grab the sponge and correct the cereal mess I just made. “No, it’s a trick I’ve acquired and sharpened over all my thirty years. Particularly the last ten I knew you. Now come on, you need to get dressed. I dread your co-workers finding out that you dress like a Yeti on weekends.”
***
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