Her dad said he wants something different. Not those ready-made boxes that cost a mint and have shiny handles.” He spoke rapidly, the excitement real.
“Kevin,” she said, “don’t you think it’s morbid to take it to Daddy?”
I crouched and felt along one side: varnish or lacquer made the surface slick and smooth. My fingers traced a raised cross with intricate embedded patterns of lines and angles. Its juncture was encircled by a halo. Along the edges of the cross, the wood was chiseled away like little waves.
“Wow,” I said.
“How much did it cost?” Isa asked. “You promised not to use the credit card anymore.”
“That’s the beauty,” Patrick said. “His estate will pay for it. We’re going to make money on this baby. We can’t lose.”
Beyond the cross, I touched a horizontal figure carved in relief, wings outstretched, feet protruding from a flowing frock, a long trumpet from its mouth. “An angel,” I said. I brought my fingers over her slowly, across the feathers of her wings and the folds of her frock. Her hair blew back as if in a breeze. Her eyes laughed, her cheeks full from puffing the trumpet. I liked that; she felt alive.
“I’m going to sell them to funeral parlors,” he said. “People are going to love these babies. And I’ve got the sole franchise.”
My fingers came across Ray’s small hands; he was feeling the casket too. I thought about his mother, gone less than a year: Had he seen her in a coffin? As I gripped his hand softly, he pulled away like in the game we sometimes played—grabbing hands at the kitchen table. Or was he upset? I couldn’t tell.
“What’s inside?” Ray said.
Patrick ignored him. “What do you think, Kevin?” He wanted my approval.
Past the angel, there was a second cross. Symmetrical. An angel in the center, with an ornate cross on either side of her. “Where’d you get it?” I asked.
“An old carpenter in the San Gabriel Mountains. You should’ve seen all the coffins he had lying around. Like a museum. And sculptures and weird old things. He even had bones.”
“Stop it!” Isa said. “You’re not selling bones again.”
“It won’t open,” Ray said.
“There’s two latches,” Patrick said.
I heard two crisp snaps as the telephone rang.
“Wow!” Ray said.
“Looks like Christmas,” Devon said, laughing.
“That is so cheesy,” Isa said. “It’s tasteless.”
“That’s why I love it,” Patrick said. “It’ll sell.”
As the lid had opened, a string of pin lights that were nestled in the seams of the fabric had flashed on inside the coffin. But I didn’t know that then. I thought they were talking about the material.
The phone rang again.
I felt the cushioned fabric inside. Satin. Soft as clouds. My fingers brushed against Ray’s hands, which flitted about, but I didn’t feel the pin lights.
“Fine,” Isa said. “Sell them around here. We’re not driving this to Florida.” Her voice shifted to her phone politeness: “Hello?”
“The carvings feel great,” I said to Patrick, “but you can’t take this to her dad. It’s rotten luck. He’s not dead yet.”
“What the hell do you know?” he said.
“Quiet!” Isa boomed. “It’s Daddy!” Her voice turned to sugar: “Don’t say that, Daddy. You’ll be fine.”
We could all hear the tinny voice of the old man raving: “The steroids they’ve got me on. Plugged up. Jesus!”
“We’ll be there soon,” Isa said. Her voice was thin now, precarious.
“It’ll be too late!” he said. “You’re always too late, Isa.”
What a bastard, I thought.
“We got you a casket like you wanted,” she offered. “It’s beautiful.”
“I won’t have those metal boxes!” he said. “I need something that rots, goddamn it. I’m going to buy it myself.”
“It’s handmade, Daddy,” Isa said. “Wooden. Daddy!” After a moment, I realized she was sniffling. “Why does he always hang up?” she said.
Patrick didn’t move; I could hear him breathing next to me. I wanted to walk over and hold her, but how could I, with him there? Instead I felt with my foot for the bulge in the kitchen linoleum. Then I beelined to my room and shut the door on them all.
Over the next week and a half, I kept up the facade of working for the newspaper, which was easier than I had expected in a house of distractions. Most of the time, Ray stayed at the Boys and Girls Club a few blocks away, where he could play basketball and air hockey with kids his age. Patrick was either on the phone or making the rounds to funeral parlors in Betsy, his old Taurus wagon, with the foot end of the casket sticking out the back. For several days, he tried to sell his one-of-a-kind coffins; then he tried to place them on consignment. He found the funeral industry to be a tight bunch.
Devon slept mornings; most afternoons, he worked at Target, his summer job. At night, he started pleading with me to run off with him. “Come on,” he said in the bathroom as I was brushing my teeth one night. “You’re sick of living here too.” For months he’d been borrowing my laptop and fooling around on the Internet, meeting people online through Friendster and Myspace. He wanted to run with me to San Francisco, San Diego, or Las Vegas—or wherever his online friends claimed to live. Ray’s quick footsteps found their way along the edge of the room.
I didn’t tell Devon it was a dumb idea. Or that I’d get arrested for kidnapping. I rinsed my mouth and put my toothbrush on my shelf. “Go to Florida,” I said. “You’ll come back here, and before you know it, you’ll have your high school diploma. You’ll find out soon enough how hard it is to be on your own.”
“I ain’t going to Florida,” he said.
“Quit using ‘ain’t.’ You might like Florida.”
“I’m down with Florida; it ain’t that,” he said. “It’s getting cooped up with this family.” He shuffled into the hallway and stopped. “One day you’ll wake up, and I’ll be gone. You too, Beavis Butthead.”
“I’m not Beavis Butthead,” Ray said from the hallway.
During those weeks, Isa would go off to bed with Patrick, but in the middle of the night, she’d slip from the back room around to the kitchen. I wasn’t sleeping well either, so when I heard a chair scrape on the linoleum, I’d get up, make tea, and sit with her, both of us hunched over the table. As everyone else slept, she would grip my hand, telling me how much she needed a listener; why couldn’t Patrick listen like I could? When she clutched my palm against her belly, my fingers
