Stranger. Megan Hart
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of ring and runs at the door. Still, knowing that the downstairs would be locked up after the chevra kadisha left made me feel better about being so far away from the front door in my third-floor apartment.
I took the narrow back stairs that had once been for the servants. The large front staircase leading to the second floor was for clients and traffic to the offices upstairs. The back stairs led all the way to the third floor.
My parents had lived here with Craig and Hannah until just before I was born. Then, the third floor had been a series of rooms connecting to a narrow hallway down the center of the attic. Sloping ceilings had made some of the bedrooms small and cramped, and the kitchen was a galley-style space inadequate for a growing family, according to my mom. It had stayed empty for years after my parents moved out.
The summer of my internship, before Ben and I had ended in disaster, he’d worked in construction. With the help of our friends, a bunch of pizzas and some beer, we’d spent a few weeks remodeling. We’d knocked out the walls, creating an open space for the living and dining areas. The sloping ceilings toward the back of the house didn’t matter with a bedroom large enough for a king-size bed and a love seat, and the bathroom had been expanded, too. Unfortunately, summer had ended, along with my relationship with Ben…and so had the remodeling.
The apartment was nice, but unfinished, and every time I thought about buying new appliances to replace the harvest-gold relics from the 1970s, or replacing moldings, I remembered all those things cost money better spent on improvements to the rest of the home or the business of my social life. It was a matter of priorities.
Despite its lack of luxury, the apartment was mine. If I wanted to have friends over, I had plenty of room for them, if not enough chairs. And it was quiet, of course. Nobody below me making noise, not even the whisper of voices floating up through the heating vents.
Lots of people are superstitious about places where the dead rest. I know a lot of my friends are creeped out by the fact that at any time I might have corpses in my basement. Inevitably when new acquaintances discover my profession, I’m asked about “weird” things happening, or if I’ve ever been scared to live above the dead.
What nobody thinks about is that people don’t die in a funeral home. By the time they come to me, the circumstances of their passing have already occurred. All I get is the mortal remains. Nothing left of the soul, if there exists such a thing. There’s no reason for a spirit to haunt a funeral home, or a cemetery, for that matter, because by the time the body reaches those places, whatever happened to the soul is already done.
Not that you can convince most people of that. The dead, who can do nothing, cause no harm, who don’t breathe or eat or sleep, don’t shit or screw, freak people right the fuck out.
After my date with Jack I was tired enough to take a long, hot shower. I deep conditioned my hair and shaved every stray, offensive hair I could. I loofahed, moisturized and steam-cleaned my pores and when I was done, I put on my favorite flannel sleep pants and my soft, faded Dead Milkmen T-shirt and curled up on my sofa with the TV remote, the latest doorstop-size novel I was reading and a pot of tea. I was by myself.
Dammit, I liked it that way.
Didn’t I?
I clicked off the TV and went to the bathroom. Too much tea. I pondered my eyebrows in the mirror, decided they could use a tweeze and spent ten minutes wincing and sneezing as I plucked.
It was too late to call any of my friends. I was still alone. Nobody to answer to, that was me. That was an advantage to having a real boyfriend, but then again, that had its own price, and one more steep than what Jack charged to make me happy.
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