The glass door smothered the afternoon heat outside when it closed. I lingered in a morose foyer, typical of funeral homes, my damp skin prickling in the chilled air. Consolatory Muzak seeped from hidden speakers in mawkish refrain. The nine steps up to the main floor gave me time to wonder if this would be too much like a second funeral for my brother. 

But I kept on. 

A blurb in our town rag said Lincoln’s coffin would be here all weekend.  

To the left was a doorway to the first parlor room. Same doorway I couldn’t bring myself to enter four months ago, Trent’s face hidden by mourners standing nearby. But I’d seen his folded hands, bloodless, artificially clutching a rosary instead of the key I’d found him with. Hands that had so many times punched a shoulder with firm affection.

The doorway was sentineled by a suit. He looked like a propped corpse. His eyes raked my jeans and biker boots before he handed me a brochure like it pained him.   

In the parlor, a hexagonal box reposed under the buttery cast of two floor fixtures. It wasn’t Lincoln’s actual coffin but an exact replica, solid walnut, touring the country to commemorate the 150^th anniversary of his death. 

Any mention of our 16th didn’t evoke the actual man so much as my brother in his tall black hat and elevator boots. He played Lincoln in a reenacting group for living history encampments. I played a wounded Union soldier he would comfort, and we’d improvise dialogue for the spectators. 

Trent would have been first in line for this exhibit. 

But there was no line. Only an older couple that trundled my way.       

“I want a perch sandwich,” the woman announced on their exit.  

A blunt reminder I wasn’t in LA anymore. I was back in the Rust Belt, land of the diabetic coma and the deep-fried Lake Erie perch sandwich. Trent had been against my going west. Told me if I was serious about acting, New York was where I wanted to be. I think he wanted me to live the dream he never could because he was too much of a townie, too guilt-ridden over Cheyanne, to ever leave it. For me, a then-22-year-old with minimal theater training, LA seemed less intimidating. Sunnier. I hesitated to go back, though, as if returning would disappoint Trent yet again in his grave. 

#

Alone now, I approached the coffin. Custom built to hold our tallest president. Such greatness cut short by an actor’s bullet from the dark. Lincoln held on until 7:22 a.m. the next morning. My brother died almost instantly of blunt trauma to the head. 

I was hyperventilating when I leaned over the casket’s opening, half expecting Trent to be lying there in his Lincoln suit, eyes popping open when he said, “Hey bro! How’s this for method acting?”  

There was only a head pillow.  

I’d been on the West Coast almost three years before Trent finally agreed to visit. His stay didn’t go well. He blanketed my industry friends as hollow and self-absorbed. Except Adison, who he went home with from a club on Sunset. That’s all he was good for, short-term hookups after Cheyanne, his true love, hottest girl in high school, died on graduation night. 

On the third evening of his visit, over some beers in my shared apartment, I showed him the script for a TV pilot I was in. He glanced it over then said, “What happened to the Nick who fell in love with Shakespeare? What happened to your hunger for higher art?” 

“Hey, it’s still acting. It’s still craft.”

He held the script in my face. “So you think Zombie Mermen is craft?” 

“You are such a goddamned snob. It’s a stepping stone bro, not the goal.” Admittedly, half my lines were more guttural than actual words. 

“Yeah? Next you’ll be saying porn is a steppingstone.” 

“You know what?” I yanked the script out of his hand. “Go fuck yourself!” 

At which point he collected his gear and left before we both realized we’d gone too far. I know he didn’t mean to bust my balls so hard. In his raw big brotherly fashion he was trying to say I was better than my choices. 

“Did you know …” 

I turned to find a woman standing near the foot end of the coffin, poised in a navy blue skirt suit, fingers laced in front of her body. 

“... that Lincoln was the first public figure to be embalmed?” She smiled as if this were cheery news. Her russet hair was bunched into a chignon. “Up until then, people used to think embalming was a violation of the body.” 

I nodded, trying not to look startled.   

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt your experience,” she said, yet moved closer. Her right hand stroked one of the coffin’s silver shamrock handles. With her wrist extended from the jacket sleeve I could see watches stacked on it, in gold and silver housings, some petite with thin bands, others large-dialed, masculine.  

“My brother was shown here, recently.”     

“Oh, I’m so sorry.” She studied me. “Would you like to sit down?” 

She gestured toward the front row of folding chairs. After I sat, she did the same. 

“I’m Rose, staff here at Snyder-Winn.” She offered her hand. 

“Nick.” Her hand was warm, almost feverish, in mine.   

“If you don’t mind me saying? I see the resemblance now.”

“We get that a lot—wait, you knew my brother?” 

“Um, not in the alive sense.”

“Right.” My throat seized up when I tried to swallow. “I don’t remember seeing you.” 

“No, you probably wouldn’t at a showing. They keep me pretty busy downstairs.” She adjusted her wristwatches. “I’m a certified embalmer.” 

And that’s all it took.

#

When I came to, I was still in the chair.  

“Nick? … Nick?”  

I lifted my head. Rose was supporting me with her body, one arm around my shoulders. We were pressed together like two lovers in a dark movie house. 

“Oh god no. I fainted?”

She smiled. Her jade eyes had flecks like gold fireflies. “You started tilting and I caught you.”   

#

After my blowout with Trent, I paced around the apartment, then packed a saddlebag and jumped on the Fat Boy to chase him down, make amends, hopefully ride beside him for a few days. I knew he’d follow the Mother Road. He loved historic America and hated interstate travel. Daylight faded. Trent’s usual cruising speed was 60 mph. I went 75. At nightfall I tented at a campground just inside the Arizona border, thinking he might be there. He wasn’t. 

I lit out again with sunrise. Wasn’t long after that, on a lonely stretch of old 66, I saw something ahead lying across the road. Trent was on his back, an arm outstretched towards me. I dismounted and approached, praying for movement. The hand on his chest 

still held the key he wore on a silver chain, engraved with Trent & Cheyanne Forever. The key to her heart she’d given him at grad ball.

His Indian bike lay partway off the road. Beanie helmet on the asphalt behind him. His nose wept a red tear. Otherwise he looked untouched. No sound but my own sobs as I knelt beside him. Strands of his hair lifted when the desert breathed. Near where he spilled, the highway patrolman found buck tracks interrupted by the road. Best we could tell, the animal had dashed in front of him, Trent braked, which accounted for the skid marks, and the bike front-ended. Deer tracks continued on across the sand like couplets to a leaping poem.   

#

We stood in the carpeted hallway outside the parlor room where I nursed a glass of water.                  

No sign of the suit.  

“Are you feeling okay?” Rose said. “You’re still a touch pale.”

I dipped my fingers in the water and slapped my cheeks. “Better?” 

Her gentle laugh wound into the ethereal choir that thickened the air. She checked her wristwatches then rolled her eyes. “I don’t know why I keep doing that. None of them work.” 

“Why do you wear them?”

“They have … sentimental value.” She glanced at the wall clock.  “Anyway, I should think about closing up?” 

Her pause left an opening that dared me to enter. My acting teacher Miss Bender was always reminding us, as an exercise outside of class, to put ourselves in situations we most avoid, the ones that bring out our greatest fears, anger, phobias. “Notice how the 

reactive emotion gets its hooks into you,” she said. “Notice where it burns in the body. Then practice raising your awareness above the emotional fire.” The idea is to find a higher truth you can bring to character. Approaching Trent’s casket would’ve been the ultimate form of this exercise. But I’d run from that one. 

One of the fixtures blinked. 

“Crazy idea,” I said. “What if you showed me your work area?” 

“Really? After you just fainted at the word—I won’t even repeat it."

“‘Embalmer?’ …  See? I’m fine now.”

#

The cellar wasn’t dark and dungeony like I imagined. Almost everything in the workroom was pure white, even the two body-length tables. Walls, ceiling, counters, deep sink with a mirrored cabinet above, all white. The glare under fluorescents almost made you squint.   

Rose stood near watching me take it all in. 

“Are there bodies down here?”

“You mean passengers,” she said. “They’re in a different area, which you are not going to see.”

“Passengers. Is that like industry lingo?”

“It’s my own usage.” She adjusted her wristwatches. “Because they’re traveling to a different place. In embalming school they tell you to call them decedents, but I find that so cold.” 

“Bad people in coach, good ones in first class?” My effort at levity was to offset the tingle of panic that buzzed in my belly like a menace of yellowjackets. 

She crossed her arms and sighed. “If you must.”

I moved to the wall counter on which stainless steel implements lay, pieces that looked capable of unspeakable procedures. 

Rose said, “Do you want to go back upstairs?”       

I did. 

I wanted to flee like John Wilkes Booth fled the Ford Theater. But there was Miss Bender to consider. There was the echo of my last words to my brother: Go fuck yourself. When we did the deep self-searching work, Miss Bender liked to say, “Remember, the other side of pain is catharsis.” 

I waved a hand over the countertop. “So, what are some of these things?” 

Before Rose spoke, she rolled up an office chair and sat me down. Then she uncovered an embalming pump the size of a small microwave. Rubber hoses came out of it on either side, and it had two black dials—one said Rate of Flow, the other Rate of Control. To the left of the pump was a nonslip cloth where a scalpel lay, nasty things she called 

aneurism hooks, industrial tweezers, and two little oval pieces that looked rubbery. “Eye caps,” she said, holding one up. “They keep the eyes from opening during a showing.” 

She carefully placed the cap back on the cloth next to its mate.

The yellowjackets crawled up my cervical vertebrae. 

“But my brother was cremated. He wouldn’t need this stuff, right?”  

“Nick.” Her hand stroked my face. “Let’s not go there.”

Trent died bereft of human touch.    

“So what do you do when business is slow?”  

“Business is never slow.” Rose leaned back on the counter. “But sometimes, after working late, I’ll step out of my clothes and mosh to some, like, Melvins in Parlor A.”

“You mean, in the buff?”

She nodded. “I sweat a lot. And it’s more respectful. I’m completely exposed, the way passengers are when they come to me.”

“But who are you moshing with—not that calcified dude upstairs?” 

“Ha! Mr. Snyder? He has no idea.” Her gaze slanted away. “It’s my own private thing.” 

“Cool. Only I’m pretty sure moshing, by definition, is a group thing.”    

“When I do it, if I totally surrender myself? It’s like spatial realities merge and I feel them watching.”

“You mean, like, the departed?”

“Passengers.” 

“Huh. Let’s say I suspend my disbelief. Why would they hang around here?”

“Maybe they’re lonely. You’d be surprised how many people die in isolation, with no one left to grieve for them. Except me.”  

She leaned forward and scanned my face. “Are you okay? I’ve said too much haven’t I?”

“I was just thinking, your job sounds pretty lonely. I mean, do you hang out with breathing people much?”

“Actually, all my friends and family are in Cedar Rapids and—” She covered her mouth to squelch a sob. 

“Hey,” I said, standing.  

“I’m sorry.” She caught her breath. “It’s just, this town is so …”

“What?” 

“Awful!” She yanked a tissue from the box on the counter. “I had no idea. But I’m lucky to have this job, I know that.” She dabbed her nose with the tissue.

“Yeah, it’s our private little hell here.” 

She laughed through her tears. “That was rude of me,” she said. “I didn’t mean to diss your home.”

I opened my arms. “Maybe we could both use a hug?”  

Rose’s face blanked. 

Shit. I’d crossed a line. 

“Sorry.” I lowered my arms. “I wasn’t trying to—”  

She threw herself around my neck. 

I held her, felt her heaving against me. She didn’t let go. I didn’t let go. 

From her lips I tasted the salt of her tears. 

She shrugged her jacket from her shoulders then undid my shirt buttons. When I got her blouse off I saw, resting atop a smattering of neck pendants and trinkets, a graphite-colored key on a silver chain. It seemed coincidental at first, except for the engraving. I lifted the key to make sure.

“This is my brother’s.” 

Rose’s hand tried to take it from mine but I held it firm. 

“Why do you have this? He was supposed to be cremated with it.” 

“Yes, we allow jewelry to go with a cremation, but only on special request.”

“We requested it!”

She reached behind her neck and unfastened the chain. “Please, have it.”

The key weighted my palm. The metal had still been warm when I eased it from Trent’s fingers so I could hold his hand awhile. 

“Why would you even want it?” I clasped the chain around my neck.  

Rose crossed her arms over her bosom. “If I have a strong connection with a passenger’s residual energy, I like to keep something of theirs to remember them by.”

“So, you like to remember dead strangers.” 

“I don’t expect you to understand.” She bent and swiped up her jacket and blouse, jangling as she moved. “No one ever understands.”

I paced around her. “What, that you’re some kind of klepto batshit crazy—”

She stood erect. 

“Don’t you dare call me crazy! I am sensitive, and I am caring to those in transition—they appreciate me!” She trotted across the floor, clutching the wad of her clothing, and up the stairs. 

The room pressed in on me, a cold white tomb. All the instruments laughed with steely winks, and I swore I could smell every corpse that had ever been processed down here. I lurched to the sink and retched.    

My arms embraced the basin as I panted into it. 

I splashed cold water on my face, into my mouth.  

The key pinged against the basin. In the cabinet mirror when I straightened, I saw it nesting in my chest hair. Strange not to see it on Trent. He was never without it. He wore the key like a shield to keep women from getting too close, as a reminder not to let himself off the guilt hook, not to move on from graduation night. The night he and Cheyanne and a few others snuck into the quarry with a case of beer to skinny dip. Before he could stop her, Cheyanne dove off this high ledge and hit a submerged rock. Broke her neck.   

“The skinny-dipping was my idea,” he told me after the accident. “She died because of me.”

It didn’t matter that I kept saying a hidden rock killed Cheyanne, not him.    

But was it any worse than a man ghosting around his big brother’s cottage in a Lincoln hat, caught on the same hook? 

Music thumped overhead. 

The main thing was to get the fuck out of this basement. I stood there for I don’t know how long. Long enough that the chill and the nausea of panic subsided and I could walk out at my own pace.

At the top of the stairway I turned left and followed the music, not spiritual drivel anymore but guitars in overdrive, drums and bass giving the floor a heartbeat. I reached the doorway to the first parlor. Lincoln’s coffin still there, closed up now. It seemed readied for the long train ride back to Springfield. The walnut hissed when I pushed the lid askew with trembling hands. I buried the key deep inside the head pillow’s slipcover, replaced the lid.

The music came from the parlor room down the hall. 

Through the entranceway, I saw Rose letting loose to the grinding beat. She wore

only the jewelry, limbs convulsing, breasts bouncing. Tendrils of damp hair clutched her face. She dripped sweat, her aliveness so strong, so pulsing, I imagined it set all those  wristwatches ticking again, the encoded chatter of lost souls. My clothes breadcrumbed my way to the mosh pit. Rose smiled through grit teeth. We circled one another, feinted and charged, the wet slap of our collision loud enough to penetrate the music, and when Rose came at me again, whirling with helicopter arms, the warmth of the air she stirred felt like a desert breathing.