Coming Home For Christmas. Marie Ferrarella

meet later.”

      With that, and a mumbled “See you later,” he walked out before Kenzie had a chance to say that she thought he was the one who needed to talk, not her.

      Instead of going back to her work—she had yet to inventory the first floor—Kenzie went to the front window, moved aside the curtain and stood in silence as Keith walked down the driveway to his car.

      Here was someone who was either oblivious to, or more likely in denial about, the extent of his own grief.

      Watching him, Kenzie made up her mind.

      * * *

      There were too many damn questions to answer, Keith thought wearily half an hour later.

      Mrs. Anderson had told him that, per his mother’s wishes, upon her death, Dorothy O’Connell wanted to be laid out at Morrison & Sons Funeral Home. He’d assumed from this information that all the paperwork had been taken care of.

      He’d assumed wrong.

      He supposed he could have just taken the easy way out, called the funeral director to ask about the costs and then assured the man that the check would be in the next day’s mail. To be honest, Keith still wasn’t entirely sure what he was doing here. It all seemed rather perverse and against what he’d always felt his role would be after his mother’s final breath had been taken.

      This process wasn’t supposed to matter to him, but it did.

      He supposed that somewhere—very deep inside—was still a sliver of the kid he had once been. The kid who had gotten along with his mother and had wanted nothing more than to take care of her and his sister. He’d wanted to be the man of the family.

      He must have been all of ten or eleven years old at the time.

      Before the age of reason, Keith silently added.

      “I can write up a full accounting,” Abe Morrison Sr. was telling him.

      The funeral director looked exactly the way Keith would have expected the man to look. Tall, thin, somber, with a touch of gray at his temples and a soft voice, as if he knew that speaking above a certain decibel level would be intruding on the next-of-kin’s grief.

      But Keith was hardly listening to the man. He just wanted this part of it to be over with.

      Hell, he wanted all of it to be over with.

      More than anything, he wanted to be on a plane flying back to San Francisco and his life, his future, not sitting here with a stately old man, stuck in the past as he listened to him talk about a woman who was in essence a stranger to Keith and had been so for close to ten years.

      Abe Morrison, however, seemed to know her very well. Why the thought irritated him so much, Keith wasn’t sure, but it did and that contributed to his feelings of intense restlessness.

      The man’s whisper-soft voice was beginning to annoy him, as well.

      “She was very explicit, your mother,” Abe was saying. “She didn’t want to burden you with a lot of details.” A mass of wrinkles around his eyes became prominent as the funeral director offered him what appeared to be a fond smile. “Not all our clients are as thoughtful as your mother was.”

      Keith nodded dismissively. He didn’t want to be here in this place where the dead were made to look lifelike. He took out his checkbook, hoping that would signal an end to Morrison’s narrative.

      Placing his checkbook on the edge of the man’s mahogany desk, his pen poised, Keith asked, “So, what do I owe you?”

      “Nothing,” Abe replied serenely.

      Keith looked up at the man. Was this some sort of a game? If it was, the point of it was lost on him. “Nothing?” he questioned.

      “Nothing,” Abe repeated, then went on to explain. “Your mother wrote out a check once she’d decided what she wanted. Always knew her own mind, that lady,” Abe commented with just a hint of an appreciative laugh. “She prepaid her funeral expenses. She just wanted you to fill in the paperwork.”

      He should have known. She’d become almost flighty in that year after Amy’s death, but at bottom, she was an exceedingly proud, responsible person who always insisted on paying her own way. He supposed funeral expenses were no different for her. Making him fill out the paperwork was just her way of reminding him that she was still in charge, even though she was no longer around.

      Closing the checkbook again, he slipped it into his jacket’s inside breast pocket. “So I guess if there’s nothing further you require from me, I can be on my way.”

      Abe’s finely curved eyebrows drew together as his brow furrowed. He gazed at Keith as if he couldn’t comprehend what had just been said.

      “Don’t you want to view the body?” he asked, seemingly convinced that Keith hadn’t really meant he wanted to leave without seeing his mother. “Our in-house cosmetic artist did an excellent job,” he added quickly. “In case you think seeing her this way might be too difficult for you, I assure you that your mother just looks like she’s sleeping.” The lanky funeral director was already on his feet, ready to lead the way into Dorothy O’Connell’s viewing room. “Come, I’ll take you to the room myself. You’ll be the first one to see her—other than my staff, of course.”

      Keith wanted to tell the man there was no need to bring him to his mother’s viewing room. He wanted simply to beg off and leave. After all, he hadn’t spent any time with his mother in the last ten years of her life. Why would he want to spend any time with her now that she was dead?

      But he had a very strong feeling that if he left, the funeral director would only keep after him until the man got him to change his mind—or lose his temper. He might as well spare himself the aggravation. And this way, after he got this viewing over with, he’d be done with it once and for all.

      So, against his better judgment, Keith allowed himself to be led into the viewing room.

      He was prepared to mumble a few token words of grief for Abe Morrison’s benefit and then leave the funeral home and this part of his past once and for all.

      What Keith wasn’t prepared for was that the funeral director would leave him alone in the viewing room.

      And he definitely wasn’t prepared for the impact that being alone with his mother’s body would have on him. Logically, he knew it wasn’t her. It was just the empty shell of what had once been his mother.

      And yet...

      She still seemed to be right there, a part of everything. A part of him.

      Keith felt as if someone had stolen the breath out of his lungs, then sat on his chest, daring him to suck air back in.

      He couldn’t.

      For just a second, before he regained control over himself, Keith thought he was going to black out.

      “Guess you got in the last word, after all, didn’t you?” he asked his mother, the question barely above a whisper.

      Keith felt tears gathering in the corners of his eyes, and he damned himself for it and her for making him have to go through this.

      “This doesn’t change anything, you know,” he told her gruffly. “This death thing isn’t going to soften me and make me decide you were right and I was wrong. I wasn’t wrong. You were. Wrong to act like life was one great big party, wrong to act like you were a teenager, living life to the fullest—and more.

      “I know what you were trying to do,” he told the still form lying in the blue silk–lined casket. “You were trying to live Amy’s life for her after she couldn’t live it herself. But you couldn’t do that,” he pointed out, the very words he uttered scraping against the inside of his throat. “Nobody gets to live someone else’s life. Everybody’s got one chance to live, and if that’s taken away, well, then it’s gone.”

      He leaned