Page 84 of Absinthe Dreams
“Landry’s?” I asked curiously, as Alina, Corliss, and Sandrine all perked up like it was so obvious and they felt dumb for not thinking of it.
“Landry’s is this Cajun bar & grill out there by the swamp on the way out to LaCroix and our places,” Jessie-Lou stated.
“You’re so new, I just don’t think Chainsaw’s gotten to take you there yet,” Velina said.
“It was one of the first places LaCroix ever took me to,” Alina said.
“Same with me and Saint,” Velina declared. “First time I ever set foot in the club, my car broke down. Saint and Collier took me out to LaCroix at the parts yard, and we stopped at Landry’s for lunch on the way back into town.” Velina leaned back in her seat, but Jessie-Lou already had her phone in her hands and was dialing the number to the place.
“Okay,” I drawled. “So, we need to know how much and figure out a night. What else did Cypress say in his last wishes?”
Jessie-Lou slid the composition book with its rumpled and folded cover and pages across the table to me. I looked at the page and the spidery scrawl that was barely legible on it and went to work with my tired brain, trying to decipher it.
Jessie-Lou was already speaking to someone on the other end of the line in her native Cajun-French, trying to work something out with the establishment.
“They gettin’ me da owner,” she said, and she went back to intently listening to the line and waiting for someone to come back on.
“Okay, so he picked out a black casket and a funeral home, and it says here…” I furrowed my brow. “He wants to be interred in the family graveyard out there somewhere.”
“Ugh.” Sandy made a face. “I heard the guys talking about putting his urn up on the memorial wall next to Louie’s,” she said.
I shook my head and said, “That’s easy enough to handle. We just get an urn that we know Cypress would like and put an empty one up there. It’s about memorializing and the aesthetic more than what or what not might beinthe urn.”
“That’ll work,” Alina affirmed with a nod.
“It’s about what Cypress wanted, not what anyone else wants,” Cor agreed.
“That’s right,” Velina agreed. “Louie didn’t have any advance directives. The guys just did what was the cheapest option and what was right in his case. I get that. It wasn’t like Louie had any family that they knew of down here to object, and even if I had been in the loop…” she shrugged. “Practicality would have had me do the same thing.”
Sandrine nodded and heaved a sigh, scrubbing her face with her hands, “I still feel like this is all my fault,” she said.
Jessie-Lou’s voice rose in a clear tone of triumph as she rattled into the phone what sounded like profuse thanks. She ended her call and looked at all of us.
“Troy, the owner, said yes!” she said, and we all breathed a sigh of relief and the tension eased out of us.
“You know where your family’s graveyard or cemetery is at?” I asked her and she nodded.
“Gonna be an above-ground burial. We got some old oven tombs on some high ground out there near the swamp. Momma an’ Daddy gots all the paperwork for it goin’ back generations.”
“Right, okay, so we’re going to need a funeral home’s services to prepare the body, and one specializing in above-ground burial that can access that grave site. We’ll have to look into whether that funeral home is capable of updating the carving on the slab or if it has to be outsourced to a different monument company. I’m not sure how that works, to be honest. My family has only ever done cremation.”
“Start with the funeral home, I guess,” Jessie-Lou said with a faint shrug.
“Does your family have a preference on which one?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“Okay, time to hit the phones and shop around.” I checked my watch. “Which is going to have to be a tomorrow thing, because most of themhaveto be closed by now.”
I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose.
“Let’s make a list tonight,” Corliss suggested. “Write down everyone we want to contact, a checklist on each page for them of things we need to ask them, and the cost for each of those things.”
“His policy was around ten thousand,” Jessie-Lou stated.
“We don’t have to stay on budget for that,” Corliss said firmly. “A lot needs to go into this. Coffins are expensive, so is the labor, the space rental, catering, all of it. It’s likely going to exceed that ten thousand and I don’t want anyone to freak out or try and fit everything into that. It goes over? It goes over, and we’ll handle it.” She looked at each one of us in turn, and all I could do was nod in agreement.
Planning a funeral was hard. There was some laughter, a lot of tears, anda lotof dark humor, and wine.
