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Show Go Love/143 "She loved to smile," the undertaker said I scribbled that in my notebook, loved to smile I wrote. "How can you do this to your wife," my first ever question as a reporter "Like this," the undertaker said He made a few sutures inside inside her mouth. "I'm giving her the smile this second." "Smile?" The smell was how a cavity tastes. He showed me to the stainless steel gurney, inclined at an angle, where fluids are sucked up through razor spikes in the back, drained into this industrial vat which with organs and whatnot. Teeth have must be extracted sometimes, especially if the family has requested the face called Happy with Jesus. "Yea, smile," the undertaker said and demonstrated how pieces of styrofoam were sewn into a slit in the gums Then he wheeled her through a bolt-locked door into a room where refrigeration blew down upon us. "We call this the fish room," the undertaker said, as if confessing the key to the universe. I remember Jimmy in his casket, how I leaned in and touched his face, his hand; how the cold ran me through. i Now, standing just inside the double doors of the Lonoke Funeral Home, this heavy girl with green eye shadow says, "Gentlemen, I'm Cheryl" She says it so it comes out Shurl-not that there's anything wrong with that "Welcome," she says. O W. says, "Thank you, Shurl," and shakes her hand three brisk times. She focuses on me, on the crick of my nose, and I imagine her figuring how many slithers of styro-paste it would take to put a smile on my face forever. "You've got to be Joey." "Yes" |