When Holden finally extracted himself from his ledgers, he found Eileen asleep at the lunch table with her arm thrown over her head and her mouth hanging open.
He glanced at the clock on the ivy-patterned wallpaper above the small fridge and then at Eileen. Her soup was untouched in the small glass dish in front of her, the steam having turned into droplets that clung sadly to the glass cover and dripped back onto the food.
He started a pot of tea, making more noise than necessary as he went, but still, she slept. The kettle whistled loudly and Eileen didn’t budge. Holden sighed. He wasn’t good at this type of thing, he realized as he shook his head irritably. Should I get Clifford to wake her? Clifford had no qualms about breaching any sort of boundaries. The only problem was that Holden didn’t know when Clifford would return. Finally, when Eileen was officially twenty minutes late, he cleared his throat and tapped her shoulder. “Ahem. Pardon me,” he said.
With one bleary eye, she stared at him for a moment before she apologized and tried to stifle a yawn as she trudged off to her desk. Holden’s irritation grew. It was too soon for her to be sleeping on the job. He sighed. The last set of interviewees didn’t give him much hope that he’d be able to replace Eileen anytime soon, but he wondered grudgingly if the lady with no car and three children would be willing to meet him halfway.
* * *
IN MANY WAYS, Eileen’s new job reminded her of when she was nine years old and had jumped in front of a raging pit-bull so it wouldn’t bite her friend; it seemed like an epic adventure in theory but was a foolhardy exercise in reality.
Her typing was atrocious. She stabbed the keys with two fingers in a way that Clifford said made her look more like a rabid switchboard operator than a secretary. On the third day, Holden frowned when he dictated a letter and realized Eileen couldn’t take shorthand but declared her quite fast without it. She had feared he would prattle on but to his credit, Holden was as clear and decisive with his speech as he was with everything else.
Clifford watched from the other side of the room, smirking as he flicked a toothpick up and down in his mouth. After Holden left for lunch, Clifford asked, “You ain’t went to no sort of secretarial school, did you?”
“No,” Eileen said as she dotted out her fifth error with correction fluid. She pushed the typewriter carriage to the left and slowly clacked out a new sentence.
“And you don’t plan to tell the boss you can’t type nor nothing so?”
"I'm doing fine without it.”
Clifford looked around and shrugged in agreement. In less than a week, Eileen had cleared away three months of filing and cleaned the office until it was spotless. Letters went out on time and phone messages were accurately delivered. She looked up from the typewriter and caught his eye. “But you knew that. You just like shooting the piss at me.”
Clifford grinned. “It’s true. If you didn’t poke those keys like hot coals, I didn’t gonna guess that you is a greenhorn.”
Eileen laughed and then frowned when she noticed three extra spaces in her sentence.
By Thursday, Eileen’s confidence was sky-high because she would be attending the first funeral she had helped to organize. But later that day, she found out that she had overlooked a crucial detail. And she would be up to her neck in trouble when it came to light.
That evening, Eileen drove through the big white gates of Southbury Cemetery and scanned the graveyard for the dark green tent Clifford had mentioned. The cemetery was filled with uneven rectangular humps and overgrown by grass and weeds that stretched from one end of the cemetery to the other. A few graves were marked with rough-hewn wooden crosses that only matched the ambition of well-kept graves in Anglican churchyards with lacklustre results. Just beyond the small white chapel in the distance, she saw the tent. Sandwiched between an open plot and a pathway bordered by blue flowers, the sides of the tent flapped like wings in the evening breeze. Holden and Clifford stood at the back of the tent, dressed to the nines in their dapper coattails. She smiled and handed Clifford the two wreaths that had arrived late that afternoon.
The bereaved huddled together and sang in warbled tones as the casket was lowered, their pitch rising in tremulous waves as a scatter of dirt and stones hit the walnut veneer. An old woman, bent at the waist and clutching a cane, hobbled up behind Holden and Eileen as the gravediggers worked in the late afternoon sun. The woman looked around for a moment, watching the family fussing and hugging each other before she asked in a strong voice, “What wunna doing?”
The deceased’s daughter sniffed and said, “Miss Johnson, we ain’t know you came to Daddy’s funeral.”
Miss Johnson shuffled her false teeth, her mouth puckering with sarcasm as she replied, “Good thing I come too, ‘cause wunna bury Herbert in the wrong spot.”
Whispers turned into gasps and confused exclamations as everyone looked at Miss Johnson. The daughter’s mouth hung open as her brother stepped forward in an immaculate black suit and said, “You always getting in people’s business. What you talking about now?”
Miss Johnson shrugged, a smug smile on her face as she said, “Lucky for you that I decided
